Let’s Write A Free Article About HALF-ELVEN THIEF!
One of the side effects of having been in self-publishing as long as I have is that my email has been out there a long time, so I get a LOT of scam messages.
Sketchy book promo sites are a dime a dozen, and they spring up all the time and frequently send out cold call emails to authors. I know some of them are operated by the same guy (or guys), because in his email database he mistakenly has my email address linked to LitRPG author Darren Hultberg Jr. So whenever the scammer guy (or guys) starts a new promo site with a name like BookSplurgzzzzzzz I get an email addressed to “Dear Darren Hultberg Jr” inviting me to the site. (I’ve never spoken with Mr. Hultberg or read his books, but I’m sure he’s a fine author who doesn’t deserve to have scammers emailing him.) Or I get emails from sketchy “book marketing” sites that say in exchange for $5,000, they’ll make sure your book gets featured on Publishers Weekly or something like that.
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of “Facebook ad” phishing messages, claiming that if I don’t click on their fake link and fill out their fake form, my Facebook ad account gets deactivated. Lately they’ve all been coming from Hotmail accounts for some reason, and recently I had a message claiming to be from “Facebook ad support” that actually came from address that looked something like jesusrises@hotmail.com
If Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Lord and Savior of mankind, wanted to disable my Facebook ads account, I am pretty sure He would express His divine will through a method other than a Hotmail account. And if the rather less-than-divine organization of Facebook wanted to disable my ad account, they don’t send warnings, they (or whatever algorithm is running amok) just does it.
Another recent scam came from a “book marketing” service inviting me to write a free article for their members about the inspirations behind HALF-ELVEN THIEF. It was obviously an automated letter generated by scanning the Amazon sales ranks. I didn’t want to write a free article for some scammy book marketing service, but I decided instead to write it for my site!
So, therefore, here are the origins and inspirations for my HALF-ELVEN THIEF series.
I first started thinking about what would become HALF-ELVEN THIEF in early 2023. A couple of different ideas went into the series.
I’ll talk about the business/publishing side of the ideas first, and then the creative/artistic ones.
1.) I wanted to try writing shorter, less complicated books, because it felt like my books had been becoming more complicated and difficult to write lately. Of course, that’s not entirely true – my books have always been kind of complicated. SOUL OF SERPENTS was pretty complex, and I wrote that way back in 2011. SOUL OF SORCERY was VERY complicated, and that was 2012. But that means I have been writing complicated books for the last thirteen years at a minimum, so I wanted to try something different.
2.) I also wanted to write something completely new and put it in Kindle Unlimited.
Like many indie authors, my relationship with the Kindle Unlimited program has been fraught because of its exclusivity requirement. There is potentially a lot of money to be made in Kindle Unlimited, but at the same time that also prevents a book from selling on any of the other ebook platforms. I have experimented with putting some of my older series on KU, but what usually happens is that I end up making about 90% of what I would make if I had just kept the books wide.
KU’s algorithms also have a pretty strong recency bias. The best way to have a book perform well in KU is to write a series of them and release them fairly close together. They all tend to reinforce each other then. Which, of course, is obviously easier with shorter, less complicated books.
3.) Marvel lockout syndrome.
I also wanted to write something completely unrelated to anything I had written before.
Like, by this point I’ve written almost fifty books set in Andomhaim, over thirty books with Caina as the main character, and over twenty with Nadia as the main character. Readers tend to be completionists who want to read everything in the proper order, but at the same time, you also tend to lose readers from installment to installment. Several dozen books in a character’s backstory can be a daunting obstacle to starting a series.
I had been thinking about this for a while, and then in 2023 we saw cinematic juggernaut Marvel Studios run into trouble after fifteen years of putting out very interconnected movies. Marvel movies used to regularly pull in over a billion dollars, but suddenly they weren’t performing at the box office like they used to. As with everything in pop culture, there’s a billion different theories about that (and a billion terabytes worth of Internet arguments), but I suspect continuity lockout was part of it. For example, THE MARVELS was the sequel to something like ten different things with a combined watching time of over fifty hours. That’s nearly an entire semester’s worth of stuff to watch, and at that point, it almost feels like homework instead of entertainment.
