As part of my journey with self-publishing, I’m going to be creating a multiverse, with a number of series all linking together to tell a much bigger story. In this article I talk about my desire to tell huge, epic stories and how I’m finally able to do so…
As you know, back at the end of last year, I decided to part ways with my agent and pursue Self-Publishing. This wasn’t born out of any frustrations about the difficulties of traditional publishing and looking for an easier ride. Instead, it was born out of a couple of years of experiments and some realisations that came out of that.
I’m not anti-traditional publishing. I have friends who work in the industry and they are good people. I may do it in the future. But I became aware that they weren’t interested in the type of stories I like. I created a pen name and self-published under that for a couple of years and in doing so realised that the issue wasn’t me.
You see, ever since I was 8 years old, I’ve wanted to tell BIG stories. I wrote a Narnia inspired epic fantasy that my teacher thought was so good, they typed it up and put it into the school library. It was a hundred pages long and has unfortunately long since been lost (probably for the best).
But a few years later I discovered Lord of the Rings and was amazed by the worldbuilding. The Shire felt as real to me as my local area, and I was amazed by the imaginative scope of it. It became my benchmark, with everything I wrote afterwards trying to be more imaginative and bigger in scope.
Along the way, I discovered the importance of character, and this merged into wanting to tell individual stories against a vast canvas.
Because I was so overflowing with ideas, I struggled to bring everything into a single story. The Four Realms was that, a book I’d worked on for years. It’s a cross-genre mash up of ideas and I’m grateful for Andy Remic in believing in me, because no other publisher would take it on. For a start, how do you even market such a book?
I realised that if I wanted to make it in traditional publishing, I needed to constrain myself. Pick one genre and stick to it. But even then, I had bold ideas for arcs that crossed multiple books.
When I first started taking my writing seriously, three book deals were the norm. That gave writers the room to build big, epic arcs. But then authors got asked to wrap everything up in 2 books, and now, unless you are at the top of the top, you’re unlikely to get a book contract for more than one book.
And that causes issues. Because ideas setting up a payoff in a later book get chopped out, and everything becomes a self-contained story that isn’t given the room to grow.
Now, I don’t blame traditional publishing for this… but I got told that I didn’t want to tell big stories, that I’d get bored, that they would become a chore. And I believed them.
But still, I planned out a twenty book series, navigating all the challenges of sell-thrus and different length contracts, only to find out that there are successful authors out there with popular series, who are struggling to get a new contract even when their numbers are good.
And I’ve written 5 book series under my pen name, and sure, I need to figure out a way to keep a wiki on all this stuff… but I do love writing new books in an existing series.
So upon leaving my agent, I really went back to what I love about writing and storytelling in general. And those big epic multi-arc stories somehow had got lost along the way.
By rights, I should start a single new series, write 3 books and then market… but the time spent editing for my agent, also saw me write a LOT of books. Most of these were the first books in series, but there were a couple of second books as well. They’re all very different, but unlike my book I wrote when I was 8, I think these are good.
And so I made a decision.
What if I created a multiverse? What if all these books and their series were linked cosmere-style and together they painted a HUGE picture… a HUGE epic story. So over the summer, I got planning. I came up with something truly huge.
And unlike the Marvel Multiverse, I’m not writing these series so all the main protagonists meet up and kick ass. I want these stories to weave in and out of each other, in a way that the series can be enjoyed on their own, or as a whole, spanning a lot of books and series.
One of my biggest challenges was magic. In each of my series, there’s a different magic system. So, I also spent the summer building an overarcing structure to magic, that my various magic systems (with a little adjustment) can fit into or co-exist. It was incredibly complicated and involved me building a few computer models to get it to work. The result is that whereas Cosmere has about 30 different magic systems, I have over 300.
To put this to the test, I rewrote The Four Realms. I replaced the magic system so it fits into my global schema without it being too noticeable. It worked, and as a result, the 2024 edition of The Four Realms is out to buy now.
I’m now in the process of retro-fitting the magic structure to other books I have written and are just sitting there. I have an order, and once they are done, they’ll be coming out.
They’ll seem unrelated at first, just a cameo or a reference here or there. With Phase 1 we’re going to be very much be focused on the earth-based stories, although later on, expect to see a couple of fantasy worlds you can assume is off on some distant planet somehow (I mean, I know, but I ain’t telling)
Over the coming years, series will come and go, some having more integration with the central arc, others hardly anything.
I can’t promise that you’ll like every series. I intend to write a lot of different things and so there’s always going to be those that just aren’t to your taste, but I can promise you that over the years, my ideal of what telling a truly epic tale comprises has only grown. Some things will take years to pay off, but I can promise you that when they do, they are going to feel all the more epic because of it.
Most importantly, I cannot begin to tell you, how excited this all makes me… I have a full schedule of book releases to get to you and my plan for the winter is just to go monk mode, keep my head down and start getting all these books released.
I did think of hiding the fact that the books are all connected and let readers work it out, but I figure it makes for a more interesting story for those of you who are interested in the writer side of things to follow along with. It’s certainly not going to be easy, especially with some of the things I want to pull off.
But the good news is that all the planning is over and we’re on our way with the first two contributions: The Four Realms and its prequel novella. Our story has started and we’ve got many, many years before we get close to the end.
*technically, it’s a shared universe but multiverse is better universally understood
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