Well That Didn't Go Like I Thought . . . In a Good Way

In my last post, I detailed how I would be minimizing Facets of Fantasy, Ryan and Essie, and Bellevere House because they didn't match with my target audience of young adults--middle school and high school kids. Yes, I know these kids are not adults in the real world, but in Bookland this age bracket is called Young Adult. And that was fine until I began examining more books and realized I'd have to cut even more. These were subtler--This Merry Summertime, The Test of Devotion, and A Year with the Harrisons were often about teenagers, but were teenagers usually the audience?

The answer was no. They are mostly interesting to adults and also at times to children because they are a "for the whole family" sort of genre and kids like that genre a lot more than teenagers do. So I was like "I have to find a solution to this instead of cutting out the books."

Then I went back to an idea from last year, which was to divide into 4 genres that I do. I even put that on my business cards. These genres are Science Fiction; Coming of Age; Short Stories; and Middle Grade. The Science Fiction is especially a young adult area, whereas the books that would be cut landed in the Coming of Age and Short Stories categories especially. We're talking 100% of books from those two categories!

I decided to stick with these 4 genres, with a twist--I would place each book into a trilogy and replace individual book pages on my website with trilogy pages that list each book in the trilogy on that page. It helps keep track of them and make sure they are evenly divided across 4 categories. In reality, I feel a lot of these books represented interpolation of other audiences than mine into my written work. It's a bit sad that so few of my books were really for MY audience, meaning few of the people who followed me were really that audience either. But since these books DO exist now, I have to find a way to manage them.

Trilogy 1: The Palladia Trilogy. Science Fiction. Obviously, this is the 3 Palladia books already written into a series.

​​​​The Palladia Trilogy of YA action-adventure stories is set in the future civilization of Palladia, a country that exists 300 years from now. This future society puts people into contrived divisive groups, and it opposes rebels who try to ignore these artificial differences and build a shared world. The three books focus on Palladia, but also include the countries of Belaria and Dorilantz.


Trilogy 2: The Americana Trilogy. Coming of Age. (The Test of Devotion; Bellevere House; and A Year with the Harrisons.) At first this seems crazy because Bellevere is already in a series, but after reading the description it does make sense.

The Americana Trilogy is a loose umbrella term for three novels for adults written with a realistic American setting. The books are set approximately 100 years from each other (1850; 1937; & 2015) and explore American small-town, rural, archetypical western, and religious life. They were not originally written as a series and Bellevere House, the second book in the trilogy, is listed with its original publication grouping, the Vintage Jane Austen, on some retailers. But they are often linked together because of their shared genre and themes.

Trilogy 3: The Worlds Across Time Trilogy. Short Stories. (This Merry Summertime; Ryan and Essie; and Facets of Fantasy.) Largely, this is anything fantasy and it also comprises a large bulk of my older writing, some of it gestated long before it was published.

The Worlds Across Time Trilogy is a group of for-the-whole-family short story collections. They showcase teen or 20-something protagonists as well as older adults and children for a balanced aesthetic that offers something for everyone. Fantasy, historical eras shown in a light-hearted way with modernized dialogue, and daily contemporary life mixed with a dose of fantasy are the primary genres.

Trilogy 4: The Prince's Invite Series. Middle Grade. This has the 2 remaining books (Victoria: A Tale of Spain and The Birthday Present) and I decided to play off of the fact that one was partly a rewrite of the other. I need a third book for this series so I can (FINALLY) get back to work on Temmark Osteraith also sometimes called The Prince's Ball. It uses the same plot devices and is I guess a rewrite of first two.

The Prince's Invite Trilogy is an informal grouping of three stories for middle-school girls. Each book in the trilogy uses a similar storyline--the first half sets up a historical or adventure story about a young girl. In the second half of each book, a girl is invited to a dance by a wealthy ruler of her country, who is threatened because she owns something that discredits him. The third book, Temmark Osteraith, is planned for publication in 2024.

I also plan to release a Complete Trilogy Anthology of each series because it will be so much faster and easier for reviewers to have the books all in one volume. Sending series to reviewers can be really clunky because you have to give copies of every book in the series along with whichever one they are reviewing. Unless they are reviewing the first one, but of course I want them to move on and read later ones!

And there will be more updates.