Episode 178: No More Crossover Series

In this week's episode, I explain why I won't write any more crossover series in my 2nd decade as an indie author. We also discuss why too long of a backstory can become a problem.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 178 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December the 10th, 2023 and today we're going to talk about why I won't write any more crossover series. Before we get into our main topic this week, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Half-Elven Thief is now available. This book will be out on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Amazon seems to have solved many of the Kindle Unlimited concerns I had earlier in the year, and so what I'm going to do with Half-Elven Thief is repeat what I did with Wraithshard back in 2020, where the books first come out in Kindle Unlimited, and then once the series is done (I am planning for six books), then they will go wide to other platforms. So if you are an Amazon and Kindle Unlimited user, you can get that as the last book I have published in 2023.

Now that Half-Elven Thief is done, I am writing the outline for Shield of Storms, the first book of the Shield War series, which will be set in Andomhaim and follow up on the results of Dragonskull from earlier this year. I'm hoping to start writing that Tuesday or possibly Wednesday of this coming week. Sooner would be better, obviously. I am also about halfway through the rough draft of Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, and I'm hoping to have that come out early in 2024, if all goes well.

In audiobook news, I had two audiobooks come out this past week: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills and Ghost in The Serpent, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get those audiobooks at Audible, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, and all the usual audiobook stores. Audio for Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is almost finished. If all goes well, it may yet come out before the end of 2023, though, given how the holidays slow down processing for everything, it might not come out till 2024. But in any case, it will be out soon.

If you stop by my website between now and the end of the year, you will see that I'm doing 12 Days of Short Story Christmas, where I'm looking over the most popular short stories I've had over the last two years or so and giving them away for free on my Payhip store until December 31st. I’m doing it on weekdays. As of this recording, I have gone through the first four short stories and tomorrow on Monday the 11th we will be having the fifth of The 12 Days of Short Story Christmas. So if you're looking for free short stories to read, stop by my website and at the end of The 12 Days of Short Story Christmas, I will have a bonus coupon for my entire Payhip store. So I think it would be worth checking that out.

00:02:42 Main Topic: Crossovers

Now on to our main topic this week: why I am not going to write any more crossover series. Occasionally I get an e-mail from a reader suggesting that would be cool if Caina met Ridmark in a book or if Nadia went aboard Jack March’s spaceship or crossover like that between characters from different series. Much more frequently, I get emails from readers confused by the Cloak and Ghost series. How did Caina get Nadia’s world? Is this a version of Caina that lives in Nadia's world? How does this affect the timeline of Nadia's books and Caina’s? Didn't Andromache die in Ghost in the Storm? Why is she running around and Cloak and Ghost: Lost Gate? Or I will get an e-mail from a reader who read and enjoyed Malison: The Complete Series and then continued on to Dragontiarna: Knights, only to be confused and annoyed that Tyrcamber Rigamond doesn't appear in Dragontiarna: Knights until Chapter 15, even though at the end of Malison: The Complete Series said that Tyrcamber’s adventures would continue in the Dragontiarna series. Tyrcamber really does arrive in Chapter 15 of Dragontiarna, I promise!

Now I'm in my second decade of being an indie author and one of the things I've decided for decade two is no more crossovers. My reasons follow: #1: The Cloak and Ghost books. I'm very grateful to everyone who read and enjoyed the Cloak and Ghost books, but boy did I get a lot of confused emails about them, like a lot of confused emails. I still do on occcasion. The idea that when I started writing them way back in 2018 was that it would be a fun little crossover side project. I figured it would just be a side story where Nadia meets the version of Caina who lives on her world and then adventures follow. Comics do parallel versions of characters all the time in comic books, right? Of course that overlooked the fact that one: hardly anyone actually buys comic books anymore, so it's probably best not to use them as an example. And two: when the Marvel movies started doing the Multiverse and parallel versions of characters after 2019, the franchise basically went off a cliff. But that was in the future yet. What actually followed was many confused questions about the continuity I tried to explain in the prologue of the book, but then I remembered the old adage that if you have to explain the joke, it's probably not funny. The same thing applies to concepts in fantasy novels. If you can't explain it adequately within the book itself, then it's time for a rethink.

#2: Malison. Malison actually went pretty well. Thanks for reading it, everyone. The idea for Malison was that it would help set up the Dragontiarna series. When I wrote Dragontiarna, I wanted the story to cut back and forth between two different worlds, Andomhaim and Tyrcamber’s world. Writing Malison also helped me to work out the way the rules would work in Tyrcamber’s world, and then that would lead into the first book of the Dragontiarna series, Dragontiarna: Knights, which also happened to be my 100th novel. Malison did well enough on its own, especially in the box set, that lots of people picked it up in both ebook and audiobook. This did cause an unintentional degree of confusion, since it says at the end of the final Malison book that Tyrcamber Rigamond will return in Dragontiarna: Knights, so numerous people continued onward, and I still get confused emails ever since from people since Dragontiarna: Knights starts with Ridmark's perspective, not Tyrcamber. So now I have a form letter that I copy and paste reassuring people that yes, Tyrcamber does return in Dragontiarna: Knights in Chapter 15 and is one of the chief point of view characters for the rest of that series. So Malison was probably the most successful crossover I ever did, but it still caused confusion.

