Authors of Forever Fantasy Online say Hi

Hi! I'm Travis Bach, one of the authors of Forever Fantasy Online- which came out on June 1st with the audiobook to follow on June 5th. My wife is Rachel Aaron, who some of you may already know if you've read any of her published series (Like The Heartstrikers). Thanks for inviting us to come over and introduce ourselves.

If you're curious about our book, the short blurb is,

"Tina and James, estranged siblings, are caught online when their favorite MMO suddenly becomes a real world. Now, separated across a much larger and more deadly world, their skill at FFO is the only thing keeping them alive. It’s going to take every bit of their expertise (and hoarded loot) to find each other and get back home, but being the best in the game may no longer be good enough."

There's also a longer blurb and sample chapters.

Quickly about us: Rachel Aaron is a NY-published hybrid author with 15 books under her belt. Including an official Attack on Titan novel: Garrison Girl. I'm her husband and long-time editor, now first-time novelist. So while FFO is my first book, it's not my first rodeo (so to speak).

We're both super new to litrpg though as we discovered the genre while pitching our book to people. It's been a very fun and wild ride since then as we've explored the community and the deep well of novels it's produced. I love the genre and my kindle now overflows with new litrpg books to read. ^___^

If anyone has any questions, we're happy to answer them as best we can.

 

I misread the op. Deleted my response. Thought it was asking for blurb feedback. My mistake.

 

Hello Jun!

We did the "For fans of WoW and SAO!" line because in marketing (and like WHOA in NY book marketing) being able to say "My book is like Bestseller" is the gold standard because it very quickly tells the reader/editor/whomever you're attempting to sell this book to what to expect. The generally accepted industry metric is that you get 10 seconds to snag a reader's attention, and brand comparisons are just about the only whole ideas that are short enough to fit inside this tiny window.

This is why, if you were to go peruse the Fantasy bookshelf at your local bookstore, fully half the new releases would have "FOR FANS OF GAME OF THRONES" written in huge letters across the front. Because GOT is a hot brand and brand comparisons sell books. Not to everyone and not all the time, of course. Obviously, it didn't work on you! But generally speaking comparing your book to something potential fans of your book already like is a pretty solid strategy.

As to why we didn't put the game name in there, well, again, it's all about cramming as many hooks into as small a space as possible. Blurbs are short. Back at my NY publisher, we were capped at 150 words total. I go a bit longer than that with my indie titles, but I still try to keep things short because, again, readers are busy. They don't care about me or my book. After my flashy cover catches their eyes, I have a very short window of time to hook them in with text before they move on, and the name of the game simply wasn't that important. What matters is that it's 1) a VR game, and 2) these cool sounding people are now stuck in it. That's the hook: players are stuck in a video game turned real.

Again, this way of writing blurbs doesn't work for every reader. It didn't work for you, and it probably won't work for a lot of other people, but that's find. I don't think it's possible to write a blurb that appeals equally to everyone. Personally, I'm pretty damn proud of our blurb. It entertainingly and energetically crams a lot of information into a very small space. But hey, if it doesn't work and books aren't selling, I'll change it. I've canned a lot of blurbs I've loved over the years because they just weren't working, that's just part of selling books. You take your best shot, sometimes it flies, sometimes it doesn't.

Thank you very much for your feedback, though! You made some great points, and for the record, I do agree with you. I'm also not a fan of being told what I should like. I was shooting for "if you liked WoW and SAO, you'll like this!" but that clearly didn't come across for you, so maybe I should change things around. Definitely something to keep in mind. I hope you'll give our book a try anyway! Thank you for the thoughtful comment.

- Rachel

 

haha well you got a response to your feedback anyway! Thanks for putting in the thought!

 

Now that I've posted a thesis on blurb writing o_o ... Hello! I'm Rachel Aaron, author of 15 novels, 1 nonfiction book, and the other half of the team behind FOREVER FANTASY ONLINE. Thank you so much for inviting us in!

Confession: I actually had no idea LitRPG was a genre until we announced FFO and people started calling it that. Travis and I actually looked around for "trapped in the game" books many times a few years ago, but there was nothing there, so we stopped searching and wrote our own. Clearly, the genre has exploded in the interim! Lucky us, there's not a ton to read. I look forward to stacking my TBR to the sky.

<3
- Rachel Aaron

 

We've been described as "GamerLit" as well, which has a nice ring to it. Personally, I vastly prefer "Lit-X" or "X-lit" to "X-punk." So many things try to be punk when there's nothing punk about them! They're just normal old Fantasies/Urban Fantasies with a theme setting. "Lit" is a much more descriptive suffix/prefix IMO.

