User blog comment:Vngel W/Limbo, Impulsiveness, and more/@comment-10789912-20151204183343/@comment-4715955-20151205120929

All stories need to connect well. This isn't true for a series at all. The Fleming and Gardner James Bond novels barely have any continuity between them -- it's there, but it's negligible because it's not important. Likewise most adventure fiction books -- certainly those of the 70's and 80's -- are entirely episodic and only connected by their protagonists, except on rare occasions when a character from a previous entry comes back for a new one. I don't even need to get into the Phillip Marlowe books, or the short fiction of Dashiell Hammett. Don't get into writing a series with the mindset that every story absolutely has to connect to the ones before and after it. Just make sure the characters are interesting and fun and make the reader want to read more of their adventures. I don't think horror works as a series at all because once the creepy cat is out of the horror bag, there's nowhere else to go: we've seen the payoff already.

All stories need to also work as stand-alone stories, instead of feeling like just a chapter (they need to please the reader, essentially). This means every story needs to be self-contained: I should be able to pick it up and both enjoy and understand it without having read anything that came before it, though if I read it all chronologically I'm sure to get the most out of the series. However, the above statement suggests that a chapter isn't fulfilling on its own, which is false. Even every chapter should have a beginning, middle, and end, ideally with the end being a cliffhanger so you make me want to read the next entry.