There is a piece of conventional wisdom in fantasy publishing that has always struck me as somewhat backwards: if you want to write serious fantasy, write a trilogy. Look at Tolkien. Look at Terry Brooks. Look at Robert Jordan. Look at George R. R. Martin. Look at almost any shelf devoted to modern fantasy, and you will find three-, five-, seven-, and twelve-volume epics. The aspiring fantasy novelist sees all of this and naturally concludes that this is simply what fantasy novels are supposed to look like.
I think that can be a serious mistake.
This isn’t an argument against series, and certainly not against trilogies. Some stories genuinely require more than one volume, and some writers are extraordinarily good at sustaining a narrative across several books. The problem arises when an emerging author assumes that a trilogy is the appropriate starting structure simply because successful fantasy authors have written them.
An established author and an emerging author are not making the same proposition to a reader. An established author can ask you to come back. An emerging author has to convince you to stay.
That distinction is easy to overlook, particularly in an age when authors are encouraged to think about their work as intellectual property and their fictional worlds as potential franchises. A writer can spend years constructing a six-book story, complete with maps, genealogies, invented languages, political histories, magic systems, and elaborate plans for how everything will eventually resolve. From the author’s perspective, that may be an exciting creative achievement. From the perspective of a stranger encountering the book for the first time, however, it can look like a very large commitment to an author they’ve never heard of.
The reader isn’t merely being asked to spend ten dollars. They’re being asked to spend time, and time is the more valuable commodity.
Fantasy novels can require twenty, thirty, or forty hours of reading. If the first book is explicitly only the first installment of a much larger narrative, the implied commitment becomes considerably greater. The reader doesn’t know whether they’ll enjoy the characters, whether the prose will work for them, whether the worldbuilding will be fascinating or exhausting, or whether the eventual payoff will justify the investment. They don’t know whether the author will finish the series. They don’t even know whether the next book will arrive in a year or in ten.
Yet the emerging author is essentially asking them to trust that all of this will be worth it.
Why should they?
The author hasn’t earned that trust yet.
This is why I think Tolkien is frequently invoked in exactly the wrong way when writers talk about epic fantasy. Tolkien did eventually produce The Lord of the Rings, but he did not begin his relationship with readers by asking them to commit themselves to a massive unfinished epic. He began with The Hobbit, and The Hobbit is a complete and satisfying story. Bilbo leaves the Shire, encounters the dwarves, faces danger, finds the ring, confronts Smaug, participates in the Battle of Five Armies, and ultimately returns home.
You can read The Hobbit and stop.
That is enormously important.
Of course, Tolkien had created a world much larger than the events of The Hobbit. Middle-earth contained histories, languages, legends, peoples, wars, and mythologies stretching far beyond Bilbo’s adventure. But the reader didn’t have to know any of that in order to enjoy the novel. The larger mythology was an invitation rather than an obligation.
In fact, I would argue that this is one of the great lessons of Tolkien’s success. The world was larger than the story.
Modern fantasy sometimes gets that relationship backwards. The author creates an enormous world and then feels compelled to tell the reader about all of it. The story consequently becomes a delivery mechanism for the worldbuilding. The first novel is no longer a complete experience; it is the first installment in an enormous explanation.
Tolkien’s world feels enormous precisely because The Hobbit doesn’t attempt to tell us everything.
There is another wrinkle to the Tolkien comparison that aspiring authors often overlook. The Lord of the Rings itself was not conceived in quite the same way that the modern fantasy trilogy is conceived. It was essentially one enormous work that was eventually published in three volumes. The familiar three-part structure therefore isn’t quite the template that modern writers sometimes imagine it to be. Tolkien wasn’t sitting down with the commercial objective of creating a trilogy because that’s what successful fantasy writers do.
He was writing the story he wanted to write.
The distinction matters.
The same principle can be seen in Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, which was his debut novel. Brooks went on to build an enormous body of work in the Shannara universe, but the first book could function as a novel in its own right. Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon offers another useful example. It introduced the world that would become the basis for a much larger series, but it didn’t require the reader to purchase subsequent volumes simply to discover whether the first story had an ending.
These authors demonstrated something that emerging writers would do well to remember: a book can be the beginning of a series without feeling like the beginning of a sentence that stops halfway through.
That distinction is crucial.
There is nothing inherently wrong with leaving questions unanswered. In fact, unanswered questions can be one of the pleasures of fiction. A novel should leave the reader with a sense that the fictional world extends beyond the edges of the page. The problem is when unanswered questions aren’t mysteries but deferred resolutions.
There is a profound difference between finishing a novel and thinking, “I wonder what happens next?” and finishing one thinking, “Wait. That’s it?”
The first response creates anticipation. The second creates frustration.