That was just sort of a crystallization of what I had been thinking about with long series.
So I wanted to write a self-contained series that would be a good entry point and introduction to my writing for people, and yet wouldn’t be connected to any of the other very large series that I have written.
Those were the business/publishing reasons for HALF-ELVEN THIEF, and now let’s talk about some of the creative ideas that went into it.
4.) I love basic/generic fantasy tropes.
My absolute favorite kind of fantasy is what people call “generic” or “traditional” fantasy. Like, I want to see a knight, a dwarf, an elf, and wizard go into a dungeon and fight some orcs, maybe an evil wizard, and steal their loot. Or go on a quest where they have to visit several successive dungeons and fight different monsters. Or a Conan-style barbarian wandering around having adventures in decadent city-states and occasionally beheading an evil wizard. That’s my favorite kind of fantasy story.
Of course, in the bad old days before self-publishing, you couldn’t sell a book like that because the publishers didn’t want traditional fantasy. That’s why the original books in THE GHOSTS didn’t have orcs or dwarves or anything like that, since I wrote them long enough ago that I was still trying to sell them to traditional publishers.
So when it came to HALF-ELVEN THIEF, I decided to write a book around some of those traditional fantasy tropes – thieves’ guild, half-elves, sinister wizards, and so forth.
5.) Half-elves.
So why is Rivah, the main character of HALF-ELVEN THIEF, a half-elf?
The reason came from a semi-ridiculous controversy in 2023. Apparently Hasbro, the owners of Dungeons & Dragons, had decided to remove the terms “half-elf” and half-orc” from the game since they might be potentially offensive. The usual Internet furor ensued, though the truth was that the game had been modified so that you could have characters who were any combination of fantasy races, like a character who was half elven and half gnome or something. (I suppose the larger issue is that Hasbro really wants to turn Dungeons & Dragons into a subscription service like Xbox Game Pass, but that’s a different topic.)
Anyway, the idea caught in my head, and so I decided that Rivah would be a half-elf.
6.) Failures of leadership.
Of course, you can tell a story with traditional fantasy tropes, but all stories, regardless of genre, have themes to them.
An author’s opinion of his own work is often erroneous, but I think one of the chief themes of HALF-ELVEN THIEF is failures of leadership.
I thought about that a great deal in 2023, because in 2023 I knew a lot of people who quit the traditional “helping” professions like the medical field, teaching, law enforcement, and so on. They didn’t quit because they disliked the work and not even because the money was bad, but because the leadership at their institutions was so inept and even malignant that it turned the workplace into a toxic environment. So they left to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere, which overall is a net loss for civilization, isn’t it? We need people to be nurses and teachers and cops, but if they leave not because the work is challenging but because their managers are grotesquely incompetent narcissists, that is a bad thing.
Like, to return to this week’s Question of the Week about villains, the one of reasons Grand Admiral Thrawn is an effective villain is because he is an effective leader. His soldiers are glad to follow him because he’s not egotistical, he’s not capricious or unfair, and he cares mostly about results. Unfortunately, in Real Life, leaders like Thrawn are rare. We have far more leaders like Admiral Ozzel from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, a petty, insecure, incompetent man who Darth Vader finally Force-chokes to death in exasperation.
We’ve all experienced working under someone like Admiral Ozzel, even if you’re not in one of the helping fields. No doubt we have all had an incompetent or malicious supervisors before, and it’s remarkable how often incompetent managers turn out to be malicious ones as well.
So I was thinking a lot about that, about how incredibly destructive bad leadership can be, and that reflected quite a bit into HALF-ELVEN THIEF.
Those were the business and creative inspirations that went into HALF-ELVEN THIEF.
Finally, I would like close with gratitude for how well HALF-ELVEN THIEF has been received. I’ve tried three “new” things in the last three years, and HALF-ELVEN THIEF by far has gone the best. I’m grateful that so many people have enjoyed Rivah’s adventures!
-JM