About Amanda Muratoff:
Ask Amanda anything about riding horses or motorcycles and she can tell you. Not a daredevil, but she finds great joy in the wind flowing through her hair. Art has always been a staple in her life – from creative writing to painting, first published at age ten. She is an award-winning published artist, though she left her career in VFX to chase the passion of her childhood. The memories of late night writing binges, glued to the computer screen at 1AM, brought her back to the fantasy worlds she created.
What inspires you to write?
The characters! I know that sounds like a circle, since I write the characters and then the characters inspire me to write, but it's true. They're real people to me, and their desires and fears keep me excited to write their stories.
What authors do you read when you aren’t writing?
I have a soft spot for Diana Gabaldon. She read part of my fourth book and said it was well written, so I'll obviously never forget that. But I'll read anything by anyone if it's good.
Tell us about your writing process.
I cowrite the Pantracia Chronicles with Kayla Hansen, and our methods are a little unusual. We sit on discord, talking, while we have the same google doc open. We write on top of each other at the same time. I'll be changing or adding a word to her sentence before she's even finished it. We outline everything, and use reference documents for the timeline, for the characters' appearance/history, for room layouts and castle floorplans.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
Talk to? Probably not. But I listen to them all the time. They steal the story sometimes, and I have to rein them back in. They want things. Sometime they get them, and other times they really, really don't. When they suffer, I suffer. I have legit bawled while writing some scenes.
What advice would you give other writers?
If you find yourself getting lost in your writing partway through a book, it might be best to stop and make an outline. A lot of people enjoy writing with the pantser method, but there's no shame in planning things ahead of time. I find it's the best way to control your character arcs and plot.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
We never pursued the route of publishing traditionally. Lesser known authors, even those trad published, are often responsible for their own marketing and promoting anyway, so why would we want to hand over most of our earnings to a publishing house? For that reason, and so that we could control everything about our series (book covers, titles, character names, etc), we indie published. It also lets us publish quickly, as the first book in the Pantracia Chronicles was published in 2019, and we had ten published by August, 2021.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
I think traditional publishers will need to change their ways to stay in the game. I know a lot of indie authors who make incredible income annually, but there is still this stigma associated with indie/self publishing. Yet, a lot of the indie books I've read recently are better written than trad books.
What genres do you write?: Romantic High Fantasy
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print, Audiobook
Website(s)
Amanda Muratoff Home Page Link
Link To Amanda Muratoff Page On Amazon
Your Social Media Links
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All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit to allow you the reader to hear the author in their own voice.
