Traitor to the Crown trilogy follows the adventures of colonial witches trying to help the American colonists by overthrowing the power of British witches who intend to crush George Washington and the colonial rebellion.

What is a “trilogy?” It seems that answering this question is harder than I thought. As I was working on Come Hell or High Water with my editor, I realized that there were two different ideas of what constitutes a “trilogy” and that each speaker may not even be aware that other participants in the conversation may be operating with another definition in mind.

One definition of “trilogy” is more like “series.” According to this definition, the trilogy is a series of 3 books that follow the adventures of a set of characters. Each book is a stand-alone novel and tells a story that is “all wrapped up” by the end of each book, though a larger arc will only be resolved at the end of the last book. The excellent Traitor to the Crown books, pictured above, are an example of this kind of trilogy. (You can read my review of these books here.)

The other definition of trilogy is that one story is broken up into 3 books and although each book can be read on its own, there is no real conclusion to the story until the end of the last book. The classic example of this kind of trilogy is The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. He wrote one big novel and was told by his publisher that it had to be broken up into 3 books as it would not fit into one set of covers and there was a paper shortage in the UK at that time (due to WWII rationing). It was fairly easy to divide the novel as he had structured it as a series of “books” and so each installment of the “Lord of the Rings” contains two of the six books. This kind of trilogy is sometimes called a “serial,” as the story is released or published in installments. Each installment might tell a self-contained episode or two of the larger story but the real story is not concluded until the “grand finale” of the last installment.

When I wrote “Come Hell or High Water,” I also wrote one novel and was then told by the publisher that it would not fit between one set of covers. (This put me into the same company as Tolkien, which I thought was pretty good!) But my novel was not organized in the same way “The Lord of the Rings” was and so it was more difficult to divide into 3 installments.

The first thing my editor and I had to do was figure out, then, was how and where to divide the novel into thirds and how to slightly re-organize the story as a result of this division.

Luckily, there is no limit on how large the digital file for a eBook is, so the entire trilogy is available as a single eBook as well as 3 individual eBooks that match the 3 paperback books of the trilogy.