Writers On The Move: Writing the Second Book: Is it Easier?: Ten years ago, if someone had told me I would have two books published by now, I would’ve laughed—longingly of course. My first novel, Cowgirl Dreams, was released in December 2008, almost ten years after I started writing it. The sequel, Follow the Dream, came out two years later.
People say to me, “The second book must be a lot easier than the first one, right?”
Well, yes and no. I guess I could say that I cheated, in a way. I wrote the two books as one long book to begin with. But when I began researching publishers, I found that the word count for the “western” genre was generally shorter. It just happened that I found a place in about the middle where I thought it could be easily divided. But then I had to make sure the second book could stand alone and fill in some of the back story without resorting to the old “telling” versus “showing.”
Read more here http://www.writersonthemove.com/2011/10/writing-second-book-is-it-easier.html
Too many characters in novels are too much alike. As a result, the stories and the characters' actions (and reactions) become predictable. You'd already know what would happen only a few chapters in the story! This is what you want to avoid when you're writing your own story – having characters that are too much like the other characters. There are way you can create characters that are different enough from each other that your readers won't get bored. Here are a few tips on how to do just that...