Building a World Big Enough for Your Series
Who doesn’t love seeing a long line of coherent covers on the shelf. Create a world that will support a series that has your future readers insta-buying each new installment.
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There are many, many reasons to write a series. But I think there’s one reason why fantasy writers tend to write in series so often—worldbuilding is a ton of work and you might as well stretch that work as far as it can go.
Some writers spend years crafting the world of their story. It only makes sense to keep writing stories in that world so that you can make that investment of time worthwhile. You don’t have to be a fantasy writer to create a series that helps you make the most of your worldbuilding work.
Maybe you’ve already planned a 12-book series. Maybe you just want to leave your options open if a book takes off and readers start clamoring for more. Either way, there are a few things to keep in mind as you create a world that can serve multiple books.
Here are my top tips for worldbuilding in a series:
#1 – Decide whether you want to go deeper into one culture or explore the wider world
When it comes to worldbuilding for a series, don’t assume that you have to just create more—more cultures, more places, more monsters. Though adding on to those elements can be a great way to expand your series, it’s not the only way.
Instead, you can go deeper into the cultures and places that you’ve already created. Show readers the deeper nuances. Focus on the ways that cultures and places have been changed as a result of the conflict in previous books. Or, take readers into a different segment of society by introducing a character from a different social class or identity group than your previous point-of-view characters (L. Penelope’s The Bliss Wars series is a great example of this technique).
If you want to add on new cultures and places, you can do that too. Just make sure that you have a coherent throughline that will keep your series from feeling like a travelogue (Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series does a great job balancing a cohesive storyline with expansive world exploration).
You can also do a mix of both in your series. Spend some books delving deeper into one culture, then expand the focus by introducing a new place or people group later on in the series (L. Penelope does this is in another of her series, The Earthsinger Chronicles).
Any of these options can work, so choose the one that best serves your stories.
#2 – Stay organized, stay coherent
If you want to write a series, you have to write a series bible. Period. No questions.
Even if you’re a pantser.
Okay, maybe you have a perfect, infallible memory. Then you can have a free pass. But if that’s not the case, you need a series bible that holds all of your worldbuilding details, character information, and plotlines.
More importantly, you have to keep updating that document. Creating it once during the drafting process isn’t enough. You have to keep it updated based on the information that ends up in your published book. The key word there is published. What you planned to do is far less important than what actually ends up in the book when it goes to print.
Whatever readers have in their hands becomes “canon,” the official lore of your world and someday, when you’re blessed with an eager fan base, that’s the information they’ll hold you to. If you lose track of details during the revision process, you risk creating a world that becomes less and less coherent as the series develops—the exact opposite of what you want to do.
#3 – Understand the difference between an episodic and continuous series
Episodic and continuous series are the two main types of series that you’ll find in the market.
In an episodic series, each book has the capacity to stand alone but the books in the series are connected in some way, perhaps by a place or the characters are related in some way. You’ll often see this type of series in romance (e.g., the Bridgerton books) and mystery/crime/thriller genres (e.g. Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent books or Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series).
In a continuous series, the books have one narrative arc that stretches across all the books of the series. Each individual book can have its own standalone arc, but it’s not required. You’ll often see this type of series in fantasy (e.g., N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy).
Why does this difference matter for your worldbuilding? Because you need to make sure that your worldbuilding matches your intentions.
For an episodic series, make sure you’ve created a setting with depth (see point #1) that can sustain the premise and allows you to build on the success of the original in new and original ways. For example, Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series occurs in a very limited geographical range, but the complex social rules of the ton allows Quinn to explore many different versions of the same basic conflict. Similarly, longstanding detective series work because there are so many different ways for people to hurt each other and the ramifications of a crime are going to be different depending on who hurts who and which segments of society they inhabit.
For a continuous series with one overarching conflict, make sure your world can handle repeated escalations of the conflict. When you write a series, each book has to be better than the previous one, otherwise you’ll lose readers along the way. That doesn’t mean shortchanging book one by saving the best for later. It means creating a world that is big enough to support conflicts that expand to reach new groups of people or that allows you to send your protagonist somewhere completely new to accomplish another aspect of their quest. If each of your cultures looks like a thinly veiled duplication of the others, you need to go back to the drawing board and find ways to bring nuance to the world.
Writing a series can be incredibly rewarding, both in the way it allows you to stretch your creativity and in the opportunity it gives you to maximize your marketing and develop a loyal fan base for your books.
Create a world that can support more than one story and you can keep reaping the rewards of your worldbuilding work for years to come.
Happy Writing!
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FYI: This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. For more information click here and thanks, as always, for your support!
