Larry Correia wrote a blog post calling out a specific demographic of epic fantasy fans: those who won’t take a chance on a new author. After being burned by the likes of George R. R. Martin and Patrick Ruthfoss, they won’t read a new author unless his series is complete, for fear that they won’t finish the series. Correia argues in his own inimitable way that without the support of fans, epic fantasy will die out.
It’s a catch-22. These fans won’t buy anything a new author creates unless his series is complete. But the new author won’t be able to finish the series unless the fans buy his stories to support his career. So long as this attitude remains, it will become even harder for new writers to break into the business, leading to a downward spiral and the end of the genre.
Or so Correia argues.
The Writer and the Reader
To understand where this fear of series non-completion comes from, let’s examine the relationship between the author and the reader.
When an author releases Book 1 of a series, he makes a promise. This is the beginning of an epic journey. He will take the reader on grand adventures in wondrous realms. And there will be an equally grand conclusion to wrap up the series.
This is the promise readers buy into. This is why they read the story. They experience the first adventure, one of many. They eagerly anticipate more adventures in the same vein. At the same time, they also recognise that the story must end someday. They hope for a conclusion that will meet or exceed the expectations set by the first novel.
As the second and following books are published, the author holds up the second part of his promise: more grand adventures in wondrous realms. But with every successive book that is not the finale, he is also holding off the third part of his promise: that there will be a fitting end to the story.
It is this third part that burns readers.
George R. R. Martin’s flagship series is A Song of Ice and Fire. The last book in the entry was published in 2011. As of October 2022, Martin claims that the sixth and penultimate book in the series, The Winds of Winter, was three-quarters written. That’s 11 years of failing to fulfil reader’s expectations.
Martin is 74 years old. it is not inconceivable that he might pass on before finishing his magnum opus. That is surely something his fans hope won’t happen—yet must reconcile themselves with.
Patrick Rothfuss published the first volume of The Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy in 2007. The second volume was published in 2011. It has been 12 years and the concluding volume has yet to be published.
In December 2021, Rothfuss promised to share a chapter from the third book if his charity reached a fundraising goal of $333,333. His fans quickly hit and exceeded the goal. As of time of writing, he has not shared that chapter.
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to writing a series. The first approach is episodic storytelling. Every book is a standalone adventure. The series is linked by shared characters and a shared setting, but the reader can jump in at any point and still be able to track the plot. The bar for entry is much, much lower. The payoff for investing in a story is guaranteed: it’s at the end of the book. It is easier for readers to jump into the series, and for authors to tell stories in that setting.
The second approach is favoured by modern-day epic storytellers. The series is one huge story, with each book representing different acts within the story, the individual parts and chapters demarcating significant events within the book. It is a much, much harder story to write—and write well. The writer has to sustain the story throughout the entire series, maintain or exceed the quality of his output, and wrap up every single loose end with a massive payoff that justifies the length of the series. Few authors can do this. Fewer authors can do this to completion. Even fewer can do it well.
Is it any wonder that readers would want to know there is a payoff at the end?
Reading an epic fantasy series—the kind of series written as a single huge story—requires an epic investment of time and energy. Readers want to know that they will be rewarded for that investment.
Now along comes New Author with a new epic fantasy series. Who is he? What is his output? Can he be counted on to reward the reader for this epic investment? Other Big Names may talk him up in reviews and on social media, but Big Names said the same thing of Martin and Rothfuss.
Correia says:
There’s another author I know who did a fantasy trilogy. His reviews and buzz were amazing. His covers were fantastic. Wide distro and good marketing. Book one sold meh. But he was in a financial position that he could keep pushing. Book two sold a bit better, and dragged book one up, as some more people thought okay maybe this guy isn’t a quitter. Again, he stuck it out because he could. Book three finished the trilogy, and then there was a huge spike. Sales took off, and the market breathed a sigh of relief and said, this guy isn’t Pat Rothfuss!
Well no shit. Because the vast overwhelming majority of us aren’t Pat Rothfuss. So quit fucking treating us like we are.
I get Correia’s sentiment. But this is the question I need to pose:
How does the market know that New Author is not the next Rothfuss or Martin?
New Author simply can’t say, ‘I’m not Rothfuss or Martin!’ Anyone can say that. Other authors can’t say, ‘He’s not Rothfuss or Martin!’ Again, anyone can say that. There’s only one thing New Author can do:
He has to prove himself.
Readers don’t owe anything to New Author. They’re not obliged to take a chance on New Author. New Author has to prove himself, day after day, book after book. He has to show that his work is worthy of their attention, and their dollars.
