I just looked up the difference between low fantasy and high fantasy, and I’m left unsure what I’m writing.
According to several articles online, low fantasy is set in the real world (but with fantasy/magical elements) and focuses on personal (little world) stakes and conflicts, while high fantasy is set in a fictional world and focuses epic (big world) stakes and conflicts.
Most of what I write is set in a fictional world but with the little world conflicts driving the story (though the big world conflicts are present). So, for example, a teenage girl inherits the throne, but the driving conflict is her relationship with her love interest.
Is this going to be a problem for publishing or marketing if that’s not what readers are expecting or looking for? Or is there an audience for that kind of story as well?
[Edit: I just found another definition saying that high fantasy is set in a world with frequently used magic, and low fantasy is set in a world with little or no magic… so I’m even more confused. I’d say my writing is pretty evenly divided between the two.]
Great question. Fortunately, I have really good news:
- It really doesn’t matter. Your job is to write a great story, how to market it is a question down the road. No you won’t hurt your sales either way (as long as you’ve told a great story), because of #2.
- It’s more like a spectrum than a boundary line. Very few stories fit cleanly into one camp or the other. Based on the totality of the story, we call it one or the other. But most stories are somewhere in the middle.
- As you’re finding, there’s not even a standard definition of low vs. high fantasy. The concept will often be similar, but if you asked ten different publishers and ten different editors to define high and low fantasy, you’d get twenty different answers.
Truly, don’t worry about it. There is always a market for great stories. Your only job is to tell a great story.
Defining the genre is important to the marketing, but that’s a decision to make after the story is done.
