Best Fantasy Books for Beginners

I may not have mentioned it lately, but I'm thrilled to be in one of the best professions in the world. Storytelling affects people in so many ways, and when I get an email saying, "Your books turned me onto fantasy, and now I'm devouring everything I can find," I can't help but smile.

Petrik Leo of Novel Notions does a great job introducing readers to new fantasy books and just did his second Best Fantasy Books for Beginners post. This is great for many reasons, but also because Petrik highlights so many self-published authors — many of whom I consider my friends (and hopefully, they feel the same way about me).

Petrik broke his recommendations into a number of groups, including:

• Classic Epic Fantasy
• Modern Epic Fantasy
• Magic School Setting
• Cozy and Urban Fantasy
• Morally Gray Main Characters or Grimdark Fantasy

Here are all 20 books, and I'm proud to have one of mine included in the group.

Go watch Petrik's, video. He has a lot of insights. But to help you narrow down which books to try out first, I've included a handy-dandy chart below which will take you straight to Goodreads so you can check out the titles (just click the book covers), authors, who published them (pay particular attention to the "Self" ones as these are really the creme of their crop and really are worth checking out, and how many ratings and review each book has.

I hope you find this helpful, and I also have my fingers crossed that you'll find more authors to love. Oh, and thanks to Robin, who did all the hard work of putting the about montage of covers and this chart together.

Title	Author	Publisher	Ratings	Reviews
	M. L. Spencer	Self	3,877	607
	Ryan Cahill	Self	5,104	725
	Raymond E. Fiest  Janny Wurts	Harper Voyager	36,687	1,107
	Michael J. Sullivan	Orbit	36,160	2,078
	Anthony Reynolds	Orbit	2,113	419
	Richard Swan	Orbit	5,445	1,246
	John Gwynne	Orbit	27,746	4,260
	Domagoj Kurmaić (Nobody103)	Wraithmarked  Creative	5,763	352
	J. T. Greathouse	Gollancz	1,897	485
	James Islington	Saga Press	1,239	279
	Dyrk Ashton	Self	2,403	499
	Rachel Aaron	Self	12,852	1,333
	Travis Baldree	Tor	89,410	18,695
	Christopher Buehlman	Tor	15,873	2,441
	Michael R. Fletcher	Harper Voyager	2,798	534
	Daniel T. Jackson	Self	1,466	411
	Peter McLean	Ace	4,795	879
	Mike Shackle	Gollancz	1,438	285
	Krystle Matar	Self	322	142
	Nicolas Lietzau	Self	1,163	329