There is something unique about the fantasy genre that draws us in as readers far more than the likes of crime, romance, western, or even horror, or science fiction. Fantasy literature takes us to impossible worlds and for the majority of us, that’s one of its biggest attractions.
But even more unique in terms of the genre, is the way it makes readers want to write. Readers of a good fantasy novel will often start their own novel the very same day they finish a series. It is something you really don’t see in any other genre. You don’t see people putting down a crime novel and writing about their own detectives, you don’t see people finishing up a romance novel and telling a love story, and you won’t find a reader of a western penning their latest cowboys vs Indians piece upon its completion.
Something about what fantasy authors do makes us want to write. So, what is it? It is the ability to take every single idea within your imagination and put it down onto paper. In fantasy there are no required character traits, we don’t have to stick to a Earth like geology, we can create new species, people can perform magic, in fact, the rules of the universe don’t even exist. We can do away with gravity or the sun and we can travel as fast as we like, how we like. Basically, any idea inside your head is plausible in fantasy. That gives you a lot of scope.
So where am I going with all this?
Well today, I wanted to do an article on what it takes to become a fantasy writer. Although I am not an author, I have met A LOT of authors. I work within publishing myself and thought maybe I could share a bit of insight and a bit of advice with people who are looking to get started or are at least thinking about it.
There are, in my personal opinion, four steps to writing a novel.
Number 1: Deciding on The Story and More Importantly The Characters
Number 2: Writing the Novel
Number 3: Drastic Editing and Revision
Number 4: Getting an Agent or Choosing to Self-Publish
Number 1: Deciding on The Story and More Importantly The Characters
So, you’ve picked up your pen or sat yourself down in front of the keyboard and are ready to write your novel. It’s time to walk away. I would NEVER suggest writing without some kind of plan. I have looked a lot into the creative process of successful authors and they seem to have one thing in common: They all plan extensively.
Some use time-lines, others use cards with key scenes on them and throw the cards away as they write them down, the majority just have pages upon pages of notes that they refine, refine again and refine harder. This is something that should take you a long time to do. You should brain storm everything and let it all develop because the last thing you want to do is have an amazing two or three chapters and then find out you’ve lead your characters into a dead end and they can’t really go anywhere.
You need to think of the story – why is this a readable story? What is so important about your fantasy world and what is about to occur that would make a reader invest 10-20 hours into it. You then need to think about how this story is going to grow, twist, turn, be resolved, drawn out, and yet kept interesting. How are the characters going to grow, will the readers be willing to follow them and accept the changes that happen to them? These are just some of the questions that should be swirling around in your head, but there are so many more you need to think about that it would take its own article to cover just a quarter of them.
Number 2: Writing the Novel
Maybe though, you have an absolutely fantastic story, amazing characters and yet…sadly…your writing just doesn’t cut it. Sadly, writing is a very, very specialised craft. An author does not get published with their first novel, (VERY) rarely anyway. I would guess that most authors have between three and five novels rejected before they get published and that’s the good ones.
To write a successful story that someone wants to read you need to be able to capture that reader within your writing style and literally transport them to your world and allow them to see it, feel it, experience it. I love the phrase, “Make sure you show and not tell,” because it simply is one of the hardest things to do as a writer. Using descriptive language to paint a picture that the reader can see in their own mind takes a lot of practice and it isn’t simply relating to the reader what you want them to see either. To get good at this will take time, revision, perhaps even study. Not all authors are graduates, but a good number do come through a university and it is there they learn these skills.
Almost as important as painting a picture is creating realistic and enjoyable dialogue. When characters talk or interact it has to feel natural. If it seems robotic or out of character you can completely kill a reader’s belief in your world and lose them. They need to feel that this character could step off the page and talk with them. Another thing is they almost need to be able to guess what your characters will say and do. This is one thing that readers love is the relationship with your characters. They must be so lifelike and so real that when they arrive somewhere, the reader knows what they are going to want to do. I have found in some failed novels that unpublished friends have sent me (this is a biggie), that I just cannot relate to the characters. I cannot connect with them and I can’t see what they are going to do in situations – I have been lost as a reader.
