As a debut author querying a potential series, you’re in a much stronger position if you write one amazing manuscript with “series potential” than you are if you were the one needing multiple books to get your story told. If you’re trying to get a novel or picture book series published, I do a deeper dive in Good Story Learning.

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Transcript for how to query a series

Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Welcome. This video is a little bit of a two-parter. I am going to address the easy answer to "how to query a series" here and in more detail over at our Good Story Learning platform that you can check out at goodstorycompany.com. So a little bit of a more mini-exploration over there, for now, for the YouTube channel, and everybody watching, I just want to say, if you want to query a series, your thing that ideally you will want to say is, "This has series potential. This is for our novels, our picture books. This has series potential, but it resolves." And the reason that I want to plant in your head that you want to approach it that way, at the query stage, when you are querying a potential series, is that you don't want to necessarily require a series. And I'll go into a little bit later why that is. You want to come out there and say, for major publishers, for agents, the story resolves for the most part, like maybe 85, 90%. It stands alone. It's going to be satisfying. This is what you want to get across in your query.

You can say it has series potential, but that potential says, "I could go either way." Now, of course, if you have already written a duology, a trilogy, a series of more books, and you can't go either way, well, we're going to talk about that in a second. But what you want to communicate there is that you do not require a series, because this puts you in a power position where you can sort of have the publisher come to you, if the series does really well, they come to you, they ask for a sequel. You can negotiate, readers love you. You have a power position by saying, "I require a series to tell the story."

You are a debut. You are an unknown. A series requires more of an investment financially, and in terms of kind of other overhead manpower from that publisher. They don't know you yet, and so they may be a little bit more hesitant to sort of toss a multi-book contract your way as a new writer. So that is a position of lower power than ideally you want to be in when you are pitching something and hoping to get something picked up. So ideally, what you put in your query letter for your series submission is, "This has series potential."

Now, to explore this a little bit more, head over to Good Story Learning, which is our membership site, where we have a lot of in-depth discussions from me and my editorial team over there, and we will get deeper into the discussion. For now, thanks so much for watching. This has been Good Story Company's YouTube channel. I'm Mary Kole and here's to a good story.

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