Today is the day! After almost two years, there’s a new Frontlines novel out. ORDERS OF BATTLE is the seventh volume in the series and picks up a few years after the last book. Things have calmed down a bit for humanity after POINTS OF IMPACT, but the Lankies are still out there, and someone higher up in the chain of command has decided that now’s the time to go looking for them.
ORDERS OF BATTLE is available on the Kindle and in paperback form today. (The Audible audiobook will be delayed until February–see my previous post on that for details.) I hope you pick it up in whichever format you prefer, then read it and maybe leave a review or recommend it to friends. And most importantly, I hope you enjoy returning to the Frontlines universe with Andrew Grayson and his podhead comrades.
Some people have noticed and commented on the fact that the audiobook of Orders of Battle now shows a delay for the release. The Kindle and print versions will still be out on December 8, but the Audible version is delayed until February 9th.
There’s a good reason for the delay, and I wish Audible would communicate it to the readers so people don’t think it’s an arbitrary thing. As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I have outpaced Luke Daniels’ schedule, and while he was still able to record AFTERSHOCKS, we had to find a new narrator for BALLISTIC, Angelo DiLoreto.
Angelo was also scheduled to take over Frontlines and narrate ORDERS OF BATTLE. Sadly, he passed away unexpectedly in October, before he could finish recording the book. Because of Angelo’s untimely passing, Audible had to find new narrators for Frontlines and Palladium Wars. The new narrator for Frontlines, Eric G. Dove, had to get up to speed on the prior Frontlines recordings to carry on the fine work Luke Daniels did with the series. That’s the reason for the delay, and while it’s less than ideal for the audiobook to be trailing the print version by two months, I hope it’s clear that it was a necessary one.
I had the luck to get great narrator choices. While Eric Dove is taking over Frontlines, the future Palladium Wars books will be narrated by Korey Jackson, and I am pleased that I’ll have different narrators for the two series to keep them distinct and separate from each other.
I know Angelo enjoyed working on a science fiction series, which was a bit of a departure from his usual narrations, and he did a great job on BALLISTIC. According to his obituary, he was only 30 years old, which is much too early to leave this ride. He was an accomplished musician, and he narrated over 200 audiobooks, which is an amazing professional track record. My condolences and sympathies go out to Angelo’s family and friends.
This row of paperbacks is my collected output for novels since 2013. That does not include the novel I just delivered, titled CITADEL, because that one obviously doesn’t exist yet in paper form. It also doesn’t represent my total output because I also managed to write four novellas and novelettes for Wild Cards (“Stripes” for our mosaic novel LOW CHICAGO, “Probationary” for KNAVES OVER QUEENS, and the stand-alone stories “How To Move Spheres And Influence People” and “Berlin is Never Berlin” for Tor.com.)
By the way, that’s the correct order of publication, for those of you just getting onto the Frontlines train. The first one is Terms of Enlistment, and the rest follow just as they are sorted in the picture. (The Palladium Wars order is super easy to figure out because the titles are in alphabetical sequence. I stole that trick from Sue Grafton.)
As much as 2020 is a near-total write-off, it’s also going to be my first year with more than one novel release. BALLISTIC, second novel in the Palladium Wars series, was released on May 26th, and ORDERS OF BATTLE, seventh novel in the Frontlines series, will be out on December 8th. (That’s only a little more than a week away! Holy carp.) I’m hoping to keep the two-a-year pace going from now on, but that’s only going to work if 2021 turns out better than the dumpster fire that was 2020.
There’s a Goodreads giveaway going on for 100 Kindle copies of Orders of Battle, the seventh novel in the Frontlines series. The giveaway will end on December 7, and the book will be released December 8, so you have 21 days if you want to put your name into the goblet and see if you get lucky. Right now there are ~400 entries for those 100 books, so your current chance is 1 in 4-ish, which isn’t bad.
Work status: I am still holed up at the Castle and finishing CITADEL, book 3 in the Palladium Wars. I’ll be turning it in this week–finally–and then it’s on to the next Frontlines book (which doesn’t have a title yet,) and some more Frontlines stories and novellas. As always, stay tuned for more as I try to find my pre-pandemic productivity mojo again and boost it to Brandon Sanderson-esque levels…
It took a little while, but the set is complete. That’s the commemorative shadow box I got from my publisher for selling over 100,000 copies of POINTS OF IMPACT. That means every single Frontlines novel has sold in excess of 100k.
I’ll bask in the completeness of those stats as long as I can, but ORDERS OF BATTLE, Frontlines #7, will come out in December and promptly ruin that streak for a while. But complaining about that would be tacky and gauche, because in the grand scheme of things, getting one’s sales feng shui messed up is a pretty trivial concern.
