Each month we highlight one of our affiliates – an individual or organization with a web presence who lists books for purchase through our booksense.com affiliate program. In return, they receive a percentage of said sales, something we like to view as a Win/Win situation!

This month, we are delighted to spotlight two of our continuing affiliate authors:

Science Fantasy author Jeri Smith-Ready and Epic Fantasy author Diana Pharoah Francis. 

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Jeri Smith-Ready explains when "The End" means the end.

Greetings! I'm Jeri Smith-Ready, author of the award-winning Aspect of Crow trilogy, a fantasy set in a world where everyone has magic according to their Guardian Spirit--sort of X-Men meets Clan of the Cave Bear. Or as one reviewer put it, "Jean M. Auel meets Mercedes Lackey."

Aspect of Crow began with Eyes of Crow in November 2006, continued with Voice of Crow last October, and culminates this month with The Reawakened. (Ha! You thought I was going to say [insert body part] of Crow, didn't you?)

Yes, it's one of those increasingly rare three-book trilogies.  Readers have already asked me if I would write more books in the series, but those poor characters have suffered enough—why not let them enjoy their happy ending forever?

Besides, there's something uniquely satisfying about a trilogy.  It provides an expanded version of the classic three-act storytelling structure.  Beginning, middle, end.  If each installment has a self-contained story, then you've got three sets of three segments, and it doesn't get any more symmetrical (some would say sacred) than that.

I came up with a few principles to help writers decide when to write the final THE END, whether it's for a trilogy, a decenovvology, or somewhere in between. 

1. Quit while you're ahead.  Leave readers wanting more.  Almost as important: leave yourself wanting more, not dreading the creation of the next book because you've grown bored with the characters and world.

2. Quit before you break your own rules. Worldbuilding grows in complexity with each installment. Eventually new stories demand changes to the old rules.  You may find your characters saying things like, "Why didn't you tell me that before?" or noting that "according to new research," the way they thought things worked in previous books turned out not to be the case.  Readers are skeptical of too much revisionism.

3. Quit before you "jump the shark." With each story, the stakes must get bigger, and the battles more epic.  It's tempting to go over the top and have your characters do things that are, well, out of character, all for the sake of a bigger bang.  Like Fonzie from Happy Days waterskiing over a tankful of sharks.

What do you think?  Is the "stand-alone trilogy" a thing of the past?  Are you more likely to start reading a series if you know when it will end?  Do you have different expectations for open-ended series versus those with a defined story arc?  Does it depend on the genre or subgenre? 

Follow these links for excerpts to Eyes of Crow, Voice of Crow, and The Reawakened.

To tie in with the Aspect of Crow series, my website features an interactive personality quiz to show you which of twelve Animals from the book you'd be. E-mail me your results and you'll automatically be entered into a prize drawing during your animal's month.  The drawings will continue until October 2009.

Thanks to Mysterious Galaxy for giving me the chance to be Affiliate of the Month.  I  love your store!

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And fellow fantasy author Diana Pharoah Francis talks about truth in telling lies for fun and profit in The Black Ship sequel to The Cipher.

There's a myth out there that when you write fantasy, you can make up just anything you want. And while certainly there's some truth to that--there's quite a lot you can make up--writing fantasy also requires a lot of research. Because things still have to work believably. So for this book, The Black Ship, I set it on a square-rigged clipper ship. The problem was, I'd never even been sailing, much less set foot on a clipper ship. So I had to research, and it wasn't just sailing and how the ship works, but the language. For a society dominated by a sailing industry, sailing lingo would be deeply embedded into the language of the culture.

So I set about researching and discovered some interesting tidbits. Some of which became important to my story and some of which didn't get stirred into the pot, but yet remained in the back of my head like fertilizer. For instance, did you know that the term 'slush' (as in slush fund) is a sailing term? It referred to the grease drippings that the cook was allowed to sell for extra money--a sort of a bonus. And flogging a dead horse is also a sailing term. It referred to the fact that sailors were paid their first month's wages before setting foot aboard ship. Then they'd spend the money and be unable to renege on the working. But that meant that since they'd been paid already for work not yet done, they didn't bother working very much that first month. Flogging a dead horse meant doing work that's already been paid for (or rather, not doing much and getting sailors to work was like flogging a dead horse).

You really don't want to know why the horse latitudes were called that.

But the last term, and one that is also surprising and which became fundamental to the book, was the "third time's a charm." Turns out that this was not a sign of luck. Or rather, it was a sign of bad luck. When a sailor survived three shipwrecks, they put a charm around his neck as a warning to any who might serve that he was in fact very unlucky since the ships he sailed on tended to wreck. 

It's actually amazing how much sailing slang infiltrates ordinary language today, and without deciding to write this book, I never would have known it. And that's one of the reasons I love to write: I get to learn knew things that I don't even know that I'm setting out to learn. It's truly a wonderful thing.

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