Pluto was never not a planet
The delayed audiobook version of ORDERS OF BATTLE was released yesterday, and it’s now available via Amazon/Audible.
The new narrator is Eric G. Dove. As I have mentioned before, the delay in production was due to the unexpected passing of Angelo DiLoreto, who was scheduled to narrate the book originally. As most of you will probably understand, that sort of thing can’t be fixed on the spot.
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.
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…