For instance, my critique partner Victoria Dahl has a series of three adult romantic comedies coming out in September, October and November-GOOD GIRLS DON’T, BAD BOYS DO, and REAL MEN WILL-each of which features a different sibling in a family that runs a brewery in Boulder. This is a well-loved device in adult romantic fiction. If you want a new book that features a minor character from the last book, I am all for it-at least for my romantic comedies, at least in theory. The answer is long and not something I can explain in a short e-mail response back to you. If you ask me this question from now on, I am going to point you here, and please don’t be offended that I didn’t answer your question personally. So I am going to lay it all out for you here: why I never intended to write sequels to most of my books, why I have written a sequel to one, and why there aren’t more sequels to that book. I have given this a lot of thought, to the point that I have considered writing a combined popular culture and reader-response study of the rise of the sequel as a driving force in commercial fiction, and then I have to remind myself, ***wait***, English PhD candidate/writing instructor/English professor wanna-be was two jobs ago. But these comments also make me sad because I am not delivering what readers say they want. They mean readers enjoyed the first book so much, they want it to continue. And it breaks my heart because the answer is still no.

For The Boys Next Door/Endless Summer, the reader writes back, “PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE,” which is funny. For most of my books, I do not hear back from the reader again. In fact, of all the e-mail and other social media contacts I receive, I would say 75% of it contains a request for a sequel to at least one of my books. Love Story is out and, as I predicted, I have been flooded with e-mail asking for a sequel.

Endless summer by jennifer echols