RSS

What kind of fantasy stories would you like to read?

If you enjoy Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb and JRR Tolkien but want something fast and furious with a mystic twist, then you're in the right place. If you've never heard of those epic fantasy writers, read on. I am one of the new breed of fantasy authors who write in a personal, lyrical style. Welcome to my world:

Epic fantasy series by Greg Hamerton: The Tale of the Lifesong

There is a song that drifts on the breeze through all the world. Its rhythms are echoed in our breath, the music is caught in our laughter, hidden in our language, woven through our life. Singers reach for the melody, but it is too delicate to hold and too elusive to remember. As the Ages pass, so the Lifesong retreats under the sounds of our time, its potent beauty and danger ever more a mystery. The Tale of the Lifesong begins here >

What can you find on this site?

I'd like to help you find the best fantasy books around. So apart from reading free samples of my new fantasy series, there's a list of the top fantasy books you simply must read. You can browse my latest fantasy book reviews. In the fantasy writing section I share insights on the craft of writing fantasy novels. And down below you can find my fantasy news section where I blog about the world of magic, myth and mayhem.

What is fantasy fiction?

What makes some books fantasy, and others fact? Both are tales: histories are constructed from records, fantasy stories are crafted from dreams. What matters most is where the books can take you. At the heart of fantasy lies magic, but when the magic respects scientific principles the story becomes science fiction and the effect can be profound: you discover a gateway into another world. Speculative fiction is diverse, it twists into all kinds of shapes in the hands of the best fantasy authors: epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, young adult fantasy, dark fantasy, comic fantasy, gothic horror. Then there are all the exciting variations of science fiction: paranormal, supernatural, time-slip, parallel worlds, futuristic, post-apocalypse and everything else bright minds encounter by asking 'what if?' I believe magic is woven into the fabric of our world. Let me show you.

"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded." Terry Pratchett

Fantasy News

Fantasy Book Review: The Riddler’s Gift reviewed by David Wagner

21 Jan

David Wagner is a Graphic Artist by profession (and an author, musician and actor/director). He just posted a great review of The Riddler’s Gift on his blog.

“Other than The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie, this book by Greg Hamerton is the most enjoyable fantasy book I’ve read in the past year. That includes all the noteworthy books listed in my 2011 Reads list over there on the right side of the blog page there. GRRM’s entire series, Pat Rothfuss’ latest, books by Brett, Parker, Scalzi, Sanderson, etc. All of them. I’m belaboring this to let you know that I am not saying this lightly, or off-the-cuff.

The author does a fantastic job (pardon the pun) of crafting rich, complex characters. They lend themselves to shades of grey that are unexpected and yet feel oddly natural. You expect the heroine Tabitha Serannon to remain naive and good-at-heart, in spite of her trials, but as she accesses magic that is well-beyond her experience and expectation, it impacts her, changes her, in ways that catch you off guard. In fact, I can’t think of a single main character, good or evil, that doesn’t go through some level of transformation, or that isn’t blind-sided by an unforeseen event (or series of events) that forces them to course-correct. It is all deftly handled, and thoroughly entertaining to read.”

Being a writer himself, he makes some interesting observations about the action, dialogue and craft and offers some useful insight into the danger of sequels. Read the full review on David Wagner’s blog

Thanks David, and good luck with your own writing!

No Comments

Posted in Reviews of my fantasy novels

Fantasy book review: Against All Things Ending by Stephen Donaldson

15 Jan

Criticism is always hard to take, and I have great respect for Mr Donaldson as a writer. But this book is crushed to death under its own weight and it drags the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant down with it.

I review it not to point my presumptuous little finger at a great writer’s faults, but to try and understand why the book itself has lost me as a reader, so I can avoid this style of writing in my own fantasy novels. It’s particularly instructive for me, because I deal with similar themes in Second Sight, on a similar stage, with similar stakes (a world wracked with chaos; a female mage striving to save the essence of life; the world will end by her causing the conditions for the Apocalypse).

