What an oxy(moron) - The Interconnected Standalone
If you peek at my GoodReads account, you will see that I am a big fan of romance books that are part of a series. A writer has a couple books about a group of friends who each have their own love story? - Sign me up! I live for seeing favourite characters come up again in another book. It’s like an extended epilogue, and their story never ends! It might be why, when I started writing, I had an idea for one book that very quickly became an idea for a series of books about a family of brothers in a small-town (and may continue into a spinoff novella, but more on that later).
I learned the technical term for these types of books as I began my writer journey. These are Interconnected Standalones. This would be a series of books (more than 2) that are each about a different couple, but the worlds are the same, and characters from the first book appear again in the second book. That is the interconnected part. But the standalone part is a little trickier. This means that you could conceivably read the books out of order or just read the one that sounds most appealing to you (you monster - how could you read out of order?!). This is not the case for a lot of other books written as a series where the main characters remain the same throughout the books and you have to read them in order, otherwise you are lost (think Game of Thrones).
Romance books are not the first place I came across this concept of Interconnected Standalone-ness. I’ve previously mentioned a favourite series of mine growing up was The Baby Sitter’s Club by Ann M. Martin. For those of you who were not a tween in the 90s, the Baby Sitter’s Club books are a HUGE series consisting of 213 books published between 1986 and 2000. I think I read books 1 to 60 before I aged out of the series. I don’t remember which book I read from this series first, but it wasn’t book 1…and that’s ok, because enjoying any of the books does not require you to have read the previous one, or even the first one. Each book gives enough info about the characters and world so you are not lost, and each character takes a turn being the voice on center stage.
Normally, chapter 2 of a BSC book would be a synopsis of the ethos of the series, how the club came to be etc. To be honest, by the 2nd or 3rd book that I read, I usually skipped this chapter because it was repetitive. It probably wasn’t word for word the same in each book, but it was pretty darn close. I get why Ann M. Martin did this, it was to make it easy for young people to jump in anywhere and enjoy, and having a somewhat standard review of the world of the BSC, made it easy to get right into the main story quickly (it also made it easier to write).
I would say that most of the romance series I read now that are made up of interconnected standalones are a little more sophisticated in their standalone-ness. The small bits of info the reader needs from the previous books are usually sprinkled in seamlessly so it doesn’t take away from the story (or make you want to skip a whole chapter). And now, having written 4 books (3 published so far) in the same series, I can say it is tricky to make sure you have hit all of the highlights of introducing the world, but it’s very doable. I credit a lot of this to Tabi, who has a knack for dropping this foundational information into the first 6-7 chapters of our books. What do characters look like, what does the town look like, who is dating who and what are some of the inside jokes or running themes that are helpful to know about. It has also helped to have beta or early readers who are not familiar with the previous books to read our latest work. They are usually good at pointing out when more info is needed.
Now to the reason I am writing about this topic for the blog - I know get to the point Andrea - is because I came across a book recently that was an interconnected standalone and the 3rd book in the series but it missed the mark in one of the biggest reasons why people love these types of stories. This book didn’t bring the characters from the first 2 books into the 3rd book despite it being set in the same small town, and the main male characters in all three books were related. I have to say I kinda felt cheated. I was looking forward to my glimpse into the ongoing lives of the characters I fell in love with in the first books. It was missing and I was sad. It actually took me out of the story so much because I kept waiting for those other characters to appear. Now the author did take advantage of interconnected stories by using the same small-town and many of the same minor characters. And there is a mystery that connects all three books, but I wanted my character update, darn it!
Well, what does this mean for you dear readers of our blog? It means that I promise any series you read from me (and Tabi) that are interconnected standalones, will wring out all the benefits of this type of book by bringing old characters back (a lot, we can’t leave them alone). In the Moore Love Series, it was easy, they were brothers, but in our next series, we have a different way of doing that for a group of friends. Stay tuned.
For those of you who can’t get enough of the Moores, like us, check out our bonus scenes: https://www.stonefruitpress.com/bonus-content. And if you like the scene where Beth pulls the wool over the rookie fire fighter, Jackson’s, eyes, you might be even more interested in what’s coming in the future (wink wink).