Book series

A book series, or novel series, is a sequence of books having certain characteristics in common that are formally identified together as a group. Fictional series typically share a common setting, story arc, set of characters or timeline, and are common in genre fiction, particularly crime and speculative fiction. Some works stand alone, readable in any order, making few references to past events, and many of these are published in a numbered series, like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Series whose characters change are typically published in the order of their internal chronology, sometimes enumerated by that order rather than publication order, as with the Chronicles of Narnia. Some series are not exactly proper series but single books published across multiple volumes, like The Lord of the Rings.

For a writer these are the entry decisions of how to write a series: what carries over, whether order matters, and how the set is numbered.