Star Wars provides perhaps the clearest example outside literature. Star Wars: A New Hope works because it is a complete adventure. Luke Skywalker joins the Rebellion, rescues Leia, discovers the Force, confronts the Empire, and ultimately helps destroy the Death Star. The immediate conflict is resolved. The characters’ larger journeys obviously aren’t finished, and the universe is full of unanswered questions, but the story we were promised has been told.
Imagine if A New Hope had ended just before the destruction of the Death Star. Luke has learned about the Force, Han is reconsidering his priorities, Leia has been rescued, and the Rebels are preparing their attack—and then the movie cuts to black with the words “To Be Continued.”
It would have been maddening.
The brilliance of A New Hope is that it doesn’t require you to see The Empire Strikes Back. It makes you want to see it.
That is exactly the position an emerging novelist should try to create.
Don’t make the reader need Book Two. Make the reader want Book Two.
There is an important difference between those two propositions. The first transfers the burden of your unfinished story to the reader. The second rewards the reader for having finished the story you gave them.
Established authors have earned the privilege of asking readers to wait. When readers pick up the latest enormous installment from an author they’ve followed for years, they’re making an informed decision. They already know the author’s work. They already trust the characters and the world. They’ve already been rewarded for previous investments.
A debut novelist doesn’t have that history.
This is part of what makes George R. R. Martin’s situation with A Song of Ice and Fire so interesting. The individual novels have been hugely successful, but Martin constructed a narrative in which the reader’s ultimate satisfaction is heavily dependent upon events that have not yet been published. That creates a very different relationship between author and audience.
With a standalone novel, the relationship is essentially, “I loved that book. I hope this author writes another.”
With an unfinished epic, it becomes, “I loved that book. I need this author to finish what I started.”
Those are psychologically very different relationships.
The longer the series remains unfinished, the more consequential that distinction becomes. Readers aren’t simply waiting for another adventure. They’re waiting for resolutions to questions they’ve been carrying around for years. The author has accumulated an enormous amount of narrative debt.
That isn’t necessarily a reason not to write an epic. But it is certainly a reason for an emerging author to understand what they’re taking on.
The larger point isn’t that new authors should write standalone novels and never touch a series. That’s much too simplistic. If the story genuinely demands three volumes, then by all means write three volumes. If you’ve conceived an epic that cannot honestly be compressed into one book without destroying what makes it work, you shouldn’t mutilate it merely to satisfy some imagined rule about accessibility.
But you should ask yourself why the story requires three books.
If the answer is, “Because that’s what fantasy novels are supposed to be,” that’s probably not a good enough reason.
And before dividing the manuscript into three volumes, there is another question worth asking: If nobody knew my name, would a stranger have a compelling reason to read Book One?
An even more revealing question is whether the first book would still feel worthwhile if the reader never purchased Book Two.
If the answer is no, then perhaps what you’ve written isn’t a novel at all. Perhaps you’ve written the first third of a novel and labeled it “Book One.”
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
The modern publishing environment makes this temptation particularly understandable. Writers are encouraged to think about series branding, reader funnels, rapid releases, subscription models, algorithms, and lifetime customer value. There are perfectly legitimate commercial reasons for wanting readers to move from one book directly into another.
But fiction isn’t a software subscription.
Readers aren’t looking for another product in a content pipeline. They’re looking for a story.
And the most effective way for an emerging author to build a readership is still remarkably old-fashioned: give people something they love.
That doesn’t require abandoning ambition. It doesn’t mean writing small stories. It doesn’t mean avoiding complex worlds or long novels. It certainly doesn’t mean pretending that every book has to be completely disconnected from everything else.
It means making the first book worthy of the reader’s investment.
Build the world. Plant the mysteries. Create the history. Leave doors unopened. Give the reader the sense that there are other stories waiting in the wings.
But give them one story that works.
The ideal debut fantasy might therefore be a novel that says, “This story is finished,” while simultaneously whispering, “This world isn’t.”
That is a much stronger proposition than telling the reader, “This story will be finished eventually.”
Tolkien understood it. Lucas understood it. Brooks understood it. Anthony understood it. The common element wasn’t that they all followed a particular number of books. It was that they gave audiences a reason to care before asking those audiences for a larger commitment.
That’s the lesson emerging authors should take from the giants of fantasy.
Don’t imitate the number of volumes.
Don’t imitate the maps, the invented languages, the thousand-year histories, or the franchise architecture simply because those things are associated with successful fantasy.
Instead, imitate the underlying principle: earn the reader’s trust.
Write the first book so that someone can finish it, close the cover, and feel that their time was well spent.
Then, if you’ve done your job, they’ll look at the shelf and ask the question every author wants to hear:
“So… when’s the next one?”
That is how you build a series.
Not by demanding that readers commit to one.
By giving them a reason to ask for one.
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© 2026 Christian A. Larsen. All Rights Reserved.
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