: Re: When a story is longer than a book, is it best to wait until the entire story is done before completing the first book in the story? I have been working on a story for several years. The

@Ogunnowo420

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If you already have the outline of the final story and haven't done major rewrites of that for some time you could think about splitting it up. Some details will surely change, but in general for the big things you know what will happen when and you will have already laid out the foundation in the first third.

Publishing your first book before finishing the other three will give you an idea of how popular your book is and thereby an estimate of what you can expect from the other books. It will also give you valuable feedback from readers about what they like and don't like about your first book so that you can improve those aspects for the second and third one. It might also give you a bit of income and thereby make it for example easier to think about editors to help you edit your other books or advertise your other books a bit. It might also be a nice feeling of having something out there already for others to enjoy.

But you have to remember that you can not change that first book. It's out there and there is no easy way to go back and scrap something that you realized you don't really like or something that won't work out in the end. You have to be sure that the main story won't change too much and that you know what your golden thread is present.

If you've already re-written something hundreds of times are you really sure you won't rewrite it ever again?

Most people re-write stuff often and as with nearly everything once it's done you will have things where you think "I could have done that better nowadays". It's just a matter of being happy enough with your current result and knowing that you will always improve and find things that could have been better in a few weeks, months, years, ...

And once you decide that you want to publish your story in multiple books you should think about where to cut off. A simple chapter ending won't do it. You have to be sure that it feels like a conclusion with enough loose threads that you can tie in another book later on and your readers remembering that there is something they wanted to know. Something they are looking forward to.

In the end there is no right or wrong. It depends on you. It depends on your story. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

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