Yesterday afternoon, I was talking with my friend Katie Darby (a recent graduate of the University of Evansville and our summer intern here at Writer's Digest Books) about Marisha Pessl's 2006 Mercantile Prize-winning debut Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking). It's an amazing 500+ page novel that combines nearly every genre (literary, historical, mystery, romance, coming of age, adventure ...) and contains illustrations and interdisciplinary in-text citations. It is both comedy and tragedy--sprawling and personal. Katie and I gushed about how much research Marisha must have done and how she must have put everything she'd ever known into this first book.

And then the inevitable question came: I wonder what she'll do next?

Being the empathetic souls we are (and writers ourselves), the mood surrounding the question changed from excited anticipation to anxiety. Oh, man. How's she gonna do it? What can she possibly do now? How does a writer follow up a first masterpiece? She must be under SO MUCH PRESSURE.

I've heard from writer and editor friends alike that these days, publishing a successful second book is actually much tougher than publishing a first because the sex appeal of the "fresh new voice" is gone. Plus, you've got the performance of the first book to live up to (or overcome).

Every year in the Premier Voices column in NSSWM, I hear from a round of debut novelists about their experiences. Any second-time (or third-time?) novelists out there want to tell us what it's really like?