There’s a strange kind of resonance I suspect many authors have discovered. Similarities emerge between writers when they write about a similar theme. As you write, you discover the same entities and challenges. To put it another way, when you work with the stuff Tolkien delved into, you come face to face with the same Balrog, regardless of whether you’ve read Tolkien or not. It’s not a case of copying; it’s a case of working with the archetypes that lurk in the place writers find themselves in. So I appreciate that what Donaldson is attempting to work with here is extremely difficult: gods, mages with staggering powers, doom and apocalypse, and the meaningful culmination of story arcs from two trilogies with many potent characters.

The opening is definitely not designed to cater for mainstream readers. When you compare it to something like Mordant’s Need, it’s plain that Donaldson knows how to write a cracking opening scene, but has chosen not to. I know we are well into a series here, but I would have still made some kind of concession to engage readers. For pages and pages we must endure the introspective exposition that is Covenant’s trademark, his fractured, floundering grasp on reality, then Linden’s self-doubt, and piles of explanation.
Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments

Posted in Fantasy Book Reviews

Fantasy book review: Fatal Revenant by Stephen Donaldson

15 Jan

Fantasy novel review: Fatal Revenant by Stephen Donaldson

I loved the first Chronicles and applauded the second. The third Chronicles began in a cunning way, and I was eager to be swept away into the Land once again. But this book, Fatal Revenant, dragged at my heels.

It could be cut by 400 pages and still tell the same story, and the excessive use of anachronistic (damn, he’s doing it to me too now, I mean to say old) and downright obscure adjectives highlight the problem: Donaldson insists on telling us exactly what every single thing means, and every possible outcome, repeatedly, with painful precision. There is no space to wonder, to guess; to fill in the blanks in the writing: to be amazed.

In the earlier books I enjoyed the poetry of the Land, the way the atmosphere of the story made me feel. There was a special beauty to the fact that the world was a dream-world which Covenant did not believe in. It was real but unreal–that ambiguity was essential to the magic of the book.

But now the Land has become too real or too defined to be believable. Being the only world that exists for the lead character, it becomes a stock-fantasy story and reads like a fictionalised role-playing game with staged combat scenes. The plotting is arduous, with character motivations analysed so often that I became suspicious of the plot. I knew that if I stopped to think about it, I’d see that the characters probably wouldn’t do what they were doing unless the author had insisted that they did. It doesn’t ring true.

There are some high-points, great fantasy inventions, wonderful wizardry and moments when Donaldson works his old magic to good effect, but on the whole I found I couldn’t empathise with Linden Avery. I just didn’t care what she did.

Fatal Revenant also has tons of back-story. It’s a classic case of ‘show don’t tell’ gone wrong. I can’t believe that anything Donaldson writes is accidental, but he has perhaps over-analysed this manuscript, filling it with reminders, patches and information readers ‘should know’. This exposition drags the whole series down. Linden is so insecure and uncertain. She is a woman of shallow emotions who is rather desperate as a heroine. The Extended Unabridged Chronicles of Linden Avery, the Chosen has become too tiresome for me.

No Comments

Posted in Fantasy Book Reviews

Building a fantasy world: the map of Eyri

09 Dec

All good epic fantasy stories have a map. I suppose you’re thinking of Lord of the Rings, but my first epic fantasy was Winnie-the-Pooh. Really? A.A. Milne is often overlooked as a fantasy author, yet most people would have no problem classifying Watership Down by Richard Adams as animal fantasy, or even heroic fantasy. Pooh Bear was my first hero. He went on quests. He had companions. Strange creatures inhabited his world, but I grew to love them all, even the terrifying Woozles. And right at the start, there was a map, which I could pore over and imagine all the adventures that could happen, and what the places might be like.

Some of that wonder of discovery has followed me all my life: it’s why I’m a paragliding pilot, and a writer of fantasy. Thanks Pooh! So when I sat down to craft my fantasy world that would become The Riddler’s Gift, I first drew a map.

It’s not like Tolkien’s map; it’s not trying to be. It is more like the Hundred Acre wood. What I’m trying to tell my readers is this: the story world is somewhere you’ve never been before so you need a map, but it’s small enough that you can grasp it all. I was also thinking of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who had a little planet to himself. The Riddler’s Gift takes place in Eyri, which is its own little protected world. It’s intentionally simple. You know there’s probably more to the The Tale of the Lifesong than this little kingdom, but it’s a welcoming place to begin.

