I Made a Map

I’ve never really paid attention to maps in books, nor did I ever think I’d write the kind of book where a map might be needed. But while I was planning out the world where my new series, The Kings of Darkhaven, takes place, I needed a map. I also had the thought maybe readers might appreciate one . . . but didn’t give it much thought. Then one of my beta readers, after reading the first book, suggested that a map would be fun, so then I considered it more seriously.

Now, when this map was just for myself, it was a very rough, very sad map, as you can see. I just used an outline of North America and divided up the space, because that was all I needed to keep track of where everything was. But if I was going to put a map inside my book, it had to look a lot nicer than what I’d made for myself. 

Now, as an author, I’ve taken a wide variety of courses. Ones on marketing and advertising, various craft topics, character development, world building, etc. Map making was not among those courses. 

So I searched around online and found a program called Inkarnate with various map making capabilities and combined what I created there with Affinity Publisher to create the second map pictured here. Which looks a whole lot nicer than the first one. The Kings of Darkhaven series takes place in the center territory, Darkhaven. And if it does well, I plan to write series for the rest of the territories, Irontide, Leviathan, and Silverfall, as well. 

I’m quite grateful I ended up making more of a real map for the story, because it helped solidify some story elements inside my head, and I really like having a quick reference for what the terrain is like at border areas for the story, which my first map most certainly did not provide. 

And, fun fact, the continent where this story takes place, The United Territories of the New Continent, is vaguely inspired by the United States, which is why I turned to North America for my first map. And the country where the main characters’ ancestors fled from is based off Europe, which is why I named it Evros, a name the Greeks used for roughly that area. 

So how do you feel about maps in books? Are they something you pay attention to or something you generally ignore?

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