What makes a bestselling fantasy author?

There are so many diverse views on this topic!

Here’s what Claire Bradshaw has to say about what makes a bestselling fantasy author.:

A magic system: This is the element that sets fantasy fiction apart from other genres. For a story to be considered ‘fantasy’, it needs to contain some sort of magic system. But what exactly do we mean by this? In short, a magic system refers to things that occur or exist in your story that do not or cannot exist in the real world. Elements of sorcery, witchcraft, and enchantment; fantastical creatures and the supernatural; advanced abilities or powers… Basically, anything with no basis in real-world evidence or logic can be considered ‘magic’.
A well-developed setting: This is another absolutely vital element within fantasy fiction. When you’re writing in this genre, your story takes place in a completely new world (and even if your fantasy is based on Earth, it’s not the Earth we actually know). In order to immerse readers in your world, you must develop your setting thoroughly and thoughtfully.
A cast of complex characters: As with any novel, it’s often the characters in fantasy fiction that truly get readers invested in the story. Your setting, plot and magic system may intrigue and engage readers, but none of these aspects matter if your readers don’t care about the characters and their outcomes. How many characters your story contains is entirely up to you, but if you’re writing a series (as the majority of fantasy writers are), it’s better to have a cast of several main characters, as well as your auxiliary characters. This provides interest and diversity within the story, helping to sustain readers’ engagement over multiple books.
A central conflict: The key to every good story is conflict. This is especially true in fantasy fiction, where the stakes are often higher for your characters, and the story usually stretches across multiple books in a series. There are a few types of conflict you can (and should) explore within your story:
- Inner conflict, experienced by your characters;
- Small-scale conflict, experienced between your characters;
- Large-scale conflict, in which your characters are up against a powerful external force.
A power structure/system of government: In every fantasy world, there must be an established power structure. This usually refers to a system of government within the world. (The only exception to this is if you’ve created a world in which the ‘system’ is actually complete anarchy, but this would lead to pure chaos and might prove difficult to shape into a coherent story.) To work out your world’s system, begin by asking one simple question: who holds the power within this world? It might begin with a single ruler, such as a king or queen in a monarchical government; it might be a high council of magical people; it might be a religious entity.

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What makes a bestselling fantasy author? The publisher’s risk…

The above provides you with some brilliantly practical guidelines to better understand what makes a bestselling fantasy author. These points however are not new, they are well known, and multiple websites will describe these in some form or another. So, for the purpose of this article, let’s look at the question – What makes a bestselling fantasy author? – through a completely different set of lenses, not from the perspective of the author who desires to produce an international bestseller and get reasonably rich from this, but from the perspective of the publisher, who has to embrace the risk that goes with “what if backing this author doesn’t work out and the entire exercise turn out to be a complete flop?” This is where the detailed research case studies that two applied Human Futurists have worked on, one of their focus areas being investigating the Intelligent Mathematical Blueprints of international bestselling authors, comes into its own and the literally changes for the better, the ultra-complex risk versus reward decisions that publishers must navigate around authors who haven’t yet become household names!

What makes a bestselling fantasy author? Look for No3 in their charts!

All of the above feed into the new and exciting field that Chris and Suzanne Styles are researching and developing, called Human Futurology and the information contained within each of these detailed studies flows from a life path experiential model they have created, which if you will, describes your journey from birth to death (whenever that might be!) in numerical data strings or lines of code. When it comes down to what makes a bestselling author, their work has found in many cases, that these international bestselling authors, had/have numerology number 3 (the number that resonates with imagination, inspiration, creativity, communication, self-expression, joy, happiness etc.) presenting powerfully and often multiple times, in their date of birth numerology chart and birth name numerology chart!

Enter the New World of Predictive Human Futurology

Chris and Suzanne Styles are two entrepreneurial human futurists who have created a strategic thinking consulting business that specialises in human futurology (the use of predictive modelling to help people more accurately predict their future). They excel at taking you and your teams on a thought leadership journey that gets you and everyone around you, Thinking into NEW Results. Chris and Suzanne Styles are passionate about helping people make sense of their lives, discovering who they really are, what they are brilliant at, why they are here, how to leverage their core talents and better risk manage their lives both personally and professionally. As you will discover in their individual profiles, they have somewhat different professional backgrounds and skills sets. It is this diversity of skills that makes them such a power couple to work with as strategic futurists. Before Chris and Suzanne Styles returned to the UK, they hosted Africa’s first ever business and life success talk radio show, The Success Show on Mix-FM. Their weekly shows attracted attention from all over the continent, with show podcast downloads running into the hundreds of thousands. They have dedicated years of research work and personal investment into understanding how to better predict a person’s future and coined the term, Human Futurology, because that sums up exactly what they, as strategic thinking consultants, specialise in.