By Jaime Buckley

There is a difference between someone enjoying your story...and someone falling in love with your world.

That difference matters.

A reader can finish a good book, smile, put it down and move on with their life.

But when they fall in love with the WORLD?

Oh, that's different.

Now they want to know where the characters came from.

They want maps. History. Languages. Weapons. Legends. Old wars. Family connections. That weird tavern mentioned for three sentences in chapter fourteen. They want to know what happened to the guy standing behind the king during the coronation. They want to know whether that symbol carved into the doorway actually MEANS something. And if you're clever...

...it does.

This is one of the reasons I've used World Anvil since 2019.

World Anvil currently reports more than 7.35 MILLION fictional worlds on its platform.

That's an absurd amount of imagination in one place.

And somehow, among those millions of worlds, my own Wanted Hero universe at WantedHero.com has grown to receive more traffic than any other world on the platform.

I don't say that to brag.

Okay.

Maybe 4%.

But the other 96% is because I want writers to understand something important:

I don't use World Anvil the way most writers think they're supposed to use World Anvil, and that matters. Just FYI, I'm not an affiliate, I don't gain anything from telling you this…I have just benefited in HUGE ways by using the platform.

If you've read any of my articles here, you know writers are my PEOPLE.

…and I want MY people to WIN.

So listen up, cupcake…cause I'm gonna give you the secret sauce of my online success right here, right now.

My World Bible Isn't Really for Me

World Anvil is usually introduced as a worldbuilding platform.

And it absolutely is.

You can build character profiles, cultures, nations, organizations, histories, timelines, family trees, maps, locations, religions, technologies, magic systems and just about anything else your wonderfully overactive writer brain can invent.

That's useful.

World Anvil itself describes the platform as a way to build an interactive world bible and showcase that material to readers through things like articles, maps, timelines and character profiles.

But that's not the part that excites me most.

I don't primarily look at World Anvil as a place to store information. I see it as a place to create experiences.

That's a very different mindset.

I already have notes. Lots of notes. Probably enough notes to make an archaeologist question my mental stability.

What I want is somewhere my READERS can go.

Somewhere they can wander. Explore. Click on things. Follow characters. Discover connections. Find things they weren't necessarily looking for.

In other words...

I want a candy store.

Life of Fiction Is My Flagship. World Anvil Is My Candy Store.

My flagship online is Life of Fiction, through Substack (my SECOND favorite platform).

That's where the relationship happens. Substack is where I write to readers, publish stories, share ideas, release chapters, talk about creativity and invite people into the larger experience I'm building.

Life of Fiction is the center.

But WantedHero.com, built on World Anvil, serves a completely different purpose.

When readers become curious about something inside one of my stories, I want them to have somewhere to GO with that curiosity.

Maybe they love Dax.

Wonderful.

Go learn about Dax.

Read about his history. Follow his relationships. Discover the places he's been. See artwork. Find quotes. Read comments from other characters. Stumble across a piece of information that suddenly changes the meaning of something you read three chapters ago.

And perhaps, if I've done my job correctly, notice something that makes you think:

"Wait...what does THAT mean?"

Now I've got you.

And it's not because I tricked you. It's because curiosity is one of the most powerful forces in storytelling.

World Anvil is the candy store.

Don't Build an Encyclopedia. Build Rabbit Holes.

This is where I think writers can get World Anvil so very wrong.

They create encyclopedia entries.

Name.

Birthplace.

Height.

Weight.

Occupation.

History.

Relatives.

Favorite breakfast cereal.

Done.

Okay, fine. Technically, that's worldbuilding. Nothing wrong with that. But nobody falls in love with a fictional universe because your character database is extremely organized.

Readers fall in love because the information makes them FEEL something.

So give them rabbit holes.

One article should lead naturally into another. A character leads to an organization. The organization leads to an ancient war. The war leads to a legendary weapon. The weapon leads to the person who created it. That person leads to a civilization everyone believes vanished 800 years ago.

Except...

...there's another article suggesting they didn't.

See what just happened?

You're telling stories between the stories.

That's what makes this powerful, AND crazy fun for you.

Let Your Characters Into the Room

Another thing I do differently on Wanted Hero is avoid making everything sound like it came from a sterile reference manual.

My characters participate.

'The boys' comment.

They argue.

They contradict the historian.

They get offended.

Sometimes they reveal things they probably shouldn't.

…they've even showed up on WITS in force to cause a bit of mayhem.

Höbin Luckyfeller, one of my best friends and award-winning gnome historian, is particularly useful for this. He gives me an in-world reason for why so much information exists in the first place.

Then Chuck can (and often does) interrupt him.

Dax can disagree with him.

Other characters can add observations.

Suddenly you're not reading a database entry anymore. You're spending another few minutes with characters you already love.

That's powerful.

The reader came looking for information.

I gave them personality.

And personality creates attachment.

You can see this approach right on the Wanted Hero introduction, where characters such as Chuck and Dax intrude into what should otherwise be straightforward world information.

That's intentional.

My characters don't know they're supposed to behave inside an encyclopedia.

Apparently nobody told them.

(Not like they'd listen anyway.)

Easter Eggs Are Reader Rewards

I LOVE hiding things.

Seriously.

