FROSTBORN/DEMONSOULED crossover?
Reader JS asks a question to which I don’t know the answer:
“Have you ever considered merging some of your story lines? I have read and reread the demonsouled series and frostborn series (currently rereading Necromancer). At times during both series, it seemed like there may have been overlap of histories. Just an idea, one I am sure you have heard before many times, to keep in mind. You lured me in with free books and I have enjoyed traveling your worlds, thank you.”
I suppose some of the similarity is that both Mazael’s and Ridmark’s worlds are medieval cultures. Though Ridmark’s world is more like the High Medieval period, and Mazael’s is more like the Dark Ages. (Britain in 600 AD and in Britain in 1300 AD were very different places.) There is nothing in Mazael’s world with the central authority of the High King, the Order of the Magistri, or the church of Andomhaim. Mazael’s world did have orders of knights, but he destroyed two of them.
As for a crossover between FROSTBORN and DEMONSOULED, I don’t know. I’ve had people tell me that it would be an amazing idea and that it would be a terrible idea.
My gut reaction is that crossovers are a bad idea…
…but the first two AVENGERS movies made like three billion dollars, so clearly my opinion is in the minority. (Then again, hardly anyone liked the JUSTICE LEAGUE movie.)
What do you think? Are crossovers in general a good idea or a bad idea?
-JM
I have in my bookshelf a crossover between TNG and the X-Men. I leave the results to your imagination, as I am not a sadist.
I called out in favour about these exact 2 series crossing over a while back. As someone who is now only 10 books away from having read your ENTIRE bibliography I can safely say this would be top of my Wishlist for your next project when Cloak Games ends.
I’ve always liked crossovers in general & these 2 just have so much story potential. It would be great timing too with Craig Halloran FINALLY finishing his Nath Dragon / Darkslayer crossover.
One of the main reasons for crossovers is to broaden the sales appeal for a lesser-selling series. If you have a significant number of fans that read Frostborn but haven’t touched Demonborn, it would be a way to get them to buy more of your (already existing) books. Sorry, I mean point out more of your extremely well written, entertaining (and available) works to readers who have heretofore inexplicably not read them. 🙂
Ack! I meant Demonsouled, not Demonborn! You can tell which series I started with, can’t you?
Have you considered reaching out to other indie authors for crossovers? I recall that it was quite popular among webcomics back in the day as a way of getting new readers, I suppose. Anyway, what I’d really like to see is a crossover with Nadia from Cloak Games and Rik from William King’s Terrarch Chronicles. They would have so much in common, like having their worlds invaded by elves, being on the hook to powerful elven nobles, their proclivity for larceny and assassination, chasing magic power at the cost of their sanity and so on.
I think I’ll keep this comment anonymous though.
I have to admit I never thought about it. I usually prefer working by myself.
It would probably be a terrible, terrible idea. The closest thing I can think of that might fulfill roughly the same purpose (i.e. help readers find other authors based on the authors they read) would be some kind of indie short story collection that the respective authors could market through their usual channels and act as a kind of sampler. Recently, I have been using author blogs to find new books to read (like how I found you through your guest post at William King’s blog).
That was a good post, and it was nice of him to invite me to write it. Now that the next version of Ubuntu LTS is out, I should write another SILENT ORDER book with it.
In terms of a “sampler” I’ve thought about bundling together all my free books into a single free book and calling it the “Jonathan Moeller Starter Library” or something like that.