Getting Ahead of Myself

In theory, I should be worrying about getting an agent and selling a book to a publisher, but, I like to be proactive about my futile fretting. So instead I expend a lot of useless brainpower worrying about finding myself in the shoes of Tobias Buckell.

Those of you familar with his kick-ass military science fiction are probably snorting your coffee right now, thinking, “Yeah, Tara, you should be so lucky.”

I like to write series. Ideally, the sales figures for a series should follow the trajectory of the books in the Harry Potter series, starting out modestly for Book 1 and reaching univeral distribution to every single literate human being on the planet by Book 7. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen that way.

What if sales for each book in my series decline? What if my publisher — or even my agent! — tires of my declining commercial appeal and drop me before I finish telling my story?