With the enormous new entries of fantasy books on the market, there is inevitably a ton of garbage being introduced.  So how does one pick the best fantasy books from the inundation of new fiction flooding the market both in the traditional paper and bind area and in the relatively new ebook market?

Time is a valuable commodity to all of us and if you’re a fan of the best fantasy novels out there but have found yourself roped into one bad saga after another, you’re going to want to do your homework.  There’s easy ways and tough ways to manage this process.

The first path you want to travel down is to follow the authors you love.  Typically if an author has spoken to you in a previous book, he or she is going to continue to do so in their next installments.  This is more true following series of books like trilogies or the long ten book mega sagas, but keep an eye on the ones that start new series if you enjoyed their past series.

The second path may seem obvious but here it is anyway.  Read the reviews on either review sites or sites like Amazon.  If the average starred rating of a book is below three (of five – a la Amazon), I wouldn’t even consider it.  There is too much good stuff out there.  If it’s sitting in the three to four range, dig a little deeper.  Check out some of the five starred reviews, see if the reviewer reads the same type of stuff you do.

Finally, there are people that have absolutely loathed some of my favorite novels.  This falls under the golden rule of ‘you can’t please all the people all the time’.  And why would you want to?  You will typically find the best fantasy novels are those that have a fair amount of five start ratings balanced by a fair amount of one star ratings.  This means there’s some true controversy to be found within those pages.  Happy reading!