Term for a collection of novels divided into several series

I'm writing my first series of novels, which will contain four books. As often happens, about half way through developing the books, I opened up the possibility for an entirely new series set in the same world with the same characters, but several years later. I could possibly do this again as well, after the second series is complete.

Is there any technical term for a collection of novels like this? It's several series, probably with varying numbers of books, that are all connected through the setting and characters. The series would be different in their plots.

Answer

The good news is that there's nobody policing this! You can call your series anything you want — just like naming your individual books, you're looking for whatever you think will best serve the series and appeal to prospective readers.

• 'Trilogy', 'quadrilogy' etc. obviously have technical meanings


• So does 'sequence' (See Wikipedia)


• Terry Pratchett simply wrote 'The Discworld Novels', and his covers would just say 'A Discworld Novel'


• Kameron Hurley writes 'the Worldbreaker Saga'


• Patrick Rothfuss calls his series 'the Kingkiller Chronicle', which of course was also used for the Chronicles of Narnia


• Brandon Sanderson writes 'the 'Stormlight Archive'


• If you're writing humour, you could use a joke description like Douglas Adams's 'A trilogy in five parts'


• 'Series' does the job, and no-one will find it pretentious


• George RR Martin uses 'A Song of Ice And Fire', that is, a unique name with no 'series' word at all

You can use as much imagination as you would when writing the book itself.

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One note of caution! The above applies when naming your work for prospective readers.

If you're sending it to prospective publishers, clearly, a cool series name still won't hurt. But in your first approach, it might be smart to focus on the initial book, or at most the initial trilogy. Ambition is great, but if you're an unknown author whose cover letter says 'I enclose my masterpiece which I anticipate to be the first in a fifteen-book series,' it could mark you out as having unrealistic expectations.

The publisher will want to see how well your book sells before they commit to publishing a dozen more, and it's good to show you understand that.

Hope that helps!