Writing more than two POVs or main characters in a book is not easy. However, with the evolution of a book series, more storylines have to come into play if you hope to keep things feeling fresh and exciting. Especially if you are gunning for a series that has more than two or three books.
• Why Is This So? Well…
There is only so much difficulty you can put one or two POV characters through across the books before it starts to feel unrealistic.
That is, “ain’t no way one person can go through all these in one lifetime. Are they cursed?!” Or before it starts to seem like you’re Emotion Baiting. That is, a book where the author throws a ridiculous amount of tragedies at the MC with the glaring intention to bleed emotions from readers; rather than write a genuinely inspired story.*
This is where extra characters come in.
• What Additional MC Do
They are a fresh slate for you to begin another storyline and explore a new conflict that will engage readers afresh.
These additional characters can be made into POV characters too in the series. Or if you cannot juggle more POVs, their storyline can be narrated by the main MCs. Either way, it adds freshness while also reducing the burden the main MCs have to carry the story. Your MCs can only be stabbed and healed so many times before the readers start to groan in boredom the next time it happens. Or don’t even blink an eye the next time he/she is at death’s door.
You can give these MCs smaller hurdles because now, you have additional characters to give higher-stake challenges that will keep the page-flipping quality of the story.
• Other Mediums Do This Too
It’s like with TV series. I once used to frown whenever I started a new season of a series, and saw new faces. Always, it meant less time spent with the main characters, or that the main characters would spend less time with each other and more with these new characters. But I soon came to realize that adding new characters to the series is what helps expand the plot lines so that the series can go on. If we’re digging into the same plot line of the same characters for more than two season, it will get boring or the series would have to end.
Of course, there are some exceptions, like cozy mysteries where we can stick with the same core characters for book after book, up to ten books. However, the secondary characters do get plot lines as the books proceed that they didn’t have in the first book; to help retain the interestingness of the world and series.
* Indeed, as writers we want to make our readers feel, but Emotion Baiting isn’t the way, and readers can tell when that’s the intention!
A Tag-On
A Tor editor I talked with said lovely things about A Desert of Bleeding Sand yesterday and it still makes me smile:
Ahem, don’t discount Dathan—all of my agent’s favorite quotes come from Dathan’s POV hehe.
Lucia's Fiction 
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