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Today he shares a somewhat unconventional decision to publish four—yes, four—books in less than a year. Here he is:

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This is the story of how I decided to publish four novels in six months. It begins with a general principle, which is that writing in any form—and certainly storytelling—is a means of communication. I have never subscribed to the belief that writers write solely for themselves.

Even Emily Dickenson, so reclusive that she rarely left her room, sent poems off to be published (although only a dozen or so appeared in print during her lifetime). This proves to me that she must have imagined a reader out there somewhere on the other side of the window for the 1,800 unpublished poems that she also wrote. Shyness couldn’t stop her voice from crying out through the tip of her pen. She wanted to be heard.

It is the same for all who write successfully, I think. (By success, I mean creating what we set out to create, not necessarily raking in the bucks.) We deeply desire to give voice to something within us, and we want someone out there to read our stories. How do we accomplish these twin goals?

As anyone knows who’s attempted to write, while stories still reside solely in our heads, they contain a kind of perfection that we rarely manage to preserve when we attempt to express them in print. And it’s the same with our efforts to bring them out into the light of day. In the perfect world, we can write whatever we want whenever we want to write it, and readers yearn for every word we produce. In the real world, we operate with constraints and may never get discovered.

As a novelist, I think it pays to be aware of the three aspects of the storyteller’s endeavor. First, every story begins with something that interests the author. Second, if storytelling is a form of communication, we must take account of the reader. Finally, an increasingly disrupted marketplace challenges us to find our audience — or, more to the point, to induce them to find us.

Inspiration

Sometimes I feel as if I have a new story idea every day. These stories might float up to me unbidden while I’m driving in the car or dozing off on the couch. But most of the time something instigates them. It could be an item in the news or another work of art or an experience I had. I’ll think, “That would make a great story,” and then I’ll mull over how I might go about telling it.

And then, most of the time, I don’t write that story. I could plead limitations of time — life intervening or some other writing project currently claiming my efforts — but the real reason most of these stories don’t happen is that they’re not ripe. Their day may come, but not yet. Some story ideas marinate this way for years.

Once in a while, however, a story idea comes along that I personally find so compelling I can’t get it out of my head. So it was with my new series, Bomb Squad NYC

Five years ago, my wife, my daughter and I left the New York area for the Brandywine Valley outside Wilmington, Delaware, not far from Philadelphia. We left, but we didn’t leave with both feet, as we decided to buy a smaller house and throw in for an apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, which we visit with some regularity.

We love going to the theater in New York, seeing independent films, window shopping, and the whole foodie scene. Admittedly, we’re pretty spoiled, although the apartment is a petite one-bedroom, and when we’re all in town my daughter sleeps on a pull-out couch.

To the occasional visitor, New York must appear to be an overwhelming agglomeration, but it’s really a collection of distinct neighborhoods, each with its own personality and its quirks. The West Village has become known for its restaurants and access to the Hudson River park, but one of its less remarked-upon features resides in a pair of nondescript garages at the rear of the local police precinct.

When we walked past those closed garage doors we noticed painted shields upon them indicating the headquarters of the NYPD Bomb Squad. One summer evening, as we returned from dinner, we found the doors open wide with a number of cops (all detectives, I’ve since learned) hanging out with a dog in front of the response trucks. We had a nice chat, and they showed us the robots they use. I learned that this wasn’t any old bomb squad, it was the Bomb Squad — the one that strives to keep all of the city safe from explosive devices.

As we walked away from the garage that night, heading for our apartment, it hit me: These guys deserve their own series. Not, I hasten to add, because they’re heroes — although they are. But because, from my perspective as a novelist, their existence carries with it a motherlode of storytelling material that has largely remained untapped.

Lots of bombs go off in thrillers and other novels, of course, but the bomb guys typically get only subplots, if any acknowledgment at all. Few novelists have attempted to crawl inside their heads. I wanted to explore not only what these guys do—which can be highly technical—but how they think, the challenges they face, how they experience life.

For many months I couldn’t get the NYPD Bomb Squad out of my head (news flash: I still can’t!), and the more I thought about it, the more compelling the material looked to me. I decided to pursue the subject with all the vigor I could bring to it.

Creation

I began this series the only way a writer can ever begin anything: with an interest in the subject matter. But then, if writing is primarily a means of communication, how would I connect to the reader? It soon occurred to me that these novels should take the form of thrillers.

The ticking time bomb is the essence of suspense. (Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s explanation: “Four people are sitting around a table talking about baseball or whatever you like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and it will go off in five minutes. The whole emotion of the audience is totally different … Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital. Because they’re saying to you, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball. There’s a bomb under there.’”) But it needn’t be an actual time bomb. In some sense any bomb that has not yet detonated is a time bomb. As Hitchcock suggested, the fact that a bomb might soon go off at any moment engages the audience’s attention. Therefore, I concluded, these books called for the thriller genre.

With my novels roughly using the storytelling conventions of thrillers, and with Mark looking over my shoulder, I set about plotting and writing the first book, A Danger to Himself and Others

The more I learned about the real world and about my characters, the more ideas I had for other stories and plot points. Using an ensemble cast, I could see a whole series stretching before me. I’d write two more, however, before rushing into print, because a final consideration remained: How best to bring this series to the public.

