When writing a series, there is a constant tension between how much each book in the series should be able to stand on its own merits - without requiring any pre-existing information regarding the other books in the series - and how much each book should intertwine with its predecessors.
On the one extreme are series such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which was really written as one complete story - but which was judged by the publisher at the time to be too long to squeeze into a single volume. It was therefore broken into a series after the fact, making it difficult or impossible for a reader to pick-up any of the later books in the trilogy without having read their predecessors.
On the other extreme are series which are written as stand-alone stories, which just happen to follow the same character or theme. Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series is a good example of this approach. Each book becomes its own independent story, and readers can pick up any book in the sequence which happens to strike their interest, and expect to understand everything that's going on.
My own series, the Stormfall Chronicles, is intended to fall somewhere in the middle of this. On the one hand, it would enhance the reader's enjoyment if they had read the preceding books in the series. I do attempt, however, to provide enough background in the successive novels for a reader to pick up the story-line without necessarily having read or recently read the books which preceded it. In my view, for better or worse, this leads to a more flexible and rewarding reader experience - although it does add a certain number of pages to the successive books, while certain concepts have to be re-introduced and explained.
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