Floodtide is Off the the Publisher

 Mostly I work on the assumption that readers who are interested in my books have signed up for the RSS feed from my blog that appears here on DW, or follow me elsewhere. But sometimes I'm so burbling over with excitement that I have to post everywhere.

I just emailed the manuscript for Floodtide off to the publisher, a full three days ahead of the contracted deadline. I'm even told that it's possible to pre-order the book on Amazon already.

(People in the know suggest that if you want to game the Amazon metrics in a useful way, ordering when it's actually available for delivery helps spread out the effectiveness. But I make a policy of not trying to influence people to buy in particular ways. Do whatever works best for you...just so long as it doesn't involve piracy!)

Trying to Predict and Shape Reader Expectations

K.J. Charles has a really useful blog today about how to manage character introductions and call-backs in a "linked main characters" series of the type that is quite popular in romance these days. Just how do you feed the desire of continuing readers to recognize side characters who were main characters in a previous book without doing it in a clumsy and intrusive way? How do you make sure your call-backs and foreshadowing don't distract too much from the central characters of the current book.

I've encountered this aspect of reader expectation from the opposite side: what do you do when your readers enter the book with a "serial linked main characters" reading protocol, but that's not what your books are doing?

I was genuinely bewildered the first time I encountered a reader opinion that Margerit and Barbara should have "known their place" and stayed out of the spotlight in The Mystic Marriage. Like...I had somehow accidentally given them 50% of the point of view time when they should have known they were only minor side characters in the book. I suppose if you expect all books series to follow the rules of this particular mode of linked romance series, then my approach was a major error. Except that's not what I was doing.

The Alpennia series was never intended to be a set of independent romance novels in a loosely linked setting (which is a perfectly wonderful concept, and in fact I have an idea for doing a series like that at some point). From the very start (or at least, from the point when I realized it was going to be a series), it was planned as an accumulation of an ensemble cast, with each character being significant to the story, though perhaps moving in and out of prominence in different books. But how could I have signaled that more clearly to set up reader expectations?

Honestly, I'm not sure I could have. Just as all my efforts to warn people that Mother of Souls wasn't a capital-R Romance novel were in vain. And I'll predict that there will be readers who come out of Floodtide feeling betrayed that it, too, wasn't a romance novel. And no doubt readers who will greatly enjoy the more action-oriented thriller aspects of Mistress of Shadows will probably tell you that "Heather has finally hit her stride and figured out how to pace a book properly."

I like to think I'm doing something more interesting than the things those readers wanted me to have done. And I hope that when the series is complete, even they will look back and conclude that--whether or not it was to their taste--the result wasn't a mistake or poor technique on my part.