If you have the confidence in doing all this, it is time to sit down and write. How much should you write? It does depend, but I can give you a rough idea of what publishers are looking for. Publishers DO NOT want a standalone novel for a début author. What they want is an author who is going to make them money. An author who is going to make them money, is one that has lots of ideas, a series that has a lot of potential to gather a following and they want all of this to fit a few conventions. Firstly, they want your novel to be of a length that slots in well with others in the genre. For fantasy you are looking at around 125,000 to 150,000 words FOR THE FIRST BOOK. Anything more and you will struggle to find that agent because it is just too big a book for a début.
Secondly, believe it or not they don’t want the book to be completely unique. Some new authors think that when writing they need a unique idea but it is simply not true. You need a unique twist on a story, but your characters, your setting, your plots (revenge, growth, theft, etc) don’t need to be unique. Why? Simple. Because when you pick up a fantasy novel you want it to be familiar in the sense that there is magic, mythical creatures, epic story lines, bold characters and so on – when reading a book you want to feel comfortable. Some of the worst books I have ever read are the ones where the author has tried too hard to make every single thing their own and steer away from what has been done before. You wonder where you are, what everyone does needs to be explained in huge detail, and characters are just not relating to you.
Am I sure? Yes, I’m pretty sure. When a publisher buys a book, they buy it based on business sense. They look at what the book is, how similar books have sold and so on. If they have nothing to compare it to or it is a huge gamble because it is completely unlike anything else they have then the risk is far greater for them.
Number 3: Drastic Editing and Revision
You have just finished the final page of your novel. YES! Oh. No. Huh? Writing a novel is one of the quickest parts of writing a novel. The refining, the editing, the reviewing, the changing things based on people’s opinions, the restructuring, the removal of scenes, the adding of scenes, and so on can take months or years to get right. There are authors who have started on books and only finished them 10-15 years later.
You need to consider that your novel will have a word limit. My advice would be that if you want to write fantasy you need to be within around 100,000 (minimum) to 150,000 (maximum). For your first book, anything more or less would be pushing it with a publisher. Wherever you get to once you finish your novel I would say – get people to read it with the sole purpose of cutting out 10% of the book. Ask them: what is boring, what doesn’t need to be in there and so on.
Usually when we write, we write one or two things that really don’t add anything or develop the story but because we love our work we just can’t admit it to ourselves. A reader who has been given that purpose will be able to do it for you and explain to you why. In addition to cutting scenes out, sometimes things will need re-ordering, you will need to add a scene to explain something or maybe develop an idea a bit more – it will all come down to making your story flow better.
It is a process that will take a huge amount of time and I really think you will need an editor. There are freelance editors around and really if you want to publish a piece of work you should be ready to invest in paying someone to professionally review your work, make suggestions for changes and even help you with your grammar, your storytelling and writing in general. Editors are ALWAYS thanked in books (as you have probably noticed) and this is because they work damned hard. They work countless hours reading through books and refining them so that they are readable, marketable and complete.
Number 4: Getting an Agent or Choosing to Self-Publish
A lot of people say that getting an agent is the hardest part of writing a novel. It isn’t really true. The hardest part of writing a novel is preparing a piece that will convince an agent it is going to sell. You need to have a perfectly formatted manuscript (a document laid out to industry standards), you need to have an intriguing first chapter and by the end of the second, it needs to be unputdownable.
One agent in a chat said when describing their perfect manuscript, “A wonderfully-written, creative and inventive science fiction or fantasy story that has the potential to both get great reviews and sell through the roof, from an author who’s willing to work hard editorially and otherwise to make their book the best possible.”
Agents and publishers WANT to make money. The sad fact of the matter is that if 99% of us published a book it wouldn’t make them any money. If we send them a piece that they feel likely is to make money based on our writing style, current writing trends and return based on investment, they will pick it up, no doubt about it.
Well known editor Diana Gill said in another blog:
“What will get me reading onto page two? Honestly, that depends on how good page one is. If you can get me to read past the first paragraph (and yes, we can tell by the end of the first paragraph if we want to read any further), get me interested in the story, or the character, that’s a very good thing. If the first page isn’t absolutely intriguing, but is nonetheless well-written (without the little green elves, say).