I discovered, as I descended into this apparently small kingdom, that there was more than enough going on to keep us occupied. We didn’t need to go beyond the visible horizon to find adventures and interesting characters and stories to be told. Having a lake at the centre and a rim of mountains meant the whole landscape sloped conveniently down to the centre, and so wherever a chase began it would end up converging on Stormhaven. This helped to direct things towards a climax and suggested where the end of the book should take place.

Drawing a map before the story is very useful, because you can plot things out accurately, like the time it would take to get from Levin to First Light on horseback, whether a cart driven by a tricky Riddler could get to Southwind in that same time, and how long you’d need to limp along the shore from Southwind to Fendwarrow, grinding your teeth after nearly drowning in the Amberlake.

The views became clear (when writing a dawn scene in First Light, what do you see looking east?). And you can probably guess why that village gets its name, being high up on an east-facing slope (don’t be tricked by the setting sun, nearby). The map helped me to see how the kingdom could be self-sustaining for so long, with a timber-yard at Llury, vegetables around Hillow, boatyards at Wright, fishing markets at Southwind, flour made in Westmill, mining at Chink and Coppershaft, farming in Meadowmoor county and fruit around Flowerton, just to begin with. These elements help to remind me what the people would be like as we pass through their villages with the flow of the story, and what would be going on in streets.

Of course, once my readers are ready to venture beyond Eyri with Tabitha (in the Second Tale of the Lifesong), there’s Oldenworld to map out. That task could take us a lifetime. But there’s nothing as exciting as opening up an unseen map, and being presented with a whole world to explore. Maps are what make fantasy epic.

No Comments

Posted in Writing Fantasy

Indie authors: is it worth joining KDP Select?

08 Dec

KDP Select is a new option that features a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers. If you choose to make a book exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, the book is eligible to be included in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and you can earn a share of the fund based on how frequently the book is borrowed.

Before you get excited about the value of the payout dangled in front of your nose when you next sign in to your Kindle dashboard ($500k for December 2012) consider that you only earn a % of all ebook unit sales in the month, across all titles and genres. I have no idea what the total is, but I’d estimate at least 2.5 million ebooks are sold in a month through Amazon, in which case your titles will earn $0.20 per loan. Who knows how far out my estimate is? It’s not going to be a lot of library-loan royalty you’ll earn. You’ll get a bit more exposure, balanced by a few lost sales (see below).

The main benefit is: “In addition, by choosing KDP Select, you will have access to a new set of promotional tools, starting with the option to offer enrolled books free to readers for up to 5 days every 90 days.”

Presently, setting the zero price point is awkward, relying on Amazons bots to price-match your free book on Smashwords, but this is impossible to coordinate as the Smashwords system has random delays, and Amazons price-matching is not immediate or limited to one day. Being able to run a dated promotion is useful, if you’re into that kind of promotion. I suspect there are more ‘promotional tools’ coming. Amazon is good at selling.

What Amazon demands in return: EXCLUSIVITY.

Ewww. How can this be a good thing for a digital product?

For me, it’s not such a big deal. My experience is the sales via Smashwords (Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony) account for less than 6% of the market. I hate limiting the availability of my book, but doing so focuses the retail attention in one place, which helps my Amazon sales rank a little, which in turn helps sales. It also simplifies the process, because I don’t have to deal with different formats, uploading platforms, tracking sales and reports. Every outlet has a management cost and introduces its own complexity.

Because most of the big publishers won’t join this program at first, it offers participants increased visibility in the Library, if only for a few months. I expect the royalty from loans will offset the few lost sales. Those who can move fast will be in the Kindle Lending Library first. I foresee a flood of indie authors and small publishers trying to remove titles from Amazon’s competitors’ catalogues, just as the peak retail weeks hit…

The odd effect this might have is that all those who don’t sell much on the other platforms will shift to be exclusively on Amazon. It’s the slush rush. The traditional published books will remain on B&N.