Publishing

We all know that book publishing faces forces of massive disruption. Online sales … ebooks … the power of Amazon … publishers consolidating … bookstores closing … the rise of indie publishing … All of these factors can be summed up thusly: It’s easier to get your work out there than ever before, but harder than ever before for a given work to get noticed.

Depending upon personality, one might take the changing landscape as an exciting challenge or a soul-crushing obstacle. I look at it this way: A writer’s gotta write and—eventually—a writer’s gotta publish. It’s just what we do.

In that context, it’s worth noting that we’ve sort of been here before. Mark Twain is reputed to have said (he probably didn’t really say it, but never mind), “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” When it comes to publishing, ebooks are relatively new, but disruptive technology isn’t.

Perhaps one can hark back to what the monks thought of Gutenberg’s printing press, but I have something much more contemporary in mind. The publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin, among others, has observed

Without rehashing the entire history of mass market paperback publishing, let’s acknowledge three important elements that impacted the market then and are doing so again: (1) new means of distribution; (2) discount pricing; and (3) binge consumption.

First, neither the distributors of mass market paperbacks nor those of ebooks were content to distribute through old channels. In both instances they realized that new customers could be found for books outside the bookstore. In the case of mass market, that meant newsstands, drugstores, and grocery stores. In the case of ebooks, it meant cyberspace.

Second, technological advances allowed both of these media to set price points well below the price of a hardcover. In fact, the sweet spots of original mass market and current ebook pricing share a ratio. They both correlate closely to approximately 10 or 15 percent of the price of a hardcover book.

Third, as prices drop and novels become more accessible, the average reader can consume with more intensity.

It’s interesting to see all of the press lately about “binge” watching of television series, because binge consumption of genre fiction has been around since the advent of so-called dime novels and continued through the introduction of mass market paperbacks. I distinctly recall my wife discovering mystery writer John D. MacDonald in the ’80s and almost immediately purchasing every Travis McGee mass market paperback she could find. (In those days she had to comb multiple bookstores.) She wouldn’t have behaved the same way for books priced ten times higher.

But many authors who made a name for themselves via mass market publishing encouraged binge reading from the early days. Consider that MacDonald published four Travis McGee novels in 1964 alone. Ed McBain, whose 87^th Precinct series is something of a model for my own, published 54 of those books in 50 years, but 13 in the first five.

Yet by the standards of a few other novelists, those guys were slackers. Louis L’Amour, the legendary writer of westerns, published 100 novels in 37 years. The great science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov published 506 books in 32 years. When I was at Doubleday, just managing Isaac was nearly a full-time job for one of my colleagues.

To take another example, romance author Nora Roberts has published more than 200 books in 31 years and is still going strong. The British mystery author John Creasey, writing under several different pseudonyms, published 600 novels in 41 years.

And in a career spanning 75 years, Barbara Cartland, the mother of all romance writers, published 722 novels. Think of it. That’s almost ten novels a year. In 1983 she published 23 novels!

Does that sound like madness? In a sense, of course it is. But my subject today isn’t what kind of mind it requires to be so so! so!! prolific. It is simply to say that this stream of material made great business sense in the mass-market-paperback age, and it makes great business sense at the dawn of the ebook age.

All of the authors mentioned above wrote genre fiction, and all of them wrote at least a few series. That’s not a coincidence.

Reading novels is an investment not so much of money but of time. Through their buying habits genre readers have told us that they’re more inclined to purchase the books in a series that’s well established. (If the series is working, sales build over time.) But these days, when so many things compete for an audience’s attention, how many opportunities does an author get to establish that series? The answer is: not many.

The triumph of mass market houses in the last century, combined with the rise of mall bookstores and superstore chains, led to the mass marketization of hardcover fiction, whereby authors like Sue Grafton, Lee Child, and John Grisham—to name but a few—could make their names with a single book and subsequently release one title a year to great fanfare.

But if ebooks are the new mass market paperbacks—and I think they are—we’re in a time when newer writers will have to resurrect the old mass market approach to establishing their brand. It isn’t easy, and I won’t be catching up to John Creasey anytime soon. But four books in six months makes a start.

One of the main concerns writers should have when planning and writing a series is consistency. But what does it mean to be consistent? It’s more than just keeping track of the character names, physical attributes, family trees, and locations in a notebook or Excel spreadsheet; it’s about presenting the logical facts that you’ve established in a series in a consistent manner, from book to book

Below, Karen S. Wiesner discusses the five major red flags of inconsistency—and what you can do to prevent them in your own fiction series.

1. Oversights

Oversights are a catchall category for anything in a plotline, character, or setting that concerns illogical, unexplainable, or unrealistic courses of action and plot holes, including coincidence contrivance (writer needs it to work and so creates the groundwork on the spot to patch up a means to force it to work) and convenience justifications (it was the only way to make A fit with B, so I had to do it, didn’t I?).

