Today I wanted to discuss a concern I have with shifting from writing my story to publishing it. When I initially wrote this novel the individual stories of each character were presented in chapters that shifted from one character to the other at similar points of time. What happened on their first day? What happened within their first week? The reader learned about the world through shifting perspectives.
Each chapter was written from the point of view of its main character. The narration is written with their perspective in mind. Only their thoughts are presented to the reader. The world is seen only through their eyes.
My goal was to tell a story of survival in a fantasy world from the points of view of a diverse cast. My intended audience are people who like to dig into a vast world. Readers of science fiction and fantasy are often as interested in learning about the setting just as much as they are interested in learning about the characters. My hope was that each reader could find at least one character that they could identify with.
Splitting this into five separate short novels will make it easier for me to find an agent and, hopefully, a publisher. If I need to self-publish, it will be easier for an interested reader to invest their hard-earned money into a shorter novel to determine if my work is worth their future investment.
My fear with this choice is that a reader will choose one story and not find the character that speaks to them.
Another concern I have is that each character (or set of characters) have radically different situations to contend with. For some, their individual story is rooted more in horror. They are dealing with the undead primarily and with the simple urgencies of survival. However, another character is isolated and sees little of the threat of the undead. Instead he deals with finding a place amongst one of the many races that inhabit this world. Two others are bonded with animals and find themselves dealing with a group of humans that represent various tribes who are also bonded with the spirits of animals. They form a nation that deals with issues of diversity and conflicting interests that, while different, mirror the problems a nation like the USA. They are a ‘melting pot’.
This means that if a particular book is read, what the reader sees of the world is limited. As a large novel these different pieces formed into a coherent whole. With the first half of the single novel simply dealing with surviving from moment to moment there is no satisfying climax that can be told in two hundred pages. It requires a large novel to do that.
With separate novels I can present a climax of sorts to allow a satisfying conclusion and hopefully whet the appetite of the reader to see what happens next.
First, I need to worry about getting these stories published and finding readers. Hopefully, there will be enough interest so that in the future I can tell a larger story that shows all of these characters evolving in the same work. By the conclusion of the stories overall arc those characters that survive what I put them through will come together in a final resolution. Thank you.