If New Author favours the modern epic approach to storytelling, then readers want to be assured that New Author has what it takes to see the story through. Readers want to see that New Author is capable of finishing and publishing several books (ideally an entire trilogy, or the entire series) before they are willing to commit. They don’t want to wait for years or decades for a payoff that may never come—or a poorly-executed payoff.
As if that’s not enough, should New Author sign with a Big Publisher, then Big Publisher also wants to know that their investment in New Author will be rewarded too. And that presents a whole different set of considerations.
Big Publisher will typically only commit to one book at a time from a new author. If Book One doesn’t sell well, the series is scrapped and New Author is dropped. Everybody loses—especially Big Publisher, which is now in the hole for however much they spent on publishing and promoting New Author.
Big Publisher wants to hedge its bets. Today it is exceedingly rare for a complete nobody to sign a contract with a mainstream publishing house, never mind a high-value contract. Publishers are businesses and they expect to make money. Usually they prefer to sign contracts with authors with a large and well-established fan base who will lap up what the author creates.
But if New Author has such a huge fan base, why would he need Big Publisher?
The State of the Market
The market in 2023 is not the market of 1993. It’s not the market of 2003. It’s not even the market of 2013. Self-publishing, recent technological innovations and shifting reader tastes have disrupted and will continue to disrupt the market.
It is difficult for new writers to break into the market. It becomes even more difficult with each passing day. But this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do it. It means that a writer has to develop a strategy that suits the market.
The Kindle Store is the largest ebook store in the world. Print on Demand is the best way an author can economically offer print books for sale, especially if he doesn’t have access to the distribution network of a traditional publisher. Audiobooks offer enterprising authors another source of revenue. Webnovels and light novels are becoming increasingly popular. Such is the state of the market today.
I grew up in a time when an author could release one novel a year and earn a reasonable amount of money, enough to justify writing the next book. TradPub still adheres to this model. If you do not have the backing of a big publisher, with the resources to run and sustain a worldwide marketing engine and distribution network, this is not viable.
Amazon is still the only game in town. Its genius lies in the fact that it is not just a retailer. It is a search engine. It helps readers find the books they want to read. Its value proposition is that it will quickly deliver to readers a large number of books that they are (possibly) interested in reading. For authors, Amazon allows them to quickly and easily publish a book in both print and digital formats on the world’s largest bookstore, potentially putting it in front of millions of eyes.
Amazon’s algorithms are biased towards novelty. They have to be. A customer is usually only going to buy one copy of a book. Additional sales are not guaranteed. Therefore, the algorithms will promote new books to generate more revenue for Amazon (and authors). Amazon ads are a way to hijack the algorithm, but realistically it is only an option for those who can afford it.
What this means is that an author needs to push out stories at a rapid pace. The conventional wisdom is one book every 30 days, or no less than one every 90 days. I myself have seen the sales cliff at the 30 and 90-day mark. I know of publishing houses that insist on publishing an average of one book every fortnight, or every week, or even every day.
Ebooks are cheap. POD drives down print costs. And everyone knows this. This means an author must price his books affordably. There is already a wealth of books out there. Readers who believe that a book is too expensive—especially a book by a new author—will pick a cheaper book. Only Big Name authors and trad pubbed books can afford to price books above and beyond the $5.99 – 7.99 range.
You may be familiar with the iron triangle of service: fast, cheap, good, pick any two. This combination of factors have transformed the market into an arena that exclusively favours the fast and cheap.
The book market is saturated. When you reach the end of this sentence, someone has just published a new book. There is an overabundance of reading material out there. It’s a buyer’s market. The buyers want fast service. If you cannot deliver the goods quickly, they will find someone who can.
This brings us to the field of epic fantasy. Conventional wisdom holds that long books take a long time to write. But once committed to a series, readers don’t want to wait for a long time for the next book. They want the sequel now. Or at least within a 30 to 90 day timeframe. And if they can’t have the sequel now, they will spend their money on someone else who can give them the payoff they are looking for.
Place yourself in the shoes of this hypothetical reader. You come across two well-regarded but new epic fantasy authors. Both of them have been around for two years. Author One has published one book. Author Two has published nine, with two more on the way.
Which would this reader be more comfortable investing his time, money and energy in?
The calculus changes for an episodic series. There may be a grand finale in the far distant future, but every book promises its own payoff. A reader may or may not have the patience of inclination to follow the entire series from start to finish, but he knows that there will be a payoff at the end of a book—any book—in the series.
This is the approach favoured by modern Japanese media. Light novels tend to be written in an episodic format. Knowing the events of previous stories may enhance the reader’s enjoyment of one volume, but it isn’t necessary. Light novels rarely end on a cliffhanger, and those that do usually wrap it up in the next volume.