Give me an opportunity to hide a clue six years before someone understands what it means and I become ridiculously happy.

World Anvil is perfect for this.

A strange reference. A symbol. An apparently meaningless quote. Perhaps a contradiction between two historical accounts, or a character saying something they shouldn't know. Maybe a line buried halfway down an article that suddenly becomes important two books later.

These aren't meaningless gimmicks. They're rewards for paying attention.

Readers who casually enjoy the story aren't penalized because they missed them.

But your dedicated readers?

Your superfans?

They get MORE.

That's exactly how it should work.

The deeper they travel into your world, the more the world rewards them for exploring it.

World Anvil even supports secrets, spoiler controls, private material and subscriber-restricted content, allowing creators to decide exactly how much different readers can see.

Now you've turned passive reading into exploration.

This Also Happens to Be Good Business

We writers occasionally have to discuss that horrible four-letter word…

[Jaime casually locks the door…]

SELL.

You good? We good? No freaking out?

Writers need to make money. If we want the time and resources required to keep creating stories, worlds, art, games, podcasts and whatever else we're building, readers eventually have to be able to purchase something.

World Anvil helps me do that without making the whole experience feel like a sales page.

Someone might arrive because they're fascinated with a character. That character appears in a novel. Guess what they can find, often in the sidebar of the page, casually sitting in the readers peripheral vision?

The novel.

Another reader discovers a location.

There's a story connected to it.

Another discovers one of my books, guides or other products while exploring the world.

World Anvil explicitly supports monetizing worldbuilding, linking to storefronts and giving customers or supporters access to additional material.

That's the way I prefer selling.

Don't interrupt people. Give them something worth wanting.

Then make it ridiculously easy to obtain.

And Now There's Another Reason This Matters: AI

This is becoming increasingly important to me. AI is changing how people discover information online. Like it or hate it, that's happening.

So as a creator, I have a choice.

I can leave machines to figure out who Jaime Buckley is, what Wanted Hero is and what my stories are about from random scraps scattered across the internet...

...or I can create a massive, organized, interconnected body of canonical information myself.

Guess which one I prefer?

World Anvil gives me the greatest degree of control I currently have over what the AI Librarian can use when representing and promoting my work to potential new readers on the web.

That's enormously valuable to me.

Because this isn't random content scraped from somebody else's description of Wanted Hero.

It's MY material.

My character descriptions. My history. My terminology. My lore. My explanations. My links. My books. My universe.

The best part of all of this?

I decide what gets published.

I decide what stays secret.

I decide what information represents the world.

This isn't just worldbuilding anymore.

It's positioning your intellectual property for discovery.

And I believe writers should start thinking seriously about that.

PLEASE start thinking seriously about that.

But There's One Rule You Cannot Ignore

World Anvil will not make readers care about a world they don't already have a reason to care about.

Don't spend four years documenting the monetary policies of seventeen imaginary kingdoms because you think readers are going to stumble across your wiki and demand a seven-book publishing contract.

Story comes first.

Characters come first.

Emotion comes first.

Always.

The story creates hunger.

World Anvil feeds it.

That's the relationship.

My novels introduce you to Wendell, Dax, Chuck and the world they're struggling through.

Life of Fiction lets you experience those stories with me.

Then WantedHero.com says:

"Oh...you liked that?"

Come over here.

I've got something else to show you.

That's the candy store.

Build for the Reader, Not Just the Writer

If you're going to use World Anvil as an author, start changing the questions you ask.

Don't simply ask:

"What information should I document?"

Ask:

"What would someone who LOVES this character desperately want to know?"

Ask:

"Where could I send them next?"

Ask:

"What could they discover here that makes the novel more meaningful?"

Ask:

"What could I hide today that will make a reader scream three years from now?"

THOSE are interesting questions.

You don't need 4,000 articles either.

Start with the characters readers love most.

Build the locations central to your stories.

Document the conflicts, cultures, artifacts and mysteries people encounter in the books.

Connect them.

Then leave doors open.

Never answer everything.

Mystery is oxygen for fictional worlds.

Your Book Is the Invitation

I've been building Wanted Hero for decades.

I've published comics, novels, short stories, artwork, podcasts and more, and I'm still expanding the universe.

But I've learned that a fictional universe becomes something very different when readers have somewhere to explore it on their own.

A novel says:

• Come with me.

A platform like World Anvil lets you say:

• Stay as long as you like.
• Explore.
• Meet people.
• Look around.
• Open doors you're probably not supposed to open.
• Read the old books.
• Study the maps.
• Argue with the historian.
• Find the hidden clues.
• And when you're ready...
• there's another story waiting for you.

That is where World Anvil becomes more than a worldbuilding tool.

It becomes part of the storytelling.

And when you're surrounded more than 7 million other fictional worlds, that's the opportunity I think matters most.

Don't merely create a world readers can read about.

Create one they don't want to leave.

Want to see what I mean? Wander through mine at WantedHero.com.

Just don't blame me when you find a rabbit hole.

I put those there on purpose.

* * * * * *

About Jaime

Jaime Buckley is the author of the Chronicles of a Hero series and the founder of LifeofFiction.com on Substack. He teaches writers how to build a sustainable publishing practice at JaimeBuckley.com and through the online course Substack for Authors.

Featured image by Jaime Buckley.