Holding A Reader’s Attention, Soap Opera Style

Today we’re going to talk about the series Vampire Girl by Karpov Kinrade. It keeps your attention through what I call the soap opera method.

Want to know what I mean?

First, I’m going to start with a brief overview of this book. A girl makes a deal with some demons in order to save her mom, and ends up as the princess of Hell who has to choose one of them for her husband and the one she chooses gets to rule over hell.

There’s a prophecy, a shadow of war, slavery half breeds love triangles, opposing sides, betrayals magic and the like.

It’s far too much to cover in one book, so the series was split up into four books. Now, if you’ve been watching me for a while, you’ll notice I rarely continue a series. I usually read one book and I’m done.

This is because far too many series writers have what’s known as a premature ending. In other words, they took one long book and chopped it up randomly. I don’t like that technique, I feel tricked and I leave bad reviews for those books.

Premature endings are not acceptable outcomes for books.

But this book series was different. I actually binge read the entire chronicle in two days, and I rarely do that.

This series kept me wanting the next book though what I call the soap opera ending. Do you remember soap operas? They were over the top when it came to dramatic action, but they knew how to write an ending.

And this book series knew how to write an ending too.

For starters, it had one overreaching arc that carried throughout all the books, several smaller arcs which also carried some incidents that were solved by the end of the single book, and then the cliffhanger.

These books are not stand alones. They don’t make much sense if you read them out of order. However, at the end of each book, one problem was solved, so yay, only to be replaced with another problem immediately after.

This is similar to how soap operas do it. If you remember soap operas, they had a problem solved by the end of the season (every episode in a soap opera is considered a chapter in the same book, so premature endings in the middle of the season don’t count.) but then something would happen that makes you tune in for next season.

For example, soap operas loved showing a single person and a widow/widower, after a season though of trials, they get together, get married, and when they are minutes away from the happy ending, someone rushes in and says the dead spouse isn’t dead after all.

Cue next season, or in this case, next book.

This worked for soap operas for almost a century, it works for the Vampire Girl series, and it will work for your book too. Be sure to read Vampire Girl if you want to see how a series SHOULD be done.