Reason #3: internal setting logic. Very often my settings have completely different internal logic from each other and so a crossover simply wouldn't work. Malison was probably as successful as it was because I deliberately planned it from the beginning to tie into Dragontiarna, so the internal logic of the settings matched. Like when people suggest that Nadia come aboard Jack March’s spaceship, in Nadia's world, magic is real. In March's world, there's no such thing as magic, and even things that appear are magical like the targeting abilities of Navigator or Lysiana’s superhuman intelligence are the result of natural phenomena that are only partially understood by the characters, but are nonetheless essentially the results of applied science. So for characters from these two different settings to cross over, one or the other would have to submit to a completely different set of logic, which would be difficult to write and confusing to read. Like if Nadia went aboard Jack March’s spaceship, would her magic be a partially understood scientific phenomenon? Would magic suddenly come to the galaxy of the Silent Order series? Or would Nadia’s magic stop working, which would be a bad thing, since sudden character depowerment is frequently a sure sign that the author is beginning to run out of ideas. Elves are another good example. I've written a lot about elves in both the Frostborn world and the Cloak Game/Cloak Mage setting, and now I'm about to add more elves in Half-Elven Thief. The elves in Frostborn and the elves in Cloak Games work under extremely different rules. Like, in Andomhaim so far we've had the High Elves, the Dark Elves, the Gray Elves, the Cloak Elves, the Umbral Elves, and occasionally Half Elves. In Cloak Games, we just have the elves and they're way more concerned about the divide between nobles and commoners than they are about High, Dark, Gray, Cloak, and Umbral elves. For that matter, the way magic works in Andomhaim and the way it works in the Nadia-verse is completely different. So the basic premise of some of my settings are incompatible and trying to force them together would create some weird story structure problems.

#4: Marvel movie lockout syndrome. The entertainment press has spilled much ink over the fact that The Marvels is the worst performing Marvel movie in the last 15 years. A lot of the opinions about it are wholly subjective and based around whatever social or cultural drum a particular writer feels like beating. But I think two undeniable facts worked against the movie, one of which is very relevant to me as an indie writer. First, it just cost too much. The Marvels cost $274 million to make, and it brought in about $200 million. If your movie costs $75 million to make, a $200 million return is a good return. If it costs $274 million, you are up the proverbial foul-smelling creek without a paddle. To put these numbers into perspective, the top three movies of 2023 were Barbie, Super Mario Brothers, and Oppenheimer, and with respective budgets of $145 million, $100 million, and $100 million, they all cost less to make than The Marvels. In fact, the combined budgets of all three movies put together is only like about 25% higher than the budget of The Marvels alone. Granted, while I wouldn't object to someone giving me $100 million budget for something, as an indie writer, this is not a particularly relevant concern to me. Nonetheless, it is a good reminder of the importance of keeping your costs down while running a business.

The second fact that is in fact very relevant to me as an indie writer with 147 novels published, who has written many long series: the movie’s backstory was way too complicated because it was a sequel for too many different things. The backstory to The Marvels…okay, so this is a sequel to Captain Marvel from 2019, but also to Wandavision from 2021, which introduced the adult version of Monica Rambeau and also a sequel to Miss Marvel from 2022 on Disney Plus, which is where Kamala Khan made her introduction, but is also a sequel or possibly a prequel to 2023’s Secret Invasion and in some sense is a continuation of the story is told in the four Avengers movies and the setup for the plot was introduced for the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie back in 2014, with the character of Ronan the Accuser, who also appears in Captain Marvel as the younger version of himself and they're also linked to the X-Men movies and the larger multiverse, and on and on and on. That is a lot of backstory.

And if I've learned anything writing really long series is that people are very often completionists. They want to read everything and read it in the order it was written. The downside of this is that the longer something goes on, the more readers or viewers you lose along the way. You can see how this works against The Marvels. It has, like dozens and dozens of hours of movies and TV shows to watch first as its full backstory. That's a big time commitment and an expensive one. For indie authors, if the series goes on long enough, you tend to lose people from book to book as they get distracted with other things or the budget happens to be tight the month the new book comes out. I think Cloak Mage will be the last series I write that has a double digit amount of titles in the series and everything after that is going to be around five to eight books, depending on the complexity and length of the story I want to tell. The problem with crossovers is that it increases the complexity of the backstory exponentially. I ran into that with Malison and Dragontiarna, even though they were both pretty successful and in a smaller way with Cloak and Ghost, even though that was a crossover with no connection to the main storyline for either Caina or Nadia. So as I plunge into my second decade of being an indie author, I don't think I'm going to do anymore crossovers for the reasons listed above, which is why my new book, Half-Elven Thief is entirely unconnected to anything else I've previously written. But of course, when I start at the Shield War next week, it will be a direct continuation of Dragonskull and the Frostborn series.

So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.