I think one really important thing to remember is that an editor’s primary function is to act as a reader–if I don’t want to read any further, why should someone want to buy the book and then read it? Give us (and yourself) something to be interested in. And no, that doesn’t mean the first sentence has to have an explosion or some other really glossy hook, but do think about what’s happening. Make it interesting. What are manuscripts most missing? Originality. Yes, there are only a few plots and stories out there, but there are endless things you can to take that boy-meets-girl theme and make it interesting.”
So how do you find someone willing to take your work? First, make sure everything is perfect. As Diana says above, you need a perfect page one at the very least. Your first page is the big ‘THIS IS ME’ and ‘THIS IS WHAT I CAN DO’ of the novel. If it says ‘I am boring’ or ‘my grammar is bad’ the publisher will simply say, “thanks but no thanks”, put your piece down and pick up the next book that would potentially make them millions.
The first chapter should also be next to perfect and just because that is your hook doesn’t mean it should stop there – as we have said, the editing process should have been an absolute killer, but now done –worth while.
So you have all that? Now you need to go to your bookshelves and pick up books you own that are similar to your work. You will then need to visit their websites, view their submission policies and submit your work. Generally, they will just ask for a summary of what your book is, who it is for and so on. Once you have done this – within a few weeks you will get a reply saying ‘send us more’ or ‘sorry this is not for us’. If they ask you to send them more, send what they ask and wait. The likely hood is (around 96% apparently) that you will get a ‘sorry not for us’ style email with little more than that.
Expect it and move on. You can send your summary, and should they ask for it manuscript, to as many publishers and agents as you would like. Start with the books on your shelves and then type into Google ‘fantasy book publishers’ and work your way through the list. You want to choose the biggest names first (ones you have heard of) and then as the weeks, months and years go on work your way down the list to lesser name publishers.
If the publisher is interested, they will call you. Be careful not to just say ‘yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes’ in excitement to everything that is said. There is a reason most writers have an agent. If a publisher contacts you, arrange a meeting and consider getting professional advice. A literary agent will ensure that you get a good sum of money for your work (although they will have some too!) where as going in on your own, you may leave with far less than you expected – remember that a publisher is a business owner.
What if you never find a publisher? It’s not a huge problem. It certainly makes it less likely you will get rich from this novel, but if you believe in it and you think people will buy it, there is the self-publishing route. Self-publishing is where you pay to have your book printed and then you market it and you sell it. It’s not easy I can tell you that, but it is doable. Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle (Eragon being the most famous) is just one example of a self-published millionaire (there are plenty more if you Google them). It is more likely that taking the self-published route is going to be a lot more work though because it is now up to you to make money for you, not the publisher to make money for themselves and share it with you.
How do you do it? I’m not going to go into too much detail because I have an article on self-publishing and a number of interviews coming up that will allow me to go into far more detail. But I will get you started.
You first need to find someone to print your book. It is not cheap. Most paperbacks cost between £2.50 & £4.50 each (around $5.00 to $9.00 in the USA). Now, you need to consider that you will have to order around 5,000 to 10,000 books to get these prices. There are cheaper deals, more expensive deals, but I’m trying to be fair and realistic here based on local printers.
Now, the average book sells for around £7.00 to £9.00 in the UK or around $12-$17 in the US (RRP). You can see here there is a pretty big gross profit margin, BUT consider you will need to pay for marketing (adverts, website, free review copies, marketing materials, etc). And should you sell through Amazon for example, they will take a big amount of your RRP for themselves as commission.
The most important aspect of deciding ‘Is it worth it’ is can you sell 5,000, 10,000 or even 50,000 books. How much belief do you have in your work? Is your story REALLY, REALLY worth reading and would you be prepared to invest all that time, that money, that effort into getting it out there and read? If the answer is yes, then perhaps this is a root you should risk. We do only get one life after all!
Anyway, that just about brings us to a close. I hope it has been educational, enjoyable and a worthwhile read. I have three more articles to come in this series. One about building a fantasy world, one about writing styles, and one about self-publishing. I hope you come back and check them out.
