Sarah Janet Maas’s interest in fantasy took off in the wake of the September 11 attacks. As a self-described “very weird” child growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she had always veered towards the magical, devouring a steady diet of fairy tales and folklore. But the 2001 tragedy made her want to truly escape from real life.
She became obsessed with the Lord of the Rings universe and started writing her own tales, working weekends and during school holidays, treating it like a job. “It felt like a way for me as a young teenager to sort out what I was seeing in the real world through a fantasy world where you had these forces of darkness on the one side — and those trying to save the world on the other,” she later explained in an interview with The Telegraph.
That teenage escapism has spawned a juggernaut literary empire, in which Maas, 37, has created her own JRR Tolkien-esque universe populated by sexually charged fairies.
Maas has released more than a dozen books in the past 12 years, providing a conveyor belt of steamy, plot-heavy fantasy — dubbed “romantasy” — that has become a phenomenon in the publishing industry and a boon to Bloomsbury, the London outfit that enjoyed similar star-power after backing a young JK Rowling.
Maas’s career had been simmering for years but she was propelled more firmly into the mainstream during another era-defining tragedy, the coronavirus pandemic, which led to sales of her books exploding. Millions of women were also looking for an escape from the grim headlines, and stumbled upon Maas’s work on TikTok and Instagram. Legions of fans, mostly women, now dissect every detail of her hefty texts online. There are tattoos, midnight release parties, Etsy clothing lines, and fitness challenges surrounding the characters Maas has created.
Maas’s most recent release — House of Flame and Shadow — sold more than 360,000 copies in the US in its first week, helping Bloomsbury this week raise its profit outlook for the second time in three months. The publisher’s annual revenue has nearly tripled over the past decade, from £98mn in the fiscal year 2013 to £264mn in 2023. To date, Bloomsbury has sold more than 40mn copies of Maas’s books.
Maas was adopted and grew up in New York City with her parents — a lawyer and a judge — whom she describes as “very intellectual people”. She went to Dalton on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a private school for rich kids that likely inspired the Gossip Girl books and television show, where she was the founder and president of the “Lord of the Rings club”.
At just 16, Maas began writing her first book, Throne of Glass. It’s an alternate version of Cinderella in which the heroine, Celaena Sardothien, is an assassin rather than a maid — attending the ball not to meet the prince, but to kill him.
Years later, Maas graduated from university and, like other millennials, faced a financial crisis that had battered the economy. Living in New York City with a creative writing degree and no work experience, she applied and was rejected from jobs at three different Barnes & Noble bookstores. (Later, as a bestselling author, she joked: “The tables have turned!”)
She managed to find an agent and in 2010 sold Throne of Glass to Bloomsbury, which published it in 2012. The Throne of Glass series was followed by a second, beginning with A Court of Thorns and Roses, a book she had begun writing while a jobless recent graduate about a huntress who lives in a snowy wood, looking for food for her starving family.
Maas’s books span themes of authoritarianism, loss and grief, trauma, friendship and, of course, a happily-ever-after epic romance. There is “lots of action and a lot of steamy stuff, lots of hot dudes”, Maas told Kelly Clarkson this month. In interviews Maas comes across as bubbly, with a sharply self-deprecating humour.
Her real romantic life is also a bit of a fairytale. She met her husband on the very first day of university. He was her first ever boyfriend, and they now have two young children together. “I think I can write about true love because I get to live that every day,” she recently said.
Romance is the bestselling book genre in the US, but it is sometimes sidelined by the literary establishment in favour of more highbrow, and usually less profitable, fare. “I don’t understand why anyone would put down other genres because in this day [and] age there’s so many other distractions to keep you from reading; the fact that anyone picks up a book is a miracle,” Maas says of the criticism.
Morgan Entrekin, chief executive of Grove Atlantic, the publisher behind last year’s Booker prize-winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, agrees. “The boom in [romantasy] has been amazing,” he says. “I am always pleased when books — of whatever kind — are selling. It is good for the booksellers and good for the industry.”
Over the years, Maas has kept a gruelling writing schedule. She remembers the delay of several years between the release of each new Harry Potter book, and she wants to save her fans that wait. “But that means it’s usually deadline hell at my house,” she said in a 2015 interview.
Now with two young children — a son, Taran, and daughter, Sloane — Maas has been forced to slow down a bit. Instead of releasing two books a year, it’ll be one. But she already has her next four novels planned out. She describes them as planes, taxiing on the runway, until she can propel them into the world.
Andy Hunter, the founder of Bookshop.org, says he is weary of the books world becoming “more of a hit-based business than ever”.
However, he says, in the case of Maas, “she’s really pretty good”.
“It’s much better to have everyone talking about a book than to be talking about a TV show or celebrity gossip.”
