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Book Series vs. Single Books

In one of his recent posts, Chris Webb talks about book covers and the book series and single books then asks his readers about their opinions about this topic.  Well, I want to share my opinions here!  Here I write about pros and cons of book series and single books in my opinion.

A single book has its own market which isn't related to any other book.  It means that readers don't consider the quality of any other book when they're buying a single book.  Other books of an author may affect the market of a new book for that author though.  Unlike single books, the quality of a book in series can affect other books of that series.  This can be positive and negative.  Positive because publications can improve their markets with good titles and negative because a bad book can affect their market as well.  Moreover, a success title for an older version can help the market of a new title for newer versions.

For example, if you buy a Wrox book and don't like it then this may change your mind about Wrox series.  Similarly, if you buy a book from the series and like it then this encourages you to buy more books of the series.  This is something like a rule.  If you don't like the taste of Hamburger for a restaurant then most likely you don't like its Cheeseburger as well!

Some technical book authoring stuff such as formatting, rules and guidelines can be extended for a single book in order to suit to its needs but for book series sometimes authors and editorial team should change some stuff to suit to the general formatting, rules and guidelines of that series.

As an example, you may know Code Complete book printed by MS Press and you may also know Test Driven Development in Microsoft .NET from MS Press but from its Professional series.  Both books are from same publication but Code Complete is a single book.  Based on author's needs to have sidebar texts and URLs, Code Complete formatting and layout is extended to have this ability to add sidebar notes (and put some images to let Jeff Atwood choose them for his blog logo!!).

But in book series there is a pre-defined general formatting and style that can't be changed and authors and editors should fit their content into this format.

For example, I'm a Wrox author and am writing a book.  In one of my chapters, I had to put a source code in a sidebar text but there was no formatting style for code in the sidebar and if I put the normal coding style, it could break my formatting.  Finally I had to switch back to normal text and present that content in main body.

On the other hand, there is a positive point for series in comparison with single books.  Publications and editors can get good experiences from other titles and apply them in order to improve new titles in a book series but for single books there are many new stuff to discover for the team.  Even authors for new titles can take a look at older titles to learn some stuff like formatting and language.

For example, even though it's more extendable to work with an individual title from formatting point of view but this can be positive for itself.  I work easier with Wrox templates and styles after co-authoring Professional Community Server because I learned many things from that title.

But the negative point about book series is they change the book authoring process to a repetitive task.  It means that a special group of editors work with authors in order to deliver a book based on some pre-defined styles and guidelines.  This changes a publication to a book factory.  In my opinion looking at book authoring as a repetitive task reduces the quality of the book because in the passing time, editors don't care as much as the past about some special aspects of a book and try to make same considerations for several titles that may be completely different.

As a conclusion, in my opinion none of these two kinds of book is preferable.  They have their own pros and cons and still the content plays the main role in the success of a book.  One way of avoiding some negative points of book series is having different series for one brand like what Wrox has done to create Professional, Beginning, Problem-Design-Solution and other series for different levels and purposes.

3 Comments : 08.10.07

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#1
Chris Webb
08.10.2007 @ 6:09 AM

Thanks for the mention Keyvan, and you make some good points here. However, Ill disagree with you a little bit about the "book factory" analogy. The idea of series is to deliver a consistent experience across all of the books in that series. The most successful example of this is our own For Dummies series - when you buy a For Dummies book, you know what you are getting every time. But I can certainly understand how dealing with series elements during the writing can make an author feel like they are working on widgets. If you feel strongly about having something special in your book - even if it is a series title - you should talk with your editor to see if a small change can be made. In most cases (and this is especially true of Wrox) we can try to tweak things a bit as necessary.

#2
Keyvan Nayyeri
08.10.2007 @ 10:59 AM

Thank you Chris :-) Now I should talk to my development editor about making tweaks ;-)

#3
TrackBack
08.11.2007 @ 9:55 AM

Wrox Executive Editor Chris Webb and author Keyvan Nayyeri had a recent conversation about what makes a book series.

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