To prologue or not to prologue? (First book and subsequent books.)—@CourtneyReese86
Short answer?
Not.
Long answer? Why not?
Because the purpose of a prologue is to either set the scene, create a mood, or give the reader essential backstory. Once upon a time, writers experimented heavily with the first two and were still working out where the put the third. Nowadays, all that stuff has an appropriate place within the body of the novel.
Set your scene and create your mood in your first chapter. Not only that, but do it on your first page. Not only that, but do it—if at all humanly possible—in your first sentence.
Why? Because readers these days have much shorter attention spans than they used to. There are a lot more demands upon our time than there used to be, a lot more shiny, flashing lights competing for our eyeballs, a lot more media crying out for our precious, limited attention. If you can’t show us where we are and with whom, while giving us a sense of how you’re going to approach this situation, quick-quick chop-chop, we will turn to someone who can.
Feed us backstory in your second or third chapter.
Why? Because we don’t want to hear it in the first chapter. If it’s not part of the eternal now moment, it’s too much of a tax on our fragile little attention spans. Fortunately, backstory’s been wedged into the second or third chapter for so long now that readers are accustomed to it. Not only that, but our appetite for shiny, flashing yanks on our nose rings is so intense that the repeated shocks of first being thrown into your story, then thrown into your backstory, then thrown into your story again feel TERRIFIC. And terrific is how you want your readers to feel.
But what about series books?
Some publishers’ editors will let you get away with prologues in the sequels to the first book of a series. But nobody’s reading them—unless you disguise them as the first chapters—anyway. For my money, they still signal lax writing. Write each novel, even in a series, as a stand-alone. You can do it. And if your readers are thinking, Geez, I wish I had a more in-depth window into the backstory, well, hey, it’s a good thing you wrote those earlier books in the series, isn’t it?