Book Ghosts
The phantom readers who haunt your first book.
They surface after your first book goes live. Maybe weeks later, people comment:
“Is there a sequel coming?” “I hope you expand on this.” “This left me with so many questions.”
These are your lovely book ghosts. Readers who sense incompleteness where you thought you’d found conclusion. They haunt the edges of your work, drawn to what’s missing and what’s present at once. Pretty cool if you think about it.
You might have considered your book finished. A whole thought wrapped in covers. These phantom readers detect invisible threads extending beyond your final page. They notice a presence of unexpressed ideas floating in the spaces between chapters.
Book ghosts process your work differently than you do. They recognize that your first book was excavating something larger than what appeared on the surface. They might sense the underground river of thinking that flows beneath your book. The deeper currents your work made visible.
These readers become oracles of your unfinished business. They name what you couldn’t see. That your book was actually book one, whether you intended it that way.
The trilogy emerges partly in response to these ghosts. Giving readers what they sense. They’ve shown you what is already unfolding. They’ve made visible the natural expansion points your first book enables.