Japanese manga publishes three kinds of issues: One-shot special issues, standalone chapters, and story arcs. After a set number of chapters are published, the publisher collects them in a volume, known in the trade as a tankobon. Story arcs are planned according to the length of a tankobon. At the end of the tankobon, the arc either ends, or there is a cliffhanger that leads into the next tankobon. Standalone chapters fill out the remaining pages in a tankobon and lead into the next arc. When a reader buys a tankobon, he knows that there is a payoff at the end, or a lead-in to the payoff in the next tankobon.
This approach creates a frictionless reader experience. Readers are free to jump into the series at any point. They can choose to buy the entire series. They can choose to buy only the books or arcs they want. They feel they can drop the series at any time. This paradoxically creates the confidence that the money they spent on the series is well-spent, encouraging them to continue their investment in the series.
The Great Endumbening
Correia says:
Depending on authors, it takes about 6 months to a year of nonstop effort to produce a good epic fantasy novel. Some of us it takes a lot longer. (it doesn’t take any of us a decade, and whoever is telling you that is full of shit). We can make books faster, but the faster you rush an artistic product, the rougher it is gonna be. And epic fantasy is one of those genres where the customer is accustomed to a certain level of quality. So if you do the churn and burn, book of the month indy thing, you might get sales, but nobody is gonna remember that series. When most of us tackle a big epic fantasy series, that’s the thing we’re hoping will stick around and still get read after we’re dead.
Epic fantasy authors who grew up in the age of BigPub dominance may feel that they want their books to stick around long after they are dead.
Epic fantasy authors who started their careers in the age of Amazon treat their books as commercial products.
Sure, it would be nice if they produce a book that will linger for decades. But they’d rather chase cold, hard cash. It’s the same GET PAID! mentality that Correia advocated for authors, taken to the next level.
These authors don’t care about ‘artistic quality’. That’s their secret. They write to market. They don’t care about craft; they care about hitting all the tropes in the target genre, slapping on a cover that meets reader expectations, then moving on to the next book. And the next. And the next.
And their fans lap it up.
It is what it is. Complaining about it isn’t going to change things. Amazon has fundamentally rewired the market psychology of the book industry. Or, rather, it leverages the human desires for fast and cheap goods to generate outsized profits.
It’s how fast food works. It’s how social media works. It’s how everything that relies on rapid delivery and low prices works. It fulfils this fundamental human desire.
The field of epic fantasy isn’t in any danger of dying out. There are tons of epic fantasy on Amazon today, churned out by indies seeking to write to market. Instead of waiting ten years for an author to, maybe, someday, finish his epic fantasy magnum opus, readers can gobble up a whole series right now. And another, and another, and another.
These books are written fast. They are sold cheaply. They may not be as good as J. R. R. Tolkien or Brandon Sanderson or other Big Name—but does the market care? Readers aren’t obliged to take a chance on a new and unproven author with an unfinished series, not when there are plenty of other established authors with well-known series out there.
The real danger isn’t of epic fantasy dying out. It is in being dumbed down.
The indie churn and burn approach does not lend itself to well-written works. It is the equivalent of a summer popcorn blockbuster, to be consumed once, then forgotten. These authors strive to be just good enough to attract enough readers so they can afford to write the next book, and the next, and the next.
Mickey Spillane wrote, “Those big-shot writers… could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.” These indie books are the equivalent of salted peanuts. But here’s the catch:
These indie authors are also subject to the same financial pressures as the New Author described above.
Going indie means that you cover the cost of everything. Editing, formatting, advertising. You aren’t just a writer. You are a businessman. And when the revenue generated by a product no longer justifies the expense? It is dropped.
In Japan, when a manga is axed, the author is given one issue (or, if the publisher is generous, as many issues as needed to fill out a tankobon) to wrap up the series. In the light novel world, the series may well be dropped without even a concluding book. The indie world sees a similar phenomenon. Either the author simply drops the series altogether, or he writes one book to wrap things up as best as he can.
No satisfying conclusion. No grand finish. No closure for characters the fans have come to love. It’s just a product to the author, and there is no room for sentiment for a mere product.
And thus the assurance that readers look for in the beginning is revealed to be false and empty. The series won’t be completed, not in the way it deserves to be completed. The author doesn’t care as much about the series as the fans may do. There is an ending, but it leaves you feeling hollow and bitter.
Here we see how episodic storytelling benefits the commercially-minded writers and publishers. Since every book is a standalone, every book delivers a payoff. That means they can drop a nonperforming series with minimal fuss, then move on to another series that is a better fit for the market. They may write a final book to close out the series, but that’s all. Fans are able to accept this because the series never promised a grand finale to begin with, and because every individual book gave them the payoff they were looking for when they picked it up. They recognise that this move is simply as the cost of doing business in a fast-paced industry. Any anger, bitterness or disappointment that comes from the sudden ending of an episodic series is much reduced compared to the confirmed non-completion of an epic series.
