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.
That’s the cover for ORDERS OF BATTLE, seventh book in the Frontlines series. As with all Frontlines covers, it features spaceships…but as with all Frontlines covers, the art doesn’t necessarily correspond to any specific event in the book, so don’t try to divinate plot points or anything.
What I can tell you about ORDERS OF BATTLE is that it takes place a few years after the events of the last Frontlines novel, POINTS OF IMPACT, and that it follows Andrew Grayson on the next chapter of his life and career in the war against the Lankies. Without giving away too much, I can say that those of you who want to know just what the hell the Lankies are and where they originated should get your money’s worth out of this book and the ones which are to follow.
(Yes, that means there’s a Frontlines #8 in the works.)
ORDERS OF BATTLE will be released on December 8, 2020. I know the product page doesn’t show an Audible book, but that’s most likely because it’s still in production. (The Audible versions need to be narrated, which means the production calendar has to allow for the schedule of the narrator.) But this will be my ninth published novel with 47North, and all of the previous ones have had Audible versions on release day, so I have no reason to believe this one will be different.
We are safely isolating here at Castle Frostbite and doing what we do most of the time anyway, which is to cook food and eat snacks and play games. The kids have been in an online charter school for a year now, so not much has changed around here other than the fact that I still can’t find toilet paper at our usual grocery store.
Life and work continue as we wait out this current craziness. I am busy with CITADEL, third novel in the Palladium Wars series. Number 2, called BALLISTIC, is going to be released next month, and I hope you give it a read because I think it turned out very well. Booklist had some nice things to say about it: “Fans of The Expanse series will enjoy this engaging and fast-moving combination of corporate machinations, police procedural, and interstellar naval combat.” And while we’re on the subject of reviews, LOCUS gave AFTERSHOCKS a very nice review in their April 2020 issue, calling it “a great start to what should be a fun, thought-provoking series.”
I hope you’re all doing well in your respective isolation headquarters. Maybe one day we’ll have conventions and bar-hopping again, but I have a feeling it won’t be this year. Alas, that will make the company of our friends ever so much sweeter and the overpriced hotel cocktails ever so much tastier.
ORDERS OF BATTLE, the seventh novel in the Frontlines series, will be released on December 8. There’s now a product page up on Amazon, where you can pre-order the book on Kindle, in paperback format, or as an Audible book:
There’s no cover art yet as the book is still in production, but that will be added as soon as the cover is final.
Just in case you missed it, here’s the product page for BALLISTIC, the second novel in the Palladium Wars series, due to be released on May 26:
And there’s a third release this year! This one is my Wild Cards novelette titled BERLIN IS NEVER BERLIN, due out from Tor.com on May 6:
Not a bad year for new releases, I’d say. And I am hard at work to make sure that things will keep coming at this pace.
I was planning to go to Detroit for ConFusion this past weekend, but the draft for the seventh Frontlines book, ORDERS OF BATTLE, wasn’t quite done yet. Work comes before fun because fun don’t pay the bills, so I sucked it up and cancelled the trip altogether just before the weekend.
It turned out to be a good decision in more than one way because I came down with a stomach bug over the weekend, and a winter storm moved in that would have made the 1,200-mile round trip a bit of an ordeal, so I am glad it panned out the way it did even if I was moping a bit on Friday that I wouldn’t get to hang out with friends.
But all’s well–I turned in the book on Monday morning, and my editor has assured me that it will make a 2020 release. I’m guessing it will be out in November or December. (The book needs to be proofread, put into print, get read for an Audible version, have a cover designed, and so on. The schedules of dozens of people have to be in sync, so you can’t just slap a draft onto your editor’s desk and expect to see the book out a month later.)
Now I get to start planning the two novels I’ll be writing this year while I wait for the first round of edits to come back. I do have some Frontlines novellas in the works to fill in the gap between now and the release of ORDERS OF BATTLE, so I should have something for you soon to tide you over.
