No More Crossovers

Occasionally I get an email from a reader suggesting that it would be great if Caina met Ridmark in a book, or Nadia went aboard Jack March’s spaceship, or a crossover like that.

Much more frequently I get emails from readers confused by the CLOAK & GHOST series. Like, how did Caina get to Nadia’s world? Is this a version of Caina that lives in Nadia’s world? How does this affect the timeline of Nadia’s books? And Caina’s? And didn’t Andromache die in GHOST IN THE STORM? Why is she running around in CLOAK & GHOST: LOST GATE?

Or I will get an email from a reader who read and enjoyed MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES and then continued on to DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS, only to be confused and annoyed that Tyrcamber Rigamond doesn’t appear in DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS until Chapter 15 even though the end of MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES said that Tyrcamber’s adventures would continue in the DRAGONTIARNA series. (Tyrcamber really does arrive in Chapter 15 of DRAGONTIARNA! I promise!)

I’m now in my second decade of being an indie author, and one of the things I’ve decided for Decade Two is no more crossovers.

My reasons follow!

1.) The CLOAK & GHOST books.

I’m very grateful to everyone who read and enjoyed the CLOAK & GHOST books, but boy did I get a lot of confused emails about them.

Like, a lot of confused emails. Still do, on occasion.

The idea when I started writing them waaaaaay back in 2018 was that it would be a fun little side crossover side project. I figured it would just be a side story where Nadia meets a version of Caina who lives on her world, and then adventures would follow. Comics do parallel version of characters all the time, right?

Of course, that overlooked the fact that 1.) hardly anyone actually buys comic books, so it’s best not to use them as an example, 2.) when the Marvel movies started doing the multiverse/parallel versions of characters after 2019, the franchise basically went off a cliff. But that was in the future yet.

What actually followed was many confused questions about the continuity. I tried to explain in the prologue of the book, but then I remembered the old adage that if you have to explain the joke, it’s probably not funny. The same thing applies to concepts in fantasy novels. If you can’t explain it adequately within the book itself, then it’s time for a rethink.

2.) MALISON

MALISON actually went pretty well. Thanks everyone!

The idea for MALISON was that it would help set up the DRAGONTIARNA series. When I wrote DRAGONTIARNA, I wanted the story to cut back and forth between two different worlds – Andomhaim and Tyrcamber’s world. Writing MALISON also helped me to work out the way the rules would work in Tyrcamber’s world, and then that would lead into the first book of the DRAGONTIARNA series, DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS (which also happened to be my 100th book!)

MALISON did well enough on its own, especially in the box set, that lots of people picked it up in both ebook and audiobook. This caused an unintentional degree of confusion since it says at the end of the final MALISON book that Tyrcamber Rigamond would return into DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS. So numerous people continued onward, and I still get confused emails ever since from people since DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS starts with Ridmark’s perspective, not Tyrcamber. So by now I have a form letter that I copy & paste reassuring people that, yes, Tyrcamber does return in DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS in Chapter 15 and is one of the chief POV characters for the rest of the series.

So MALISON was probably the most successful crossover I did, but it still caused confusion.

3.) Internal Setting Logic

Very often my settings have completely different internal logic from each other, and so a crossover simply wouldn’t work. MALISON was probably as successful as it was because I deliberately planned it from the beginning to tie into DRAGONTIARNA, so the internal logic of the settings matched.

Like when people suggest that Nadia comes aboard Jack March’s spaceship. In Nadia’s world, magic is real. In March’s world, there’s no such thing as magic, and even things that appear magical, like the targeting abilities of a Navigator or Lysiana’s superhuman intelligence, are the result of natural phenomena that are only partially understood by the characters, but are nonetheless essentially the results of applied science. So from characters from those two different settings to cross over,  one or the other would have to submit to a completely different set of logic, which would be difficult to write and confusing to read. Like, if Nadia went aboard Jack March’s spaceship, would her magic be a partially understood scientific phenomenon? Would magic suddenly come to the galaxy of the SILENT ORDER series? Or would Nadia’s magic stop working, which would be a bad thing since Sudden Character Depowerment is frequently a sure sign the author is beginning to run out of ideas.

