General
If the mayor is the boss of the major city of Finnegal, then the General is probably the boss of Drubeck. It’s his job to keep the Visa Sharks in line when the Visa Lottery takes place each year. It’s also his job to quell the fights that break out. He’s a hard man, a scarred man, and one that is really powerless. I’m not sure what the exact military establishment is like in the two countries yet, but I have a feeling that in the West it’s pretty shabby.
Slum Rat’s Family
I’d imagine there’s a small sister that mainly supports the mom. The young boy, our main character, is old enough to try and find a way for himself in the world. His older brother is already too far gone into the corrupt ways. The family will be small, and probably won’t be talked about much.
Well, there you have some characters. It’s not that hard to write a fantasy novel with good characters if you take the time to outline them and give them each a brief description like I’ve just done. It will really help you identify any holes in your world, like the military and government in my case, and fill them up with details. Next time I’ll talk about the characters in the East and how you can write a fantasy novel with multiple settings.
14: Supporting Characters
When you write a fantasy novel, main characters simply aren’t enough. Characters have to interact with dozens if not hundreds of other minor supporting characters. You should decide early on who your major supporting characters are, and who your minor supporting characters are.
Major Supporting Characters
Sometimes these characters will be in every chapter, having long dialogues with main characters, interacting with other minor characters themselves, or just being present in case the need for them arises.
These are your major supporting characters. Your reader will get to know them, although not as well as your main characters. They’ll have to have some kind of brief history themselves, as well as motivations, thoughts, and feelings.
Minor Supporting Characters
Sometimes these characters will appear only once in a whole book, perhaps a storekeeper or guard. They might only utter one line of dialogue, or none at all. These characters are usually only needed to perform one or two simple functions to move the story forward, and then they are gone.
These are your minor supporting characters. Not much planning goes into these folks, and they’ll often spring up on their own as you write a fantasy novel. Planning for each one of these characters in the outline stage of your novel is impractical, if not impossible. Part of the creative process is not knowing everything, and that’s when minor supporting characters are needed the most.
Creating Supporting Characters
I’ve already outlined the main characters in my fantasy novel, although I’ve only done so in the West. That leaves one whole part of the country that I’ve got to deal with, the East.
But do I want to deal with that? I’ve got a good basis for a story already, most of which will take place in the West. Do I need to introduce any characters at all from the East in the first novel, or can I wait until other novels in the series? I’m already realizing that one novel will take place solely in the West, another in the East, and then the final in both together.
Still, references will be made to characters in the East in the first novel; they have to be. My main characters in the West are not completely ignorant of the goings on, the personas, and the politics of the East, after all. They’ll know the big names, so I’ve got to know them as well. That’s why it’s good to get those supporting characters down now, especially if you want to know how to write a fantasy novel that can be turned into a series.
Let’s look at my major supporting characters in the East, which will in turn become main characters in another novel.
The Ruler
At this point I’m still not clear on what title I’ll give to the ruler in the East. It could be king, emperor, or president. It could even be something off the wall and which I haven’t thought of. How about a group of rulers, or a council? Perhaps two rival groups have come together to form a coalition government. It’s hard to say, but it’s still pretty clear one person will be considered the main leader or boss.
This person will have to appear to care about the people in the West, although I don’t think he really will. He’ll have to do that to curry favor with the people in the East who support the Visa System, but he’ll also have to appear a bit disdainful of it as well to appease those who hate the Visa System. It’s really a fine line, and his true motivations probably aren’t known to those in the West, or many in the East. They remain unknown to me at this time as well.
The General
Just like there’s a general in the West who is in charge of all things military, so to will there be one in the East. But whereas the general in the West can often sit back, not having to worry about anything but the Visa fights once a year, the general in the East will always have to be on his guard. Visa stragglers could be crossing over the Wo’dan Desert at any time, and it’s still not unheard of to see others making it through the Swamps of Miletus.
This man will no doubt be hard, uncompromising, and perhaps angry. He could do a better job running the country than the current ruler, and it’s not been unheard of for a military leader to take the top spot in the East. Things have been going south in the East, at least that’s the way this character sees it, and they mean to do something about it. This would be a very good female character.
The Shepherds
The Visa Shepherds are those that ferry the lucky ones from the West to their new homes in the East. Each year they come to the West when the Visa Lottery takes place, and their job is only getting more dangerous. Lately a mob mentality has grown up around Drubeck each time the lottery draws near, and last year a whole ship of Visa recipients almost were killed when the mob tried to capsize their boat.
