The Life of a Novel Series

This post is a rewrite of one I wrote almost a decade ago, and since the series has been updated I thought I would share this again. It serves as a good example of how a series comes to be, how it might change over the course of writing three or more books, and how it lives on for many years after its first publication.

The first Hanover Falls novel, Almost Forever, was first published almost 16 years ago in 2010 with Howard Books/Simon & Schuster. I came up with the three titles and was so pleased that the publisher liked them too. I thought it was clever that each title took a word from the book before it.

Here’s how that series first came to be:

The books were first published by Howard Books/Simon & Schuster. My idea for the series came one morning when my husband, Ken—as he often does—laid a newspaper clipping on the table beside my breakfast plate. It was a story about a fire that had killed several firefighters and told how this community of firefighting families had pulled together to support one another after the tragedy. “It sounds like a Deborah Raney novel,” Ken said.

I read the news story and was moved. Immediately, this cast of characters began to form in my mind. I contacted my niece’s firefighter husband, who not only let me borrow his training manuals for the next couple of years but patiently answered my questions and gave me great insight into the firefighting “family.”

Wanting to change every detail from the real-life story, I decided to build my story around a fire in a homeless shelter. But I would need to do a ton of research since I’d never even been inside such a shelter. I don’t think it was a coincidence that shortly after, our small-town church got involved in a ministry to a local homeless shelter. I wanted to be upfront about my motives, so asked the volunteer coordinators if they would be opposed to me volunteering with the intent of researching for a novel. They smiled and said they just needed warm bodies to serve, and as long as my motives weren’t sinister, they’d be glad to have me.

My first night at the shelter turned out to be a researcher’s dream: a new fresh-out-of-jail admittance from the no-admit list, a mild altercation between a client and a volunteer (not me!), a bottle of vodka discovered hidden in a hallway and the subsequent (negative) Breathalyzer test on the suspect, a chance to pray with a man on suicide watch, and a phone that rang virtually the entire 5-11 shift.

Only after I arrived home did I glance at my calendar and realize I wasn’t supposed to show up for my shift until the following Sunday night! (Which I did, and NOTHING happened that night! Good for the shelter, but not so much for the researcher.) God knew when I needed to be there, and I couldn’t have asked for better research material. Still, it was sobering to come out of my little cozy-life cocoon, and as God always has done through my writing process, he grew me so much during those years I spent volunteering at the shelter.

The books eventually were finished, I got stretched in sometimes painful yet wonderful ways, and then, almost a decade after the idea was conceived, I got the rights back to these books and we made them available again through Raney Day Press, with beautiful new covers designed by my husband.

I loved all the covers these books have had, but Ken and I have learned that new covers really do give a book or a series a new life and help new readers discover it! I think this is especially true for contemporary novels. So six years later, Ken gave the covers another refresh, and this is how those books look now:

Like all my series, these novels are each written to stand alone, but the books in this series are also more intertwined than any other series I’ve written. So while you’ll get a complete story reading any one of them, you won’t get the whole story. That isn’t revealed until the final book in the series!

Do you like to read series books? What are some favorites you’ve read recently? I’d love to know!