three questions about the SILENT ORDER series
Editing is underway for SILENT ORDER: WRAITH HAND, the second book in the SILENT ORDER series!
The last few posts about the SILENT ORDER science fiction (coming in October!) series inspired three questions.
1.) Am I going to put any of my other new (or old) books in Kindle Unlimited?
No. That would be counterproductive, because it would betray reader expectations. SEVENFOLD SWORD, THE GHOSTS, and CLOAK GAMES already have a good audience on Kobo and Google Play and iBooks and Barnes & Noble. So people expect (rightly) that future books in those series are going to be on Kobo and Google Play and iBooks and Barnes & Noble.
Jerking the rug out mid-series would be kind of a useless thing to do.
But since the SILENT ORDER series doesn’t actually exist yet, there are no reader expectations to betray. 🙂 It’s an experiment, because I’ve recently seen other science fiction series use Kindle Unlimited effectively. And if it doesn’t work, no harm done. Kindle Unlimited is only a three-month term, and once those three months are up, SILENT ORDER can go on all the other retailers.
2.) Will the SILENT ORDER series be in 1st-person narration?
No, it will be in limited 3rd-person. If those terms are unfamiliar, 1st-person uses the “I” pronoun, like CLOAK GAMES: “I did this, I did that.” 3rd-person uses the he & she pronouns. “Caina did this, Ridmark did that.” 3rd-person limited means that the narration stays entirely within the head of one character. (I don’t like 3rd person omniscient because it gets confusing and easy to forget which character is thinking which things.) Whenever I switch POVs in books, I usually use a scene break to march that we’re switching over from, say, Ridmark’s perspective to Calliande’s. SILENT ORDER will be entirely from the POV of Jack March.
GHOST IN THE COWL and GHOST IN THE MAZE were written entirely from Caina’s perspective, so I’ve done it before.
3.) How far in the future is SILENT ORDER set?
One hundred thousand years. I picked that date because “one hundred thousand years of war” was one of the arc phrases in FROSTBORN. The SILENT ORDER series doesn’t have any connection to the FROSTBORN series, but I like the way “one hundred thousand years” sounds, so I set SILENT ORDER 100k years into the future. 🙂
Also, reasons of creativity. If you set something like, 100 years in the future, people will complain and say that things might not have developed that way, and you sort of have to predict the next century or so. That’s always trouble because people can’t predict what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone in a 100 years. (I enjoy reading old science fiction from the 80s about how by 2017 the Soviets would have conquered the globe, and there’s this great science fiction novel from Timothy Zahn called SPINNERET about how the hyperdrive was invented in 2011.) But in 100k years, multiple civilizations would have risen and fallen and risen again in that time, and Earth itself will be so far in the past that it seems like a legend, so there’s far more freedom with the world-building.
-JM