A deus ex machina situation is one in which an improbable event or element is introduced into a story to resolve all the problematic situations and bring the story to a close. In a conventional Greek tragedy the producers actually lowered an actor playing a god onto the stage at the end of the play and he resolved all the conflicts. Talk about unsatisfying for the audience! Any author worth his salt needs to create plausible backstory and motivation for every action, and she has to make characters heroic enough to solve their own problems. That’s why Oversights are so major in series consistency.

If your character does something that makes no sense in the course of the action or in terms of their internal conflicts and motivations, or if you include a plot point merely for convenience sake, you’ve got yourself a nasty oversight. If, in one book, your character is so scarred by the death of a spouse that he doesn’t believe he can ever move on or fall in love again, and in the next book he has already become involved with someone new and never thinks about how he’s a widower, you’ve made a huge oversight that readers probably won’t tolerate, let alone accept. In other words, you go from one situation to the next without any explanation for the radical change. If you want something to be believable, you need to set it up logically and you need to set it up early enough so it will be readily accepted by the reader. That absolutely requires advance planning.

2. Changed Premise

This category includes information given in one episode that directly contradicts information in another. In a series this can be fatal. If your book series has a Changed Premise from one book to the next, readers will lose respect. If anything concerning character, plot, or setting conflicts with something that was previously established, it would fit under the Changed Premise heading. If you alter the structure or foundational facts that were previously set up in the series, even if you do it for a very good reason, you’ve changed the premise for the story, and readers will notice. If you can’t find a way to make something believable within the entire scope of the series, you’ll lose readers, perhaps for the remainder of the series. As an example, if your vampire can’t see his own reflection in the first two books in the series, but in the third he desperately needs to be able to see his reflection in order for your plot to work, you’ve changed an established premise. You’ll have to come up with a solid bit of plausibility to get readers to accept the change. If you create a world in which no outsiders are tolerated in the first three books, yet in the fourth one a stranger shows up and is ushered into the heart of the community with open arms, you’ve changed the premise of your series.

3. Technical Problems

While problems with equipment and technical oddities were often an issue in science fiction shows like Star Trek and The X-Files, (and may be in your series, too, if you include a lot of technology that must be realistic), this kind of inconsistency can also deal with inadvertently or indiscriminately jumping into alternate viewpoints or changing descriptions of characters or settings because what was previously mentioned has been forgotten. If your character always speaks in a certain dialect and suddenly stops in a subsequent book, that’s a technical problem. Names and jobs can also accidentally change through the course of a series. If your character’s hair color or eye color changes, or if he was 6’5″ in the first two books in the series but drops an inch in later stories, you have what may be considered technical problems.

For instance, in The X-Files both main characters used cell phones throughout most of the series, but the phones were used inconsistently, in ways that forced the viewers to question the logic. In one episode, Mulder was trapped underground in the middle of a desert called Nowhere—was there actually a cell phone tower nearby that allowed him to get good reception? In other cases Mulder and Scully didn’t use the phones when they should have, and in each of these cases, it was convenient to the plot and for the writers/creators that they didn’t use their phones to call the other to their rescue because it would have solved the plot of that particular episode too quickly.

These are probably minor and simply annoying issues at most, and you probably won’t lose any readers with such blunders, but dotting all your Is and crossing all your Ts will make fans appreciate you that much more.

4. Continuity and Production Issues

Again, in both The X-Files and Star Trek, errors often crept up as a direct result of someone on staff not checking the manual or previous episodes before going ahead with the episode. How often was a setting shot reused and only slightly altered in Star Trek because coming up with something new would have been expensive or time consuming? In a classic Star Trek episode, the creators decided to establish that the Romulans had stolen the design of Klingon ships—so they could use a Klingon ship they’d already created. Not only that, but the Romulans also used Klingon weapons. Cheaper for the creators, yes, but viewers can’t help but groan at these production issues. If you’re doing anything “halfway” with your series simply because it would be a hassle to find a better, more creative way of handling it, you’re making your own production problems. Readers will feel your impatience and probably wonder why you skimped.

If you give a character two birthdays or have him get younger instead of older as a series progresses, these are less crucial issues but nevertheless problems. I call issues like these minor because, unless you have fans who are ravenous and must know and understand every facet of your series, many won’t sit down and figure out timelines or even see a problem.

5. Unanswered Questions

If the author is never going to answer a nagging question, why invest anything, especially time and passion, in the series? Leaving a series arc dangling isn’t something an author can do in a book series unless she sets up the series from the first as an open-ended one that probably won’t have definitive closure. While each book in the series must have satisfactory individual story arc resolutions, all series-arc questions must be answered in the final book of the series or readers will be furious, perhaps enough to ban you as an author for life. They’ll feel cheated and rightly so. Don’t underestimate the damage a vengeful reader can do to your career. (Have you read Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne? Do it now and take heed!) To write a series is to promise the closure and/or resolution of unanswered series arc questions. Think of it this way: With the first book in your series, you’ve presented a question and asked your readers to be patient as you string out the development of this theme through several books. You’ve promised that an answer will be delivered in the last book. If you don’t deliver it, you’ve stolen time, money, and even reader emotions, all with a careless shrug of purposeful neglect.