Philip Athans is a New York Times bestselling American fantasy and science fiction author, longtime editor of the Forgotten Realms novel line, and the author of The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction: 6 Steps to Writing and Publishing Your Bestseller (Adams Media, 2010), with a foreword and case-study chapter contributed by Forgotten Realms giant R.A. Salvatore. The book has become one of the standard genre-specific craft references for speculative fiction writers.
His editorial career began in 1995 when TSR Inc. (the original publisher of Dungeons and Dragons) hired him as a Books editor. Two years later TSR was acquired by Wizards of the Coast and the editorial team moved to Seattle, where Athans rose to senior managing editor for book publishing. He edited the Forgotten Realms novel line at the height of its commercial run, working closely with R.A. Salvatore, Paul S. Kemp, Elaine Cunningham, Ed Greenwood, Erin M. Evans, Richard Lee Byers, and dozens of other Realms authors, and developing complex intellectual properties that extended into game design, comics, and media licensing. He left Wizards of the Coast in 2010 and runs an active freelance editorial and developmental coaching practice.
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction is structured as six successive steps from idea through publication: defining the genre and its sub-genres (high fantasy, sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, hard SF, space opera, steampunk, dystopian, and others), the nuances of storytelling, building protagonists, antagonists, and supporting casts, world-building from blank slate through flora and fauna, the details that make worlds and inhabitants stand out, and the publishing business. Athans interviewed R.A. Salvatore, Paul S. Kemp, Terry Brooks, Kevin J. Anderson, and other working fantasy and SF authors, editors, and agents to back the book up. The closing chapter is a line-by-line editorial deconstruction of a previously unpublished Salvatore story.
His blog Fantasy Author's Handbook has run weekly since June 15, 2009, with more than eight hundred posts on speculative fiction craft, publishing, and the working business of genre writing, and his collected best essays are available as a printed volume of the same name. He has also written original fiction including the Forgotten Realms novel Annihilation (2004) and the Watercourse Trilogy (Whisper of Waves, Lies of Light, Scream of Stone), and edited multiple shared-world anthologies.
