By Tony
Riches
For most writers, completing one book
would seem more than enough of an achievement, so why would anyone make a
commitment to writing three? I’d just reviewed Pat Barker’s wartime
Life Class Trilogy for my blog and
was reading Conn Iggulden’s impressive Wars
of the Roses trilogy, when the answer occurred to me.
There are
real benefits of tackling any story as a trilogy, and now I’ve written
one I’m convinced it’s something any novelist should consider. For me, the
greatest benefit is synergy, defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as ‘the
combined power of a group of things when they are working together that is
greater than the total power achieved by each working separately.’
Put simply, the scope of a trilogy offers writers
a liberating sense of space and freedom, as ideas hinted at in the first book can
be developed and explored over the rest. This means the complexity of
relationships evolve over time, and the social, political and economic context can
shift over years – or even generations, offering readers a much more
‘immersive’ experience.
There are also practical and commercial
considerations. If you follow the fashion for longer books, you only have one
opportunity to sell it and the promotion can only begin once it is available
for pre-order. I was able to promote book one of my trilogy while writing book
two (and it became a best-seller in the UK, US and Australia.) Readers began contacting me to ask when the
next book in the trilogy would be available and I soon built an international
reader base for the trilogy.
Similarly, although each book works as a
‘stand-alone’, I’ve seen evidence in my sales that people reading them in the
wrong order tend to buy the others. I also hadn’t realised Amazon (and other
retailers) are happy to promote and market a trilogy (or any series) as a
discounted single purchase, which is good value for readers and means your
books are more likely to be ‘discovered’.
Finally, a trilogy offers a framework for
developing wok on an ‘epic’ scale. In my case, I realised there were countless
novels about the court of King Henry VIII and his six wives, yet I could find
almost nothing about the early Tudors who founded the dynasty. The idea for The Tudor Trilogy was that King Henry VIII’s father could be born in
book one, ‘come of age’ in book two, and rule England in book three, so there
would be plenty of scope to explore his life and times.
The first
book of the trilogy was my fourth novel, so I had a good idea about the structure.
In
book one, OWEN, a Welsh servant of Queen Catherine of Valois, the lonely widow
of King Henry V, falls in love with her and they marry in secret. Their eldest
son Edmund Tudor marries the thirteen year-old heiress Lady Margaret Beaufort,
and fathers a child with her to secure her inheritance. The birth of her son,
Henry, nearly kills her, and when her husband dies mysteriously, his younger
brother Jasper Tudor swears to protect them.
In book two, JASPER, they flee to exile in
Brittany and plan to one day return and make Henry King of England. King
Richard III has taken the throne and has a powerful army of thousands – while
Jasper and Henry have nothing. Even the clothes they wear are paid for by the
Duke of Brittany. So how can they possibly invade England and defeat King
Richard at the Battle of Bosworth?
In the final book of the trilogy, HENRY, I
explore how he brought peace to England by marrying Elizabeth of York, the
beautiful daughter of his enemy, King Edward IV. The trilogy offers me the
scope and depth to help readers understand how Henry’s second son became King
Henry VIII, the tyrant who transformed the history of England forever.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Tony Riches is a full time author of
best-selling fiction and non-fiction books. He lives by the sea in
Pembrokeshire, West Wales with his wife and enjoys sea and river kayaking in
his spare time. For more information about Tony’s other books please visit his popular
blog, The Writing Desk and his WordPress website and find him
on Facebook and Twitter
@tonyriches. His latest book JASPER, Book Two of The Tudor Trilogy is available now.
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