To find out, I contacted some publishers, and they hooked us up with their mapmakers, who told us how they work with authors, how they draw maps, and what they’ve contributed to the fictional worlds they draw. So sit back, and prepare to travel without moving, as cartographers Tim Paul and Rhys Davies take us through the process of making a map of a place that doesn’t exist. Who decides to include the map? The publisher or the author? According to Lauren Panepinto, creative director for Orbit Books, the decision to include a map in a book is usually up to the author, although the publishing house does have some say, particularly if the author’s map spoils aspects of a story. The process is similar at Prometheus’s sci-fi and fantasy imprint, Pyr, according to editorial director Rene Sears. Usually the author happens to have a map on hand already and passes it on to the publishers. Left, Author sketch of the map from Chris Willrich’s THE SILK MAP. Right, the final map by Rhys Davies That’s where the artists come in. But wait. How does one get into making maps of imaginary places? Tim Paul, who makes maps for Orbit as well as other clients, has been an artist all his life, majoring in Fine Art Figure Drawing at Wayne State University and working as an illustrator. His expertise as a mapmaker, however, comes from another passion of his: Paul has been playing Dungeons & Dragons since the age of 14. Rhys Davies, a mapmaker who has worked with Pyr and Tor, is also a trained artist who specialized in fine art at art school. He came to map-making after leaving a product design job at Yankee Candle. (He was fed up with drawing birdhouses and snowmen, he says.) “A friend at St. Martins/Macmillan put me on to a wonderful art director at Tor who needed a map for a new series of novels.” The books were Charles Brokaw’s Code books. “It all tumbled on from there,” he said. Fun fact: When asked if they had a favorite map growing up, both Paul and Davies immediately pointed to J.R.R. Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth. (“For me there is only one fantasy map,” said Davies.) From the author’s mind to the fly-leaf Map artists need two things from an author: a list of all the names and places that are going to be on the map and a rough draft of the map itself. Some of those roughs are turned in on anything from scraps of paper to napkins, but others, says Davies, are clearly planned out. From top left, clockwise: Author sketch of the map for Alex Marshall’s A Crown for Cold Silver. Tim Paul’s in-progress map. The final map. Occasionally, but not often, mapmakers get to read a copy of the book. This was the case for Paul, who had a chance to read Wake of Vultures by Lila Brown before making the map (the Wake of Vultures map is currently his favorite). Both Paul and Davies usually begin drafting their maps by hand. Davies works by hand before turning to Photoshop to clean things up, fine-tune his work and add old paper textures to the finished product (he uses different textures for the land, the sea, etc.). For Paul, who uses a Cintiq touchscreen, working by hand also means he’s working electronically. The maps also have to be tweaked so that they fit on the page. Real world geography vs. fantasy geography The artists send their maps to the authors for feedback; at this point, there can be a lot of back-and-forth, or “tennis-matching”, as Davies calls it. The author needs to make sure the map is consistent with the story and the mapmaker needs to make sure the map makes sense. For the second book in Blake Charlton’s Spellwright series, Spellbound, Davies and the author worked together to create a map of a city, and Davies found that he needed to make the city believable; he and the author had to decide on a workable street pattern and Davies had to draw buildings that corresponded with the income of the inhabitants in certain neighborhoods. Does the geography of a fantasy map have to match real world geography? That depends on the mapmaker and the author. Davies, who also creates real world maps for other genres (real maps are most challenging because accuracy is key, he says), does sometimes adjust rivers so that they don’t flow uphill. Paul does the same, but for the most part, isn’t too bothered by geography that doesn’t match the real geography of our own planet. “These are fantasy worlds and anything is possible, so me personally, I don’t stick to the 100 percent authentic possible geography concept,” he said. Mapmakers are world builders, too According to Panepinto, the mapmaker is as much of a world builder as the author is. Davies is hesitant about calling himself a world builder; the author, he says, is the one with the true vision of his or her world. He did mention, however, that one of the authors he had worked with was using the map Davies had drawn for his first book as a reference for the next book in a series. Paul has had similar experiences — an author has changed a small detail in the book to match the map — and that does make him feel like a world builder. Mostly, however, he feels like a world builder because his work sets up a book.