An attitude is growing up that says, ‘if we can’t go, no one can go.’ As far as the Visa Shepherds see it, there’s really a sense of desperation taking hold that hasn’t been evident in years past. There will be one Visa Shepherd that is a major supporting character, and I have a feeling he’s questioning the whole system, perhaps for the first time in his long career.
The Instigator
There has to one major supporting character in the East that is trying to rile things up. In the West this is the Preacher. He’s agitating for change, although no one pays him much heed. In the East this character will have a much more prominent position in the government, perhaps in that country’s version of the Senate or other governing body.
He views the Visa System as the one great evil in the land, one that has to be stopped. Not only is it holding down the West, but it’s holding back the East. If the two countries could just integrate and work together, both would be so much better off.
Of course no one wants to hear this. The whole economy and way of life in the East has come about from their policies concerning the West. Most don’t think they’d be much better of than the West if they hadn’t started limiting those from the West generations ago.
But some people are listening, and a small group of followers are beginning to rally around the Instigator’s words. This could spell trouble for him.
Those are just a few of the major supporting characters from the East that will be mentioned, or perhaps even highlighted in one or two chapters, when I begin figuring out how to write a fantasy novel with this outline.
I’d suggest if you’re struggling with how to write a fantasy novel, you too sit down with your map and figure out which characters are needed where, and to what extent. It’s much better than suddenly finding yourself in need of a major secondary character that could last through the whole book, and making them up on the fly. This will only hurt your story, so plan just a little, or a whole lot.
15: Writing a Fantasy Novel in Installments
I’ve been quite intrigued lately with the idea of writing installments. This has come about ov
er the past month or two based on things I’ve seen and read, including:
– Kindle Serials: I stumbled upon the Kindle Serials section on Amazon a few weeks back. Even though I’d been there before I’d some how forgotten about it. Looking at the competition, it seemed there was a real good chance to break out. After all, in the fantasy genre there were only a dozen titles to choose from. Checking this out made me remember a blog post I’d read earlier about Kindle Serialized Fiction on Lindsay Buroker’s site, and things started to click.
– Wattpad: About a week after I re-discovered Kindle Serials I discovered Wattpad. This is a cool site that will allow you to put up chapters for others to read for free. If you do it often enough, and your work is good enough, you might be able to build up a sizeable following. I also managed to read a pretty good blog post about this, which was also on Lindsay Buroker’s site.
– Goodreads: I’ve been actively taking part in goodreads.com discussions for several months now. I started to get a feeling that people were looking for a little bit more from the fantasy genre. I got the sense that people wanted darker fantasy, grittier fantasy, and fantasy with an attitude. I thought that was pretty interesting, so started formulating some ideas.
– The Expendables: During my last month living in China I watched a lot of movies and drank a lot of beer. Hey, I wasn’t working that much, so it didn’t really matter. One movie that I downloaded was The Expendables. I’d never gotten around to it before, but I enjoyed it. And what’s more, it made me think that a team of mercenaries would be kind of cool in a fantasy novel.
The result is The Hirelings, a different take on the fantasy novel. I may or may not put it on Wattpad, and I may or may not go the Kindle Serials route with it. Hell, I may just get a cheap cover (like the one I have) and throw it out on Amazon when it’s all finished.
Part III – Your Fantasy Novel’s Book Cover
I’d like to talk about marketing for a few chapters. It’s very important that your book has a good cover. I’d also suggest maps. Fantasy books really benefit from maps.
So where do you get all this? I’ve written about eBook covers a lot in my other book, Design Your Book, and I urge you to check it out. In these chapters, however, we’ll discuss elements that you want to think about before contacting those designers.
16: New Fantasy eBook Covers
I’ve had happy announcements all week, and it’s a pretty good time. Not only do I have a new book coming out, but I’ve also got several new covers. There’s a new cover for my old Tarot book and then there’s these three babies for my epic fantasy trilogy, The Jongurian Trilogy.
I’ve gone through multiple versions of these covers, as anyone who’s read this site regularly knows. You can read all about my old fantasy eBook covers in a previous post, but suffice it to say, they were never that good.
They’ve always improved, I’ll say that much, but you could tell they always had that homemade look.
Well, these new three look pretty good I think.
– The Jongurian Mission has a nice old fort or castle on it, which goes along nicely with several parts of the story, especially when the main characters sail into the small and unknown island that feels deserted.