Thank you to everyone who has bought and read POINTS OF IMPACT, and I hope you get back on the ride for ORDERS OF BATTLE, because I think it will be worth your while.
I contributed the novella “Probationary” to this volume, featuring an alternate history version of the Falklands conflict told from the perspective of a rookie British ace, Rory Campbell a.k.a. “Archimedes”. (It’s a war story, so there are lots of battle scenes.)
The other stories in KNAVES OVER QUEENS were written by Paul Cornell, Mark Lawrence, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Emma Newman, Peter Newman, Peadar Ó Guilín, Melinda Snodgrass, Caroline Spector, and Charles Stross. It’s a stand-alone volume full of British-centric stories, and while it helps to know the Wild Cards universe, you don’t need to have read all the books in the series to make sense of this one.
Then suddenly Merry felt it at last, beyond doubt: a change. Wind was in his face! Light was glimmering….But at that same moment there was a flash, as if lightning had sprung from the earth beneath the City. For a searing second it stood dazzling far off in black and white, its topmost tower like a glittering needle: and then as the darkness closed again there came rolling over the fields a great boom.At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:
Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!
With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains. Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and the darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.
Today is release day for BALLISTIC, the second novel in the Palladium Wars series.
You can obtain this fine product over at Amazon, where operators are standing by to take your money for the Kindle, trade paperback, hardcover, or audiobook versions. Heck, buy them all and complete the set!
For the BALLISTIC giveaway, I have decided to bump the number of books up from 5 to 10, and I will keep the contest going for the rest of the day. Leave your entry comment on the original post for the giveaway if you want to be included, but be aware that the cut-off time is midnight Pacific time, and I won’t include any entries submitted after that point. Tomorrow morning, I will let the computer draw ten names out of the hat and post the winners. (One entry per person, please…no stuffing the entry box.)
This marks my eighth published novel, and number nine is coming in December. For the rest of the day, I will now follow the time-honored tradition of Obsessively Refreshing The Product Page To Check Sales Rank…
I’ve turned in my most recent two novels in the span of six months (BALLISTIC in August of last year and ORDERS OF BATTLE in January of this year), and while doubling one’s output is on the whole a good thing, it can also have some unintended effects.
One of those effects is that I’ve outpaced the schedule of Luke Daniels, the excellent and highly popular narrator of the Frontlines series and the first book of the Palladium Wars. Luke is very good at what he does, and because he is so good, his schedule is very, very packed. Therefore, 47North has had to switch artists to avoid holding up both series by a year or more. BALLISTIC isn’t voiced by Luke Daniels, and the upcoming Frontlines novel ORDERS OF BATTLE won’t be done by Luke either. The new narrator is Angelo Di Loreto.
I love Luke’s work on Frontlines and Aftershocks, and I know that a lot of you really love it too because I get frequent comments on the quality of the Audible narration. I know that this may be a disappointment to those who have come to associate Luke’s voice with Andrew Grayson. But that’s one of the realities of the publishing world. A recent commenter took me to task for not writing my books faster, but the production schedule involves more than just me turning in a draft and then someone slapping it on the Kindle store a few days later. There are many people who have a hand in the publication: the lead editor, the developmental editor, the copyeditors, the cover artist, and so on. And the audiobook production isn’t the smallest item on that list because they have to slot in a narrator and plan for studio time, then produce physical media for the CD and MP3 versions…you get the idea. This is a team sport, not a one-man show, and very little of it is up to me except for turning in finished manuscripts. Whenever something alters the flow–like, say, the writer retooling their work flow and doubling their output schedule–it sometimes has unpredictable knock-on effects.
Luke leaves some pretty big shoes to fill for the further narration of both series, but we really liked Angelo Di Loreto’s narrative style and voice, and I believe he will be a great fit. (You can check out his prior work here.)
Changing narrators in the middle of a series isn’t ideal, but the only other option would have been to clone Luke and bring the clone up to speed, and my editor was pretty firm that this would have blown the production budget for the next decade or so…
BALLISTIC, the second novel in the Palladium Wars series, will be out in a little less than two weeks. I just got my author copies in, so I figured I’d do a little giveaway.
Leave a comment on this post if you’d like a signed trade paperback of BALLISTIC. I’ll leave the post open until release day, which is Tuesday, May 26. On May 26, I will let the computer pick five entries out of the hat, and I will send those five people a signed paperback. This giveaway is open to anyone in the world, and I’ll cover the shipping.
