Avatar fans desperate for a deeper insight into the world of the Na'vi are set for a treat after director James Cameron revealed he is planning to write a novel based on the box office hit.

The prequel, which would mark the director's debut as a novelist, will go into depth about the previous lives of characters. "It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn't have time to deal with – like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake's brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that," the film's producer Jon Landau told MTV.

The book will not be a novelisation, Landau insisted. "A novelisation basically retells the story of the movie. Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things," he said, adding that the book should be available by the end of 2010. Cameron himself later confirmed the news to the Wall Street Journal.

"There are things you can do in books that you can't do with films," he said. "I told myself, if [the film] made money, I'd write a book." At the end of January, Avatar took over from Cameron's previous film, Titanic, as the top-grossing movie of all time.

Landau told MTV that if Cameron's novel is a success, they might look at allowing other authors to write books about the world. "We certainly have stories that are set before the movie opens and after," he said. "I think that what we want to do is find out what mediums those stories are best told in. There might be opportunities in publishing to tell some of the backstory, tell some of the earth war stories, what went on in Jake's life before the movie. And we'd have that lead up to the sequel that might take place on Pandora several years after our movie closed."

They may not, however, be approaching any Russian writers, after Cameron was forced to reject claims in Russian papers that Avatar owed an unacknowledged debt to Soviet fantasy writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and their creation, The World of Noon, which is set on the planet Pandora and follows the lives of humanoid inhabitants the Nave.