Since I’ve been working for the first time on serialized works and reflecting on decades of reading them, I found myself mentally working out a scale of how much a book desires to be read as a sequel, starting from the most standalone of shared-universe standalones and scaling up to the most serialized of sequels.
I think one’s personal scale will vary for this kind of thing, so I thought I would share mine.
In reverse order from most sequel to most standalone:
5 – Not even a nominal attempt to recap past events or catch the reader up; action depends entirely on what has gone before.
4c – Extremely perfunctory recap, possibly mandated by market expectations or a publisher or, if created by the author’s own free choice, intended for the use case of series readers who want a quick memory refresher.
4b – There is recap and set up that is genuinely intended to make the book more readable to any reader with a baseline willingness to read a series entry out of order who comes to this volume without having read its predecessors; however, the book as a whole is strongly intended to be read as a sequel.
4a – The recap and the book as a whole are written with the intention that readers with a baseline willingness to read a series out of order can pick up this volume without having read its predecessors and have a satisfactory reading experience; however, the assumed default ideal reading experience is reading the series in order.
(My sense is that 4b and especially 4a were pretty ubiquitous in series written before the internet, when readers were more likely to pick up what they could get at a bookstore or library.)
3 – This book is designed to be just as enjoyable when read on its own as it is when read after other books in the series; however, the series has a clear order, such as internal chronological and/or numerical, and the reader will get something out of reading the series in order.
2 – A true standalone in a shared universe, not designed to be read sequentially; there is a strong internal chronological order or other aspect that creates an obvious “sequence” option for readers trying to decide in what order to read the multiple books in the shared universe.
1 – A true standalone in a shared universe; there is no strong internal chronological order or other sequencing and the multiple books are not intended to build on each other, except in the sense of all fleshing out the same shared universe.
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