I’d like to test out the ‘promotional tools’, so I just ‘opted out’ of all etailer channels on Smashwords. They update their feeds today (being a Thursday). Who knows how long it takes for every etailer to pull the title off their digital shelves? Until all of them have updated, I’m in limbo … I don’t yet have the advantages of being on KDP Select. Yeah I could click on ‘enrol’ without waiting for all competing sales channels to be eliminated, but Amazon’s bots are pretty active and the gorilla sounds pretty serious about the penalties, the worst one being ‘removal from the KDP program’. That would be a death knell for any indie author, although I doubt Amazon would ever use that on a title that is selling and making them money.

It remains to be seen if this is worth the sacrifice. It feels creepy to agree to anything ‘exclusive’ in the digital age. But I’m telling myself it’s only for 90 days, and if it doesn’t work I’ll pull the plug without having lost much. I suspect Amazon will provide (just) enough candy to keep me at the party. With digital publishing, it’s important to catch the new wave, and I want to maximise my Amazon presence because it drives 94% of my digital sales.

It’s a clever move by the market leader that will no doubt have blogs boiling around the world.

Will it help indies shift more books? I’ll let you know.

———————–

[edited on 12 January 2012]

Yes. It works!

Got a pleasant surprise from Amazon this morning … I’d enrolled my books in the Amazon Select (Library) scheme, thinking it would make a few pennies. Well it’s more than that. Amazon’s author’s fund ($500,000 per month) is divided by all the library loans (295,000 in December). I had 100 loans, so got $170. Neat hey?

My calculations were out by a factor of ten, because I’d estimated the payout based on all ebook sales instead of only the books in the Select scheme. I expect the amount I receive will halve every month as more authors sign on.

Yes, the catch was I had to make the book available exclusively on Amazon. But the lost net sales from the other outlets was far less than that for the month.

I guess that some of the loans might have been potential sales, so in a way you’re cannibalising your own market and accepting a slightly lower royalty, but I would presume that most of the loans are people that see the book on the library shelf, or only try it because there’s zero price friction, rather than buyers who tried to save money by loaning titles they wanted to buy (they only get one a month).

On reflection, Amazon have been clever at introducing the free promo days tool. In the past they were losing money when they price-matched free ebooks. The way you’d do it was to set the price at $2.99 (or higher) on Amazon, and at $0.00 at Smashwords, and when Amazon’s bots discovered this they price-matched your Kindle book but still paid you the original royalty. Although this was technically breaking the terms of your sales contract (you promise not to make it available anywhere else cheaper) because this could be out of your control (Apple decided to discount your ebook) Amazon paid your agreed royalty on the full price. I presume it’s still possible to do this but I’d rather play it straight and support the company that is blazing the trail of ebook success. So I’m remaining a loyal Amazon Kindle Select author.

If you’re an author, I’d recommend you join the program or get your publisher to do so. If you’re a reader with an Amazon Prime account, check out what you can loan, for free, while still supporting your favourite authors.

No Comments

Posted in Book Marketing

Building a fantasy world: the art of the Lifesong

02 Dec

As a fantasy author, I have tons of sketches that appear on anything within arm’s reach. These multiply as I write a story, and often the story only grows because of the ideas that form in the sketched scenes and scribbled creatures that appear in the margins.

That sword I sketched stuck in my mind, and became Felltang, the swordmaster’s blade. My father even crafted the sword for me in steel. I almost broke my wrist trying to swing the thing at a tree. At which point I realised that the blade must be order-forged and made of a much lighter composite than steel.

The lyre was Tabitha’s instrument, but although I’d seen the shape of it, it took me some time to reach the point in the story where she receives it. So drawing is absolutely vital to my writing process, because it helps to display things that have risen to the surface of my subconscious long before I understand their place in the story world. They are gifts from the Muse, or as Stephen King would say ‘the bones of the story I’m digging out’.

