The Business Genius of Discworld
Before we really dive into this topic, I feel it’s vital to put one piece of information front and center: Sir Terry Pratchett was an outstanding writer. Today we’re going to do some exploring of the business side of his art and all the market hurdles his books were able to dodge around, but bear in mind that his practices worked because the product he created was of such high quality. All of the business talk is about getting someone to pick up a new title, once they start reading, it’s on the story to keep things going.
Brilliant an author as he was, Pratchett was also exceptional at circumventing many of the challenges authors face in marketing with his Discworld series. Maybe he was a genius who saw far enough ahead to lay the groundwork well in advance, maybe it was part luck and part making the right choices, I have no real insight into what made Pratchett create and structure Discworld the way he did. When I first encountered it, I was a reader, enraptured by the tales like anyone else. Later in life, I reread some after moving into this field full-time, and was gobsmacked by how smartly constructed the whole enterprise was.
Background
This is going to be light, because if you haven’t read any of the Discworld series, my genuine recommendation is to go do that. For those who won’t/can’t/just need a refresher: Discworld is a comedic fantasy series set in the eponymous Discworld, a flat world held aloft by elephants on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. Magic, wizards, monsters, cities, civilization, technology; Discworld is packed to the gills with unique people and places. The stories themselves were all set in this world, sometimes with a semi-regular cast like books centered around the wizards of Unseen University, sometimes closer to one-offs, though usually still featuring cameos from known characters sprinkled in. As the name implies, this is not the story of any one person, it is the tale of a world and the people who dwell upon it.
Marketing New Books
No, I didn’t accidentally slap a different entry’s section in here by mistake, although it does seem like a bit of a topic jump. But to discuss some of the business brilliance of Discworld, first we have to go over some behind-the-author-scenes stuff.
In writing, it is considered a general rule of thumb that series are more fruitful than standalones. There are of course exceptions, however on the average this holds true. If someone likes the story, that represents multiple purchases, helping both your bottom line and giving you more chances to show what you can do as an author. Even people who like an author’s prior work won’t always crack open their newest endeavors. I’ve had a great many folks at cons tell me how much they love one series while having never touched several others, and please don’t take that as me throwing shade. It’s just the nature of looking for stuff that draws us in, I do the same thing.
The trouble is that a series generally needs to have an main arc running, and eventually it needs to be paid off or loses steam. That means they have a built-in shelf-life, sooner or later you run out of new stories to tell with those characters in that setting. Shaking things up too much can risk alienating existing readers, and spinning it off still holds many of the challenges of starting a new series.
Then there’s attempts to break into new genres, something a lot of authors don’t even try. I do it frequently, largely because I like telling different kinds of stories and set an established precedent early on, but it’s always a challenge. Even the readers who will trust you from one action series to another might not be interested in going down a comedy or mystery lane. While changing genres isn’t quite the same as starting from scratch, it comes closer than you might expect.
Discworld
After that last section, I’m guessing some of you have already picked up on a few of the brilliant business bits of Discworld. To start with, it is one series. Despite the fact that it has multiple recurring casts that would easily be capable of anchoring their own, and really is a mix of several series and standalones set in a shared universe. By holding it all under one banner, Pratchett never had to put his readers in the position of having to change series.
Discworld was essentially the best of both worlds. It had the longevity and support of a series, without the main arc that would slap an inherent timer on everything. A recurring cast to use for character development and longer-form story-telling, as well as one-offs to play with shorter tales. And my god, the number of genre limitations that man told to go fuck themselves. He wrote action, conspiracy, heists, family drama, scam artists, and unnatural forces, just to name a few. The stories could vary as wildly as the characters, using the genre that best supported whatever was being currently written.
That said, it has to be noted that part of the reason such a tactic worked was because Discworld was written so consistently. No matter how ridiculous things got, it still felt like a cohesive setting where you could believe these various disparate elements were living and interacting with one another. When you picked up a new book, there was a level of trust that even if some faces might be new, you have a good idea of where you were going. As we said at the start, the smart marketing wouldn’t have mattered if he didn’t have the skills to back it up.
Takeaway
I don’t want to say the lesson here is to try and write a Discworld-eque series, even assuming we were each capable of such a feat. Rather, I think what I took from it was recognizing that there are more ways to do this than what we are presented with. Don’t be afraid to break with the established norms, such as creating a world that is both a series and a set of standalones. Find your strengths and see how they can be creatively wielded. Sir Terry Pratchett was able to use his high level of consistent story and character writing to create a cohesive series out of often separate tales.
Who knows what sort of options your own talents might open?