Starting a New Book Series

For Christmas I got the first three books of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. I recently started reading the first book, Children of Time. It made me think about how I go into a brand new book or even a series.

I, like many others, don't like spoilers. I want to be surprised. I want to read the book, see the suspense building up, the conflict rising, only to see how the characters react and either solve or succumb to whatever is going on.

With TV and movies, I try to limit what I know about them going in. I'm often wary of trailers because of how much they show and how sometimes they'll show way more than they should to try to rope you in.

With books, I feel like more often than not I'm going in completely blind, at least when it comes to fiction. I love that. The mystery of what plot lines I might discover, what kind of world building I'll get to experience. I get recommendations from friends and others. If someone I trust to give good recommendations says a book is worth reading, I'll add it to my list, see if the library has it and will give it a go. Worst case I don't like it and I'll go read something else.

I think with books though, it's also the lack of visible trailers. Books are just made up of words. Artfully crafted into a world and a story. There's no video to share with your target audience, just maybe a short blurb on the back giving a brief description of the story.

I think there's something to be said for that, going into a story with only a 1-2 paragraph blurb about what you're going to be reading. Takes some trust too to see if the story is going to deliver. It's probably why recommendations are so powerful a persuader.

Either way, I'm now a little over 50% done with Children of Time and am so far enjoying it. I'm not sure where exactly it's going and that's fine by me.