My sketches are simple scribblings to help my creative process, but when it comes to promotional posters or cover art I encountered a problem. I’m not a commercial artist. I can’t draw in colour at all. But because I was so close to the books, anything someone else drew seemed to have no connection to the story I had created. I had strong dislikes about cover art (too grungy, too gamey, too pretty, too dark), but only a vague idea of what I wanted or needed to promote The Tale of the Lifesong properly.

After a lot of soul searching, I learned that I hadn’t developed the thinking skills to form the concept of the art I wanted. That conceptual thinking is hard. So I set out to learn the art form.

After studying more advanced graphic design at Sessions College, I’ve become a little better at communicating ideas through images. This image comes about as close as I can get to summing up the beginning of the Tale of the Lifesong, in a paragraph:

Let’s see. What we’ve got here is a girl who sings, almost with abandon, to the point of not paying attention to those drawn to her music. The dark side: strangely seductive, but leading to evil, and beyond to darkness. On the light side: things are not what they seem to be. There’s the outline of the Riddler: his presence, or his shadow. But is he really there? Or is he really made of darkness? Is he leading Tabitha to the light, or blocking her approach? He’s associated with some currents of magic of cosmic proportion, because that’s his background, and there’s fire in there too because there’s chaos burning through the order. Then a field of stars, because the story spans the universe, and there’s a red colour because it’s all linked by passion and … well, music. So I guess the image should have a soundtrack by Lisa Gerrard.

Then again, you’ll add your own soundtrack and panoramic movie as your imagination fires things up. That’s the beauty of reading.

No Comments

Posted in Fantasy Book Design

Indie fantasy authors to watch: DAVID DALGLISH

27 Nov

David Dalglish is a self-published fantasy author living in southwest Missouri. He is best known for his assassin-filled Shadowdance Trilogy, which has sold over 50,000 copies.

Fantasy Book Critic said they “heartily recommend the entire Shadowdance trilogy to all lovers of dark, action packed fantasy stories”.

He was remarkably friendly, considering I was approaching him from a shady back alley of the internet. I wasted no time, hooded my wink, swept back my cloak and produced an unsigned digital copy of my blog. I asked him some pointed questions, expecting some barbed answers.

ON THE PAST
Mathematics to fantasy: was that a calculated move?
(I see what you did there). And technically I had a minor in English, so this wasn’t as completely out of left field as it sounds. But yeah, I thought Math would give a job to fall back on, and the lit classes would just help me in the dream of being a writer. Things kinda didn’t go as planned…

What drew you to writing about half-orcs?
I spent forever telling my wife these stories, the whole overall plotline, always in sort of a “when I write it, this’ll happen…” way. Finally she said either write the stories, or never tell her them again. I couldn’t live without these characters, so I set about to writing, like I always knew I should.

ON WRITING
They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but wouldn’t you make more as an assassin?
I’d be a terrible assassin. I can’t get to the fridge and back without waking my wife, let alone stabbing a guy in a tall tower without him noticing me laboring up the side.

It looks like you released six books of roughly 350 pages each in 2010, and four in 2011? Did you work on those for years before or are you an incredibly fast writer?
I had three of the Half-Orc books finished when I first started, so that helped a ton in 2010. As for this year, it’s actually just five novels, and technically Sliver of Redemption came out in January, with the bulk written the previous year. So that’s sorta cheating to count that one. But for six days a week I go to the library and write. Nothing magical about it, and I’m hardly the most prolific writer out there. Since I have no one holding me back to any sort of publishing schedule, it’s just full steam ahead to get my stories to my readers.

How do you maintain that sort of speed?
Caffeine, and the terror that tomorrow, this magic carpet ride will come to a crashing halt, and I need to get just one more book out to readers.

ON FANTASY
Lord of the Rings had dragons. Inheritance has dragons. Skyrim has dragons. Do you have dragons?
I have no dragons native to my world, but I do have a single dragon in Sliver of Redemption. I threw him in there at the request of a hardcore fan. He’s made of bone and shadow, and was terrific fun to kill. I might have to sneak in more.

How do you stop your magic from blowing up your world?
Hahahhaahhaha.
I do blow up my world. Nothing stops it.

