• R.I. Eagle Scout mining new field: Book publishing

SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — Between earning his black belt in karate and achieving the rank of Eagle Scout, Sean Fay Wolfe began writing a book that has become “Quest For Justice, A Minecraft Novel."

By Donita Naylor 

Posted Mar. 24, 2014 @ 10:22 pm

SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — Between earning his black belt in karate and achieving the rank of Eagle Scout, Sean Fay Wolfe, then 14, began writing a book that has become “Quest For Justice, A Minecraft Novel: Book One of the Elementia Chronicles.”

Now 16, Wolfe has self-published his first book, at 420 pages, and imagined a series of nine books set inside the Minecraft game. With readers asking for the next installment, Wolfe has begun writing the second book.

Wolfe relies on his parents, Vic and Kelli Fay-Wolfe, both instructors at the University of Rhode Island, to act as publisher, editor and marketing agent. His two younger brothers, Eric, 15, and Casey, 10, were some of his first readers, and their enthusiasm encouraged him to continue, he said.

The book introduces readers to the world of Minecraft, where everything, even trees and water, is made of cubes. “Think LEGOs,” Wolfe says.

Players can dig in mines or chop at trees for building materials, and they collect items that might prove helpful in crafting tools for better building, sustenance and defense.

The teaser on the back cover introduces the main character, Stan2012:

“Stan has never played Minecraft before but from the start he loves the action of building with the infinite blocks that make up the world around him. He finds it exhilarating to battle the monsters of the night alongside his newfound friends, Charlie and Kat, on the Minecraft server Elementia. Before long, however, the three discover that there is a prejudice against new players on the server, and they witness many hate crimes …”

Guided by an instruction book, the three main characters enroll in a boot camp, thus introducing non-Minecraft players to all the game’s threats and survival strategies.

With inspiration from “Harry Potter” and “Hunger Games” books, Wolfe said, the “Elementia Chronicles” imagines life as if a player woke up inside the game, with nothing in his blocky grasp, and his clothing “the standard look for a Minecraft player who had not yet changed his skin, or appearance.”

Wolfe, who hopes to write full-time as an adult, spoke about his book and other accomplishments at a table in his family’s spacious colonial in a South Kingstown neighborhood off Route 2. The family dog, Lucky, stretched up to be petted as Wolfe talked.

(The Fay-Wolfes said they hyphenate their name but, because the boys are the last of the Wolfe line, encouraged Sean to use Wolfe without the hyphen as his pen name.)

Since the book came out in January, Wolfe has been “blown away” by reviews on Amazon, was asked to speak as a guest author at his former elementary school, was asked to mentor a boy in New Jersey who loves Minecraft and heard from a father in England who found that reading the book to his autistic son forged bonds between them.

Wolfe said he started to play Minecraft in late 2011, right around its official release. “There was a period where I was pretty obsessed,” he said. “I formulated a story in my head” and started writing fan fiction. He outlined the entire book, he said, before he started writing. “Whenever I had an idea, I would scratch it down in the back of my school notebook.”

His fourth- and fifth-grade teacher is “not at all surprised” that Wolfe has written a book.

“He always, on his own time, wrote stories,” said Alison Santerre, who teaches at Kingston Hill Academy. “He loved to do creative writing in his spare time.”

He was in a small group of students who wrote literary essays, she said, “Pretty sophisticated for fourth or fifth grade.”

During his sophomore year at South Kingstown High School, his half-completed book sat forgotten in his laptop while he got busy with other things, such as playing the viola, and working on his Eagle Scout project of building a cat run and adding shade to the dog runs at the South Kingstown pound. Then he found his book while housekeeping on his computer. He asked his mother to read it.

“I was surprised that I really enjoyed the book,” she said. “I really wanted to know what happened next.” She came to a conclusion: “We have to make this happen.”

The book, available at amazon.com and locally at Wakefield Books, Barrington Books, Books on the Square, in Providence, and Island Books, in Middletown, is printed on demand, so the Fay-Wolfes had very little to pay upfront. It’s also available through Kindle Direct and through Smashwords for Nook and iTunes.

For more information, visit Wolfe’s website, www.sfaywolfe.com.

Wolfe said he thought it would be a good idea to tap into the world of Minecraft, because the game’s popularity could provide a reader base. A Wikipedia entry says that as of Feb. 3, the game has sold more than 14 million copies on PC and more than 35 million copies across all platforms.

Wolfe rides a wave of acceptance for self-published books.

“There has been a change in the respect for self-publishing,” said Laura Rossi Totten, of Jamestown, who has been a publicist for 23 years. Self-publishing was “that unwanted guest at the party.”

Now, she said, “Every single editor at publishers large and small have made it a job to monitor and really watch the trends that are happening in self-publishing. There is sort of an unspoken mandate coming from the top,” she said. Editors and agents “really don’t want to miss the next bestseller.”

She said that with some well-known authors exploring self-publishing, and major publishers paying six figures for self-published books that have proven their appeal to readers, “The stigma is gone.”

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Bowker, a publishing research firm, tracked 391,000 self-published titles in 2012, up from 51,237 in 2006. In 2013, self-published books accounted for 32 percent of the 100 top-selling ebooks on Amazon each week, on average.

They average 25 to 30 percent of the titles on The New York Times bestseller list, said Amy Edelman, of IndieReader, a web-based consumer guide to self-published books and the people who write them.

To Totten, Wolfe’s book “has all the elements of kind of a runaway success. It would be really cool” if his book took off.