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I knew it was going to be a long book, somewhere in the region of 250-270k words. The average length of a novel is around 90-100k. Just before I completed it, I decided that I would issue it as three separate books, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. But wait; it may have been three books but it wouldn’t have been a trilogy in the truest sense of the word.

The end of Part One would come as a shock to the reader since it had no closure, no resolution. It merely stopped at the end of a chapter, waiting for the reader to buy the second part and continue the story.

It was pointed out by my close friends, Steve and Alison, that this would be unfair, that it would annoy readers, cheat them, and may ultimately lose me some credibility. I understood their fears, but wanted to throw it out to a wider audience for their opinion, so I posted a thread on the Kindle Users Forum. And sure enough, Steve and Alison were right; some people would be prepared to read three books covering just one story provided they were made sufficiently aware that none of the Parts were stand-alones. Others definitely would not even embark on upon the first book knowing they had to buy all three in order to read just one story.

So The Third Rule will go out as one book. The only problem we can foresee is when I eventually publish the book in paper format. We estimate it will be somewhere approaching 900 pages, so this might pose a few problems, but we’ll cross that bridge…