Elves are another good example. I’ve written a lot about elves in both the FROSTBORN world and the CLOAK GAMES/MAGE setting, and now I’m about to add more elves in HALF-ELVEN THIEF. The elves in FROSTBORN and the elves in CLOAK GAMES/MAGE work under extremely different rules. Like, in Andomhaim so far we’ve had the high elves, the dark elves, the gray elves, the cloak elves, the umbral elves, and occasionally half-elves. In CLOAK GAMES/MAGE we just have the Elves, and they’re way more concerned about the divide between nobles and commoners than they are about high, dark, gray, cloak, and umbral elves. For that matter, the way magic works in Andomhaim and the way it works in the Nadiaverse is completely different.

So the basic premise of some of my settings are incompatible, and trying to force them together would create some weird story structure problems.

4.) Marvel Movie Lockout Syndrome

The entertainment press has spilled much ink over the fact that THE MARVELS is the worst-performing Marvel movie in the last fifteen years. A lot of the opinions are wholly subjective and based around whatever social/cultural drum a particular writer feels like beating, but I think two undeniable facts worked against the movie, one of which is very relevant to me as a writer.

-It cost too much. THE MARVELS cost $274 million to make, and it brought in about $200 million. If your movie cost $75 million to make, $200 million is a good return. If it cost $274 million, you are up the proverbial foul-smelling creek without a paddle. To put these numbers in perspective, the top three movies of 2023 were BARBIE, SUPER MARIO BROTHERS, and OPPENHEIMER, and with respective budgets of $145 million, $100 million, and $100 million, they all cost less to make than THE MARVELS. In fact, the combined budgets of all three movies put together is only like twenty-five percent higher than the budget of THE MARVELS alone!

Granted, while I wouldn’t object to someone giving me a $100 million budget for something, as an indie writer this is not a particularly relevant concern to me. 🙂 Nonetheless, it is a good reminder of the importance of keeping your costs down while running a business.

-The second fact is very relevant to me as an indie writer with 147 novels published: the movie’s backstory was way too complicated because it was a sequel for too many different things.

Like, the backstory to THE MARVELS:

“Okay, so (deep breath), this is a sequel to CAPTAIN MARVEL from 2019, but also to WANDAVISION from 2021, which introduced the adult version of Monica Rambeau, and also a sequel to MS. MARVEL from 2022 on Disney+, which is where Kamala Khan made her introduction, but it is also a sequel (or possibly a prequel) to 2023’s SECRET INVASION, and in some sense it is also a continuation of the stories told in the four AVENGERS movies, and then the set up for the plot was introduced by the first GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movie back in 2014 with the character of Ronan the Accuser, who also appears in CAPTAIN MARVEL as a younger version of himself, and there are also links to the X-MEN movies and the larger multiverse…”

That is a lot of backstory! And if I’ve learned anything from writing really long series, it’s that people are very often completionists. They wanted to read everything and in the order it was written. The downside of this is that the longer something goes on, the more readers or viewers you lose along the way.

You can see how this works against THE MARVELS. It has like, what, dozens of hours of movies and TV shows to watch first? That’s a big time commitment, and expensive one.

For indie authors, if series goes on long enough, you tend to lose people from book to book as they get distracted with other things or the budget happens to be tight the month the new book comes out. I think CLOAK MAGE will be the last series I write with double-digit book titles, and everything after that is going to be around five to eight books, depending on the story I want to tell.

The problem with crossovers is that it increases the complexity of the backstory exponentially. I ran into that with MALISON and DRAGONTIARNA, even though they were both pretty successful, and in a smaller way with CLOAK & GHOST even though that was a crossover with no connection to the main storyline for either Caina and Nadia.

So, as I plunge into my second decade of being an indie author, I don’t think I’m going to do any more crossovers for the reasons listed above.

Which is why HALF-ELVEN THIEF is entirely unconnected to anything else I’ve previously written. But of course THE SHIELD WAR will be a direct continuation of DRAGONSKULL. 🙂

-JM