: Re: Is it a common practice to provide a chapter/section reference from the next volume in a series to the previous? When writing a series of fiction books in which characters, universe, and events

@Jessie137

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Footnotes informing a reader of which previous work an event occurred in are ubiquitous in comic books, but I've never heard of them being done in a novel before, nor would I really recommend it. The general consensus on another recent question about using footnotes in a novel was that it was a bad idea and would break a reader's immersion.

Or is it normally left to the reader to know and remember what volume 1 read?

Yes. And of course, you can't rely on that. I read the second Artemis Fowl book before I read the first one, and was relying on references to what happened in the first book in order to understand what happened in it and who everyone was. When I watched Attack on Titan years back, I managed to completely forget that a specific character existed right up until his corpse was discovered.

There's not much you can do to safeguard against this. If you spent too long explaining things that happened in the previous book(s) just in case people forgot, you're going to insult the intelligence of the readers who do remember. Just mention as much as you need to mention, then move on.

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