Every once in a while a reader emails me to say something like this.
<blockquote>I love your books. I've read every one of them. I just enjoyed the latest. But why oh why do you keep telling me what Costa/Peroni/Teresa look like? I know by now. You don't have to keep repeating that information.</blockquote>
Oh but I do. Because that information is just one of the several dilemmas that lay behind writing a series. Most of us find out about them by accident. Let me try and forewarn of a few here and now so you can avoid some of the mistakes I've made in the past.

First, and possibly foremost, people will not, usually, read them in order. When I had two or three books out in the series that was more likely to happen. Those three were on shelves in book stores. People could sift through them, spot the first and start with that. Not any more. The eighth book in the Costa series, <em>The Blue Demon, </em>will soon be out. Very few book stores will keep in an entire series of seven or eight titles for any author. So when people discover the series they will tend to buy what's in front of them. Usually one well into the series. Who really started Rebus at book one? That's why you have to describe your characters in each and every book. A large number of people will be meeting then for the first time. You can't just pitch your titles at people who know them already.

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That leads on to a more difficult question. How do you get your back story -- the things that happened before -- into your later books? This is a stinker. My own approach is to leak small amounts of information into the present book that give a hint of what's happened before. But I don't do any more than is necessary. I really want to avoid the kind of preface you see on some TV programmes that spend a few minutes at the start telling you what you missed earlier.

It's very important to me that each title in this series works as a standalone book. No one should have to read one title in order to understand another, in my kind of work anyway. They're series books in a loose sense. There's a continuing story beneath the surface, primarily that of the relationships between the principal characters involved. But each story is an individual tale, unrelated to any other. So that's very different to something like Harry Potter, say, which is a series of books set in direct chronological order, joined by linked events and themes.

Another big gotcha in series books is the job your protagonist(s) do. Mine are cops. Lots of people use cops. Others use private detectives or something similar. Why are these professions so popular for series books? Simple. They're the kind of jobs that are always going to turn up the kind of problems that will generate new stories. Cops and PIs meet crime. It's part of their work. You just have to invent the crime and no one is going to say, 'Why do these guys keep on bumping into bad people?'

Imagine, though, you've just started a series where your protagonist is a wedding planner. First book: there's a murder at the reception. Second book: there's a murder in the church. Third book: hell I don't know but it doesn't matter because every reader still out there is screaming, 'Who in God's name still employs this wedding planner and why? She's death on wheels. Gimme a break...'

The approach I have to my series is simple. I regard them as individual books that just happen to have the same cast. I slip into different styles, different points of view, different places on occasion mainly to keep things fresh. And with every last one of them I have to remember that for someone out there this will be their first. Long-term fans are fabulous. We all love and appreciate them. But to be honest they'd get as fed up as everyone else if we wrote for them and them alone.