Marko Kloos's Blog, page 15

BALLISTIC giveaway winners

There were exactly 100 entries for the giveaway, with three duplicate entries, and I have 10 books up for grabs, so your chances were slightly better than 1:10.

Here are the winners, as picked by random number generator on numbergenerator.org:

Scott Welch

Ghost Rider 6

Martin Disch

Harry Caudwell

Justin Bell

Elizabeth Rogers

Bobby Williams

Sonja Thiede

Johanna

Jordan A. Brown

Congratulations! If you are on the list, you will receive an email sent to the address on your comment registration. Reply to it to claim your book.

Reading list interview

On the occasion of the BALLISTIC release today, Andrew Liptak has a fairly lengthy interview with me up on his reading list. I talk about Frontlines and Palladium Wars and a bunch of other things, so if you want to have some nuts-and-bolts insight on both series and get an idea what ORDERS OF BATTLE, Frontlines #7, will be about, head on over and check it out.

 

BALLISTIC is out today

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…

 

 

Audiobook news

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 giveaway

 

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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.

Don’t forget that Goodreads still has a giveaway for the Kindle version going on until May 25, so put your name in the hat over there if you’d rather have an electronic copy.

Berlin is never Berlin

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Tor.com has a new Wild Cards story out today, written by me.

It’s called “Berlin Is Never Berlin”, and it features Khan, my joker-ace character who is half Bengal tiger and 100% bad-ass. (Khan was my point of view character in “Stripes”, my contribution to our Wild Cards novel LOW CHICAGO.)

In this story, Khan takes a bodyguard assignment for a bunch of spoiled rich kids who want to go clubbing and socializing in Europe. Spoiler: it doesn’t turn out to be the milk run he expected.

The title comes from a saying about Berlin: “Paris is always Paris, but Berlin is never Berlin.” It refers to the ever-changing face of the city, which seems to be in constant flux.

I had a lot of fun writing that story, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. As with all stories on Tor.com, it’s free to read.

Frontlines #7 cover

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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.

Isolation update

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.

New Wild Cards story at Tor.com

Tor.com has a new Wild Cards story up. It’s called “The Visitor: Kill Or Cure”, and it was written by Mark Lawrence. As with all tor.com stories, it’s free to read.

The Visitor: Kill or Cure

As I have mentioned in my last post, I have a story in the queue there as well (featuring my favorite joker-ace, Khan), but it won’t be released until May. I’ll be sure to let you all know when it goes live.

Release date for Frontlines #7

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.