Anticipating how a fledgling fanbase might react to the various release orders of the above is fairly easy, but choosing which reaction to 'risk' is more difficult. (I have the old 'author's contract with his/her readers' notion in my head as I write this; that an author's name is, to some extent, a label which has a certain set of stylistic and tonal promises associated with it.)

I'm wondering how you folks would choose, in a situation where you have basic outlines for several fairly different novels which you're equally enthusiastic about, which one to go ahead with and write first - presuming you'll be putting that one forward to publishers as your 'first novel'. Am I nuts for thinking that far ahead?

General thoughts on authors putting out genre/world consistent, but very different works are also welcome. (I can't think of any examples with which to soothe myself.)

And/or, have you heard other authors comment on this?

Which makes me think of the "career" approach most editors take with a writer when they acquire a book. If the book does well, the editor will advise the writer to write "more of the same" for two reasons: continue to build the readership by giving those who enjoy the second book a first book to enjoy as well and strengthen the original readership by writing more of what they liked in the first place.

So whichever editor you sell your first book to (whichever one you decide to do) is not going to want you to do something very different for the next book.

However, if you can convince the editor to market that first book as "first in a shared world series" and then publish your second, very different, book under a different name, it might work. You could publish all of your different books, each with a different name, and the hook would be that they take place on a "shared world" with several different authors.

David Gemmell did this well in The Drenai Saga. The Drenai are defending their country from a Nadir invasion in the first book. The second book takes place several years later, and the protagonist is a Nadir-Drenai half-breed and it's from the Nadir PoV. He also jumps about in the timeline. You could do worse than follow his example (he was an international bestseller for his Drenai books).

quote:

---

Another possible solution is to tell those stories each with different protagonist, and in a different part of that world: a starship pilot in one, a cop in the next, a wrongly convicted murderer in the third.

---

That's exactly my intention. I'd like to have the various plots touch, at least in a superficial way, but primarily they're all different stories in different places about different people.