Other indie authors I know have noted reader preferences shifting towards webnovels, light novels, and standalone novels set in a shared universe. Episodic storytelling, in other words. Perhaps this explains it.
The Way of the Pulps
The market demands cheap and fast. But you can’t compete on cheap and fast alone. That means you need something else, something that sets you apart from the rest.
You need cheap and fast and good.
This was the promise of the pulps during the heyday of the pulp era. Well-written stories, sold cheaply, available almost everywhere. These stories catered to almost every possible interest: fantasy, adventure, crime, romance, even sports, aviation and railways.
The way of writing to market focuses on cheap and fast. It is fast because it follows genre conventions and tropes to a T. They give you a ready-made formula. You just need to flesh out the skeleton, so to speak. But this produces generic, bland, forgettable stories.
The pulp way is to marry cheap and fast and good. Stories are published quickly. They are priced affordably. But they are also a cut above the rest in quality.
The secret to this is Pulp Speed. You write as fast as you can without sacrificing quality. Then, while maintaining quality, you steadily increase your output. This requires conscious, deliberate, effortful practice. You’re not just fleshing out a skeleton. You are deliberately crafting a story from start to finish, engaged in every step of the process, choosing or rejecting tropes and formulae as needed. And the more you practice writing, the more stories you write, the better your writing becomes.
Correia’s epic fantasy series, Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, encompasses 5 books over 10 years. Correia wrote other books during this period as well. Had he worked exclusively on Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, it is reasonable to assume that he would have published 5 books in 5 years. He is well-known for his work ethic, he is signed with Baen, and one book a year is the standard series cadence for publishing houses.
By following the way of the pulps, I can create 6 books in 2.5 years.
I don’t just mean publish. I don’t mean write, either. I mean the entire writing process, from planning to writing to editing to formatting to publishing.
An epic fantasy novel is much longer than other novels: 90,000 words at the low end, 200,000 at the high end. Assuming a word count of 150 to 200K words, it will take me about 3 to 4 months to create a novel of such length. That means 18 to 24 months dedicated to writing and proofreading the first draft. The remaining 6 to 12 months will be spent on deeper edits and preparation for publication.
Impossible? No. I just described Saga of the Swordbreaker.
I began the first book in the second half of 2020. The first draft of the last book was completed in the end of 2021. I published the first three books in 2022. The next three books will be published this year.
From the moment the first word was written to the moment the last book will be published, it would take just 3 years to publish 6 books. And much of the time after editing the drafts was dead time. It was time spent on writing marketing materials, preparing and executing crowdfunding campaigns, and so on. I know I spent way too much time waiting on Babylon Black instead of finishing the series. I could easily shave off half a year had I focused on completing Saga of the Swordbreaker.
6 books in 3 years is still much faster than 5 books in 5 years.
My readers know that quality is a hallmark of my work. My reviewers always call attention to the consistent high quality of my writing, above and beyond your typical written-to-market work. Saga of the Swordbreaker wasn’t written like a summer blockbuster movie; it’s imbued with themes and ideas that invite you to discover them with every re-read. In that regard, though it is a cyberpunk cultivation series, it has some of the essential trappings of an epic fantasy series.
New readers will also be assured that I can and do finish my stories. These days I only rapid-publish a series when the entire series is complete. They will have no fear of author existence failure, or sudden series failure.
The pulp approach applies equally well to epic storytelling and episodic storytelling. It is genre agnostic. It is simply a method that allows you to write quickly and write well. It does, however, require a dedication to the craft that many writers lack—and so it is how I stand out from the crowd.
Small wonder that Saga of the Swordbreaker is my most successful series up to this point.
I do face the financial pressures other indie authors face. However, crowdfunding allows me to cover these costs. This allows me to take the kind of risks that traditional authors, big publishers and indie authors will never take—the kind of risks so critical for artistic growth and expression, the same expression that translates into superior quality stories.
Indie authors have other options too. Monetisation through webserials. Blockchain publishing platforms. Patreon. Or just laying down the money upfront.
Fans have expectations. Publishers have bottom lines. Authors are caught between the two, and still need to be able to eat. The pulp mindset married to cutting-edge publishing options is the solution. It cuts out publishers who can’t add any value to the author’s life, assures the fans, and revives the genre through consistent infusion of high-quality work. Episodic storytelling makes it easier for writers and readers to invest in a series.
Correia has his own way of seeing and doing things, informed by his temperament, his publisher, his peers, and his readers.
As for me, I have mine. And my work speaks for itself.
You can judge the quality of Saga of the Swordbreaker here. I’m certain you won’t be disappointed.
Leave a Reply