The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy… the series.

I thought maybe I would give you a little background on this book, and the series it inspired.

Like many of our recent titles, it starts out with Tee Morris.  Tee came along at a time when DMP really needed him. I think the universe was looking out for me. Not willing to take no for an answer, and moving at the speed of light, he pushed me to expand my horizons. The time came when I started to put much faith in him, and when he said he was working on this ebook, and would I like to consider publishing a print edition, it didn’t take much thinking to say yes. So, some correspondence later with the editors and the ebook publisher (Twilight Times), and I had myself my first non-fiction title.

Now any publisher will tell you, there is no money in fiction publishing. There just isn’t. Costs are high, margin low. Not a great combination. But we struggle through, mostly for the love of the genre. Non-fiction can be a different story – I thought maybe it would help out and make up some of the deficits from the fiction side. And it has. It’s a great reference tool, a fun read and accessible in its approach. I think I liked that the best about it right from the beginning. Some of the authors I had heard of, some not. Some are well-known, just not in the US market, or the novel market – some are relatively new. But it didn’t seem to matter. The information they were sharing was solid, and well-researched. It just wasn’t, as we claimed, complete.

I think it would be hubris to claim that the book would cover everything there was to cover in fantasy writing just over 300 pages – but the book came from the ebook publisher with that title, and well, I liked it. It also wasn’t a title already being used, which was a bonus. Then we started selling it. And people liked it (except, as they pointed out, it maybe wasn’t complete). Which got us thinking…. We should do another one. And thus the series was born. Only we made a mistake initially, and used “The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy” as the subtitle – which made coming up with titles for future editions somewhat difficult, and less than cohesive. And while we had some titles we thought were hilarious, we just didn’t figure they would go over well with the reading public (after a couple of hundred tries, you eventually get a little silly). So, we are correcting our mistake and renaming the series…

• The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy, Volume One: Alchemy with Words

• The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy, Volume Two: The Opus Magus

• The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy, Volume Three: The Author’s Grimoire

And so on. We plan to expand our writing how-to program in the future, so watch for further updates and news on that.

Thank you to all of you who sent in title suggestions for volume three. The book is almost ready for production now, and we are very proud of it. It looks and reads fantastic, and is full of oodles of tips and help. Even I learn things as I read through these volumes. Of course, I am not a writer, just the publisher, so there’s always much for me to learn.

And of course, we’ve learned our lesson and later this year, when we launch The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction, we will start it right off as Volume One – with plans to add additional volumes down the road.