Writing A Bestselling Series

Chapter 14: Choosing my Covers

In 1998 and 1999, I found myself in an odd place. I had advised one of my publishers to push Harry Potter big, and I was filled with anticipation about that. I was writing little Star Wars game books as fast I could, and I was invited to write a novel based upon an old movie script written by L. Ron Hubbard. But I was worried about my career.

I had deep concerns about my relationship with my editor, and I wanted to get those worked out and see if I could patch up my relationship. At about that time, he told me that my publisher was considering whether or not to push my fantasy series as a "super lead" title. This would have given me a lot more visibility on the shelves and perhaps even a decent promotional budget. That all sounded great, but it didn't seem likely to happen. Part of the problem of course was that my publisher already had a couple of other super-lead authors, and so working in a third one—someone who would get six months of promotion in a year, seemed hard to schedule. Then of course there was the question of, "Would my editor support me?"

Well, some meetings were held, and after a few months it was decided that the books wouldn't get that big promotion. So I had to begin to wonder: How can an author push his works big when the publisher doesn't seem willing to put any muscle behind a series?

I think that every author should be thinking about this with every series. Some authors will write a tepid series, do nothing to promote it, and wonder why they aren't making the big bucks. I just wanted to figure out how to break in well. In other words, you ask yourself, "How can I push my books so big that my publisher takes notice?"

Now, I'd written a story that I thought could be translated into other mediums. At the time, I saw movies and videogames as also being big possibilities. Before college, I had played some D&D with my little brother and his friends, and I had quickly become interested in developing my own games. So when I saw a little article in the newspaper about a local company that was producing videogames, I called them, introduced myself to the president, Les Pardew, and asked if I could have an interview with him.

I met with Les and showed him my first novel in the Runelords series, and I asked how I might be able to see about getting a big fantasy role-playing game made. He read the book, as did several of his employees, and decided to take a shot at it. But, he said, "I think that before I can sell this to a big company, you need to get a reputation as a video game designer." 

 I asked how to go about that, and he said that perhaps there was a way that I could do it. He asked if I was any good at writing proposals. Well, while working as an editor at BYU, I had helped dozens of professors write proposals that had brought in millions of dollars in grants, and I think I'd learned how to do it pretty well.

So the next day or two I worked on a proposal for a game called Starcraft: Brood War. This wasn't hard, since I was working with Alan Tew and some other talented game designers and technicians. Les explained that if the proposal was accepted, he would have me work as co-leader of the design team. The idea was simple. The first game in the StarCraft world was very good, but it wasn't well balanced. So we proposed to fix it. We faxed it in to the folks at Blizzard, and they accepted it with neck-breaking speed. Now, being co-leader on the design team was a pretty easy job. All that I did was come up with ideas for the game.

For example, in my novel Brotherhood of the Wolf, I had gone into a lot of work designing my reavers. I had taken some of the inspiration for them from insects, including the ant lion. My reavers would dig themselves underground, then wait for prey to bumble along, at which point they would leap out from under the dirt and pounce. So just for kicks, I suggested a similar thing in the game for creatures that we called "Zerg lurkers."

One of the problems that Starcraft had was that the humans died too easy. So Les suggested that we develop better armor or heavier guns, but those were the first two ideas that came to mind, so I suggested a third alternative: better medics.