 

There was recently a whole discussion about this in the GameLit Society forum where a reader was ranting about the comparison thing. It was fresh in my mind, and hence the response. The general feel of the discussion was that if you're quoting someone awesome, but weird if an author says it for themself.

That said I will be reading (well listening) to your book, because I liked your other novels. I enjoyed hearing about Bob and his lady love. My feedback was more for if I saw the cover and intro to the blurb and had never heard of you before (which admittedly I wouldn't have if this came out 7 months ago).

I actually have you partially to thank for the Dragon theme of my first LitRPG. I'd just finished Heartstrikers when I started writing it, and had dragons on the brain. Pair that with some concept art for a cover and.... "I need to write a book about dragons."

 

But doesn't describing a book as "X-punk" convey a sense of flavor to the reader, same as a comparison to WoW or SAO (Although if i had to raise an issue there it would be that you are comparing visual and interactive media, to solely written media)? Sure the setting may be solely thematic, but it also gives the reader a sense of what to expect, which is the point of these definitions rather than total accuracy?

 

It's still a pretty new subgenre so I think we're going to see a lot of evolution within the next decade. 10 years ago it was more or less non-existent, though people were toying with similar ideas before that. Then we had LitRPG, then we had some guy try to trademark the descriptive term of the genre and setting people on fire. GameLit, so far as I know, at that point started gaining more steam.

Similarly to you, I thought about writing a book along these lines before I even knew it existed. I think my first real inspiration was Sword Art Online and Log Horizon, followed by Ready Player One. It wasn't until I searched for similar novels that I discovered that LitRPG and GameLit were things.

 

I like the GamerLit tag as well. Though it makes me think of that anime Recovery of an MMO Junkie. Which is basically a contemporary drama that centers around MMO players. So Gamer Literature.
Does anyone remember the old anime tag, "Inter-dimensional Exiles"? That's really what I think best describes our book since it lacks a lot of obvious game mechanics in its narrative. (Not that those are bad. We just didn't use them.)

 

So much so here as well. In particular it was Log Horizon I found to be the most inspirational of the lot. I really liked how it focused on wider social and setting issues than SAO did. Haha, SAO barely had time for it's own central conflict of clearing the dungeon. But I loved it none-the-less.

Going into writing FFO, I really wanted to wrestle with changing the world like Log Horizon did. I wanted to aim for a more mature story that battled with shades of gray as much as it does monsters. For example: one of our main characters, James, has the same big-thinking that Shiroe in Log Horizon exhibits.

 

Greetings!

Holy crap Batman!, Here i come walking in this thread and feel like the guy that just woke up and see 10 empty coffee pots on the table and a pack of people shapes vibrating at ultrasonic speeds!

 

I wanted to touch on the social elements too. The beginning of Freehaven Online: Dragonsbane (my LitRPG) is semi-autobiographical, in that like my protagonist, my sibling died and years after his death I gained access to his vanilla collector’s edition MMO account. When I signed in I found that the Guild he talked so much about building up while he was alive was empty, etc. I wanted to explore the idea that friends in a game could still be real friends if you never met them in real life, what kind of impact this technology would have on people socially, and how people might treat NPCs if they had some intelligence. I didn’t want it all to be just a level grind.

Sorry for typos. I’m on an iPad now and autocorrect murders my coherence sometimes.

 

I think that's really cool. I've downloaded the sample and am already intrigued. Such a sorrowful opening so far.

 

Opps, forgot to say hi! I did so on Twitter though, so that counts.

I look forward to reading it. Two novels in my backlog before it though, but I'm excited to see what comes of it.

Edit: hello!

 

Welcome to the Jungle! We like fun and games!

With my standard welcome out of the way, welcome to both Travis and Rachel. As you already noticed the forum gets pretty active when you light a fire under them

I have heard a little about the Forever Fantasy book and from that it sounds to be an excellent read and it's in my wishlist for next paycheck, though some may gripe about the missing LitRPG elements it's not really your fault since you only discovered the little hole we call home a short time ago

LitRPG has only really being around for a short while (less than 3 years EDIT: Bad info, much longer or so i have now been informed.) with GAMElit being even newer than that, the thing that mostly defines them as being RPG and GAME is the use of the mechanics. For example a LitRPG book showing stats/level/level ups/buffs and item descriptions, for GAMElit maybe it's an FPS a lot of the time those weapons have their own stats in-game, or a CiV game you have resource management. A lot of the people who read these stories are specifically looking for those details.