ON PUBLISHING
Blogging, tweeting, facebook, forums = time not writing. Is anything effective for an indie author?
Well, it helps that I do this full time. But the hours at the library I write are sacred. Everything else is just bonus. And truth be told, I don’t blog often, update my website only when I have a new book, and don’t have a twitter account. I think some magic is involved with my success.

ON THE FUTURE
What’s next for David Dalglish?
About to release the third paladin book in December, and then onto a new Trilogy. Returning to apparently everyone’s favorite character, Haern the Watcher, and his friend, Zusa.

Thanks for taking the time to share a little of your success story, David. I look forward to watching an extended reign for you on the Kindle Fantasy Bestseller lists!

Support an indie fantasy author by checking out David Dalglish’s website or dive into one of his titles below:

No Comments

Posted in Author interviews

What’s in a fantasy book cover? Taking another look at Second Sight.

18 Nov

When designing the second book in the Tale of the Lifesong fantasy series, I was free to do what I wanted, because I knew nobody would buy it without first buying The Riddler’s Gift. So I designed it to appeal to converted fantasy fans rather than the wider readership that was intended for the first book.

It is a full-blown fantasy novel, with no attempts to make it an ‘easy read’. It is darker, more layered, and much more personal.

The idea behind the design is ‘learning to see the world in a different way’, or through second sight. The idea is reinforced by placing the title brightly lit in the foreground, which means you have to change your focus to see Tabitha looking at you from behind the design.

So the colours (especially when printed) are darker than the first book, which help to provide contrast with the title to lift it off the page. This theme is echoed in the book, which has dark atmosphere of collapse and impending ruin to frame the delicate beauty of lifesong.

It’s more personal, because Tabitha’s face is closer (once you see it). The sprites are still there, but now they are flying through the gold of order-magic.

After a while, you might see the big swan and smaller swan, that echo the goddess Ethea and her channel, Tabitha. You’ll only appreciate that reference much later in the book, but that’s the kind of fun you can have with a design when you’re the author and there’s no pressure to follow a commercial template. I could make this one my own.

After a while longer, you might see that the background has an overlay of text, which are the words of order-lore that are imposed on Tabitha and the world. The barren earth beneath helps to convey the rough, brutal quality of chaos-torn life in Oldenworld, which contrasts with the perfect, clean lines of the order-formed double-S. Okay, maybe some of these things only mean something to me, but I felt by including them in the design it would hint that there were some other things going on you might not be able to decipher (maybe if you had second sight, you’d be able to see?). Once again, I’m hoping to leave an intriguing impression, to make you ‘turn the book over’.

The typography of the author name is now better, and I’ll probably retain this styling in future to try establish some kind of branding. Display fonts (as used in the Riddler’s Gift cover) are often overdone – this Charlemagne font does the job better than the Morpheus font ever did.

What I wish I could do, is graphic art like this Angel by Song Yuefeng. The fallen goddess and the delicate girl who mourns her is gothic, textured; beautiful. As soon as I saw it, I knew Tabitha had to see this as a dream, and I wove it into the story of Second Sight, discovering what it meant, who the goddess was, and why Tabitha had to protect her at all costs.

That single image had the power to communicate a story. In essence, both authors and artists are doing the same thing. Framing an idea, using elements in just the right place, juxtaposing light and dark, texture and form, colours and neutral areas, subjects and negative space, to communicate something beautiful.

I’m first and foremost an author, so for you to see my ideas, you have to read my books. As you do so, you build something in your mind that is more than just an image: it is alive, and it is yours, because you have participated in its creation.

That is the magic of reading.

No Comments

Posted in Fantasy Book Design

Science fiction book review: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

17 Nov

RATING: 4.5 *

Altered Carbon is a science fiction novel set in a violent 26^th century. It’s a technological thriller structured around a crime investigation, set on future Earth.

“An astonishing first novel” said the Times, and I’d go along with that. It’s impossible to describe what Morgan has done in this novel without mentioning the premise, so if you don’t like spoilers read the Kindle sample of Altered Carbon which will lead you to discover the premise by Page 5.

Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments

Posted in Science Fiction Book Reviews

Indie fantasy authors to watch: DANIEL ARENSON

13 Nov

Daniel Arenson is an author living in Canada. He is best known for his “Song of Dragons” fantasy series and his novel “Eye of the Wizard”. He chatted to me about obsessions, inspirational fantasy art … and dragons.

ON THE PAST
Was there one book that made you want to be a writer?
Probably “Dragons of Winter Twilight”, the first fantasy novel I read. I was eleven years old. I started writing fantasy stories after reading that one.

“Writing to the Point” by Algis Budrys was a huge influence as well.

Was writing a planned career, or are you a writer despite what you were told?
I write because I can’t stop. More than a career, it’s an obsession.

What has it cost to get to where you are today (money, time, opportunities)?
Time. I have many ideas for books, and only so much time to write them all. The main challenge in my career has been finding time to write all these novels!

ON WRITING
How do you manage to live ‘in this world’ and in ‘the other world’ you’re creating?
“This… world….?”

How long does it take to produce something like Blood of Requiem?
I write quickly, but I spend a lot of time editing. A book like “Blood of Requiem” takes about 100 hours to write, but might take 300 hours (or more) to polish. Then it goes off to my beta readers and my editor.

ON FANTASY
Dragons. They used to be the enemy; now their incredibly cool. What’s your take, and how do you make a myth come to life?
In “Song of Dragons”, I wanted to give dragons a new twist. Instead of classic dragons, I wrote about humans who can turn into dragons at will. There are many stories about werewolves, but I’ve never heard of weredragons before, and I wanted to tell their story. They are definitely the good guys in “Song of Dragons”; the villains are the humans who demonize and hunt them.

Series or standalone: you’ve done both. Which do you prefer writing, and which is more popular?
I began writing standalones when I was published at Five Star Publishing. It’s a bit tougher to write a series when you’re dealing with publishing contracts; you don’t know if the first book would be a success, if your publisher would buy the second, etc.

When Kindle became popular, I began writing “Song of Dragons”, a fantasy series. I don’t have to worry about the realities of print publishing anymore. Writing a series is great; it lets me create more complex story arcs. After I release the third “Song of Dragons” novel, I plan to write a sequel to my standalone novel “Eye of the Wizard”, and turn that into a series too.

ON PUBLISHING
You’re currently riding the wave of the ebook bestseller lists. Can you outline your progress?
To be fair, I’m not on the general ebook bestsellers lists, but I do appear on the Epic Fantasy lists. There’s really no secret handshake. I didn’t promote my books in any unusual way. I simply try to keep improving with every book, and keep writing new epic fantasy stories that readers will enjoy.

How much promotion work was required to get there?
I used to promote a lot — I’d spend hours on Facebook, Twitter, Kindleboards, and other places. But I quickly realized that this was taking away too much writing time. Today, I’m still active on Facebook, but I try to spend most of my time writing new books instead of promoting the old ones.

You have some really professional covers. How did you select the designs, and do you have cover artists you can recommend?
I’m a big fan of fantasy art. Growing up, my heroes were fantasy artists such as Larry Elmore, Fred Fields, Jeff Easley, Brom, Brian Froud, and many others. I started writing fantasy because I wanted to invent stories that “feel” like that kind of artwork. To me, a great piece of art isn’t just a pretty image; it tells an entire story.

I still enjoy browsing websites such as DeviantArt and discovering new talent. I found my current artists simply by browsing artwork websites.

ON THE FUTURE
How far away is full-time writing for you, and would you choose to write full time?
I do have a “real” job too (I’m a software developer), but most of my income currently comes from ebooks. In the future, I might choose to scale back software development until I write full time, but we’ll see.

What’s next for Daniel Arenson?
This winter, I plan to release “Light of Requiem”, the third “Song of Dragons” novel. Keep an eye out for it! After that, I plan to write a sequel for “Eye of the Wizard”, and then possibly a fourth “Song of Dragons” novel.

Thanks, Daniel for taking the time to offer some insight into your writing success!

READ A SAMPLE
Support an indie fantasy author by visiting Daniel’s website.
or help his dragons rule the roost on Amazon Kindle by checking out his latest titles below