Will there ever be another Nic Costa?

The Via Latina on the outskirts of Rome, not far from Nic’s fictional original home.

Will I ever go back to Rome to write another Nic Costa? It’s a question I get asked a lot. Let me try to explain why the matter is not quite as straightforward as it might appear.

Transcript

Will there ever be a new Nic Costa

 [00:00:00] You're listening to David Hewson, today talking about series books

David: Here's an email I received this morning. Please, please, could you write another Nic Costa book? I love Nic and Caravaggio too. Ah, they turn up at regular intervals. I need to address the issue, don't I? Because it's not really as simple as it might appear. Let me introduce you to the joys of writing series books and the horror.

 Now, readers are lovely people, but they imbue authors with an authority most of us simply do not possess. There are the gilded few at the top of the book industry who can write whatever they like and see it [00:01:00] published, but that's not the case for most of us. Increasingly, the publishing world is pretty choosy, or ruthless if you wish, when it comes to what it wants to see in print.

Yes, I could write more Nic Costa, but bringing an old series back to life is fraught with problems, creative and economic. Let me go back in time to try to explain. Nic Costa came to life when I was at the end of my first publishing contract. The then publisher rejected the first book, A Season for the Dead, outright, and fortunately my then agent found me a new home.

Originally, the book was a standalone and Costa pegged it in the end. You'd be surprised how many series start this way. But my new editor was convinced the book should turn into a series set in Rome, and offered me a three book contract if I undeaded him, which I was very [00:02:00] happy to do. It meant creating an ensemble cast.

Costa, Teresa Lupo, Falcone and Peroni, and I grew very fond of them. Over the next decade, I wrote nine Costa books and Carnival of the Dead, a standalone for Teresa. They were picked up by Random House in the US and got great reviews there, but nothing lasts forever. When the ninth book came out, we were into the financial crisis of 2008.

Random House didn't even bring the ninth and I think one of the best, The Fallen Angel, out in paperback as it cut back on authors everywhere. Then, in the UK, I wrote three adaptations of the Killing TV series and after that the publisher wanted something new. So it was off to Amsterdam and four Pieter Vos books, along with my increasing involvement in originals for Audible.

Costa was often in my thoughts, and I would have been happy to revive him, but no one seemed [00:03:00] much interested. Until another publisher took the first three books from Macmillan and asked me to write a new one, The Savage Shore, for a crime imprint they'd just invented. I did, and the book worked pretty well for that imprint, but not much else that they published did, so the imprint vanished.

And not long after, I noticed you couldn't even get the later Costa titles as e books. And here comes a sticky process most authors with long careers will know, trying to get back your rights. It took quite a while, but eventually I reclaimed ownership of not just the outstanding Costa titles, But Vos, my first Italian novel, Lucifer's Shadow, and Carnival, which is why you'll find the latter books on Amazon now, republished by me.

I did at one point put together a plan for three Costa books, a trilogy which would wrap up the series for good. But again, no one seemed much interested. Readers, understandably, only see [00:04:00] books in terms of, well, books. But publishing is a business, and there it's more complex.

Generally speaking, few companies are interested in taking on a series that has started with someone else. Partly, I guess, because if they make a big success of it, they'll simply be putting money into the pockets of the previous people who didn't. With Costa, this is complicated because the first three books are already with a publisher, and logically the series should all be in one place.

I will have news on that front shortly. But a brand new Nic Costa? The practicalities aside, and much as I'd love an excuse to go back to Rome, I do have to ask myself whether I could wind back the clock quite so much. I started writing that first book a quarter of a century ago.

It's six or seven years since I worked on The Savage Shore. These are old books for me, and I'm older too. [00:05:00] They're a lot more bloody and violent than anything I write now, and I don't want to go back to that. Also, I'm an impatient sort who very easily gets bored. That never happened with Costa and crew, but in part because I did other things along the way, such as Shakespeare adaptations.

I don't want to be typecast into being someone who writes only one kind of book, with the same characters year in year out. Fine, if that works for you. But it's not me. Series books are tricky beasts to sustain. They take time and several years to build an audience. And then, for most of us, we find that audience will plateau, and either fail to grow, or begin to fall through changing tastes, or just because people stop reading.

And there comes the tricky point. You have a bunch of lovely readers who adore the stories you tell, and have great connections with your characters. All the same, if the [00:06:00] numbers aren't growing, then publishers will start to get uneasy. And frankly, so should an author, too. We write to be read.

Otherwise, what's the point? I suspect all of us with midlist series have come to that awkward point where we have to ask ourselves, does it really make sense to cater to an adoring but slowly diminishing fanbase? As if we're exiled in a kind of literary Las Vegas, churning out our old hits for the few who remember them.

Or is it time to try something else? I could write another Costa. The truth is, at the moment, there's really not much point. Now, I know these aren't the answers that fans of series books want to hear. But the truth is, the decision on whether your favourite characters live or die is not solely in the hands of authors.

The markets will decide too, and they are not given to sentiment. That's not to say I won't get around to [00:07:00] writing the trilogy that closes down the Costa story for good.

One day, who knows. For the time being though, I hope you enjoy some of the more varied stories and characters I'm trying to bring to life.