– Trouble in Jonguria really captures the dark aspects of this book, as well as the dark settings. A lot of the action takes place at night or in deep, dark forests. There’s a sense of foreboding, and I thought this cover does a decent job expressing that with the dark and stormy sky.
– The Jongurian Resolution depicts the city of Baden, the capital of Adjuria, and the setting for the final scenes of the book and trilogy. This cover looks quite a bit different from the other two, although it tries to keep the same typography. It works, for now, and it doesn’t concern me too much as most people thinking of buying Book 3 would have bought the other two already, don’t you think?
Overall I’m happy and have uploaded the new covers onto Amazon and Smashwords. The first book in the trilogy is permanently free on Amazon and has had more than 500 downloads in the past 2 weeks with little to no promotion. Hopefully the trend can continue and more people will discover this exciting fantasy trilogy!
17: Three New Epic Fantasy eBook Covers
I’ve got 3 new epic fantasy eBook covers.
You may have noticed them on the homepage over the past few days, and two of them have finally gone live on Amazon (it took 4 days).
Yep, I’m talking about The Jongurian Trilogy, the three books that started me off on my self-publishing career.
Without any further ado, here are the cover images:
I had those made by Joe Shawcross, a great artist that I ran into on Deviant Art and profiled in my 16 Deviant Artists for Fantasy and Sci-Fi eBook Covers article back in August.
Well, I didn’t really have the money to hire Joe (he charges $200 a cover), but I did anyways. Thankfully the three images stretched over 2 months so I didn’t take the $600 hit all at once.
I really think he did a great job on these, as I knew he would because he has awesome images in his portfolio. I mean, I feel like writing a book just for that warrior warthog.
Anyways, I’ll be working with him again sometime soon, and if you want some great fantasy eBook cover art, I think he’s your man.
So what about layout? Well, here’s that:
I had this done by Machine 4 Arts, which is a user on Freelancer, a site I do a lot of eBook cover work on and also do a lot of writing-for-hire work.
I got this artists to do the layout on the three covers for $60…and he even threw in an awesome 3-book cover image that I’ll profile in another day or two.
All in all, I really hope these new covers help sell these books. I’ve changed the covers many times, and you can see all the old versions in the chapter called Should You Change Your Novel’s Cover?
I used to get 20 sales each on Books 2 and 3 every month, but now it’s about 5. That’s probably because of the bad reviews for Book 1, and that’s why I again went in last weekend and cut out about 15,000 words or so…mostly boring travelogue shit that readers hated anyways.
Will it matter? Not sure, and I’ve even been thinking of taking the book off perma-free and putting it at $0.99.
Really what I should do is submit it to all the free sites again now that its got that new cover, which is something I haven’t done since June (I keep a spreadsheet of all promos, and you should too – haven’t you read Sell Your Book?).
We’ll see how that goes, and if there’s interest, I’ll write about it. Until then, if you haven’t looked at these books, please do.
18: New Jonguria Maps!
Wow, check out these new maps!
Actually…let’s go through the process first…because seeing how a good fantasy book map is made today is important.
First, I went to Deviant Art and put up a notice on their forum, asking for someone to look at the old maps I had. I wanted someone to send me a message with their idea and how much they’d charge.
I was very lucky to find someone named M. Nires. This guy makes some great maps, and I already showed you the John Colter Map he made for me. Here’s what we did for these maps.
It all started with the old maps for Adjuria, which I’d made in MS Paint back in January, 2010. Here’s what that looked like:
That map helped me write nearly 450,000 words about this world. That got me three books, and they’ve sold more than 500 copies between them. The first volume has been downloaded more than 11,000 times.
The map wasn’t that good, however, and in 2013 I had a woman in Europe make me a new one. This is what that looked like:
At the time I was very happy with this – it was a huge improvement! But it didn’t have the detail I wanted, and a lot of things were left out. I knew I had to get a new map, and since I had some money this month, I went ahead and did so.
First I got some rough sketches, based on my desire to flip the world from landscape format to portrait. Yeah, I wanted the map to work bet
ter with a book’s shape, and that meant changing things. Here’s how the designer first started that:
That really wasn’t how I wanted the world, however, so I made this really, really crappy model to guide him:
Wow, talk about bad, huh? But it got me on the right path. Plus, I knew I had a good artist because he said that the image helped. That’s how these came about:
Wow, now we’re getting somewhere. When I saw those lakes taking shape, I knew this map would look good…and it does – here’s the final version:
How to Write Fantasy Page 5
