In early December, I released my third book, Twin Curse. Unlike my last novel, Reckless Rebellion, this novel wasn't part of my current series, or at this stage, any series at all. It was a standalone fantasy romance, so a slightly different genre even. So how did the two releases compare?

Reckless Rebellion made a pretty big difference to my sales, more than tripling them for the first two months of it's release. The only promo I did was to mention it in a few places, to my mailing list of a whole 27 subscribers, and run a free promo on the first book. I was thrilled with the results.

For Twin Curse, I mentioned it to my mailing list (over 60 subscribers by then!), sent out review copies, mentioned it in as many places as I could, and sat back.

In it's first month, it sold ten copies. Ten! That's a fraction of the number Reckless Rebellion sold. In fact, those numbers looked a lot more like the first month of my first ever book. The second month was only slightly better, and only because I caved, and ran a free promo of the book through Select for 3 days.

So in my opinion, for sales, series far far outweigh writing standalones. Of course, there's always a possibility that writing in different genres (fantasy romance as opposed to sci-fi romance), it would be interesting to see if there was more follow through in the same genre, but I do know that I'm going to put a lot more effort into my series books than my standalones. Not that I won't write standalones, I have a few partly done, so I'll definitely finish those, but they do require a lot more promotions than my series books, meaning less writing time!

What have been your experiences? Have any authors seen crossover between standalone books? And readers, do you read other books by the same author even if they're different storylines?