what is THE BONE QUEST?
Today, I’m going to talk a bit about book marketing, inspired by a reader question!
A reader emailed to ask what THE BONE QUEST short stories are.
Basically, they are a series of linked short stories, set a few years before the start of the FROSTBORN series, that I’ve been giving away to the subscribers of my new-release newsletter when a new FROSTBORN short story comes out.
Previously, for the FROSTBORN short stories I wrote the origin stories of the various companions who had come to join Ridmark on his quest – THE MAGE’S TALE, THE THIEF’S TALE, and so on.
However, I had finally reached a point in the FROSTBORN series where no more companions joined Ridmark, so I needed something else.
Hence THE BONE QUEST, which when it is finished will be an account of Ridmark’s journey to speak with an Elder Shaman in the Qazaluuskan Forest. Once the FROSTBORN series is done, I’ll combine THE BONE QUEST short stories into a single fix-up novel.
It’s also an experiment – I give away the short stories for free with my newsletter, but after that, I would like to find an additional use for them (from a marketing perspective), since individual short stories don’t sell very well. My most successful effort with that has been a fix-up novel – basically, short stories combined into a novel with a frame story. FROSTBORN: THE KNIGHT QUESTS sells pretty well, and that’s a combination of the original TALE series of FROSTBORN short stories.
Since I was planning to do that anyway, why not design the short stories to be joined together anyway? Hence, THE BONE QUEST, which has become something of a serial. It will be interesting to see how it works out!
So far, it has sold well, but the stories have gotten a bunch of annoyed reviews from people who were irritated that the short stories were not, in fact, another full-length FROSTBORN novel. I think I made a mistake with the branding of the short stories – the cover design looks too much like the regular novels. Before FROSTBORN: EXCALIBUR comes out, I might redesign the covers of THE BONE QUEST short stories to look less like the novels.
-JM
“However, I had finally reached a point in the FROSTBORN series where no more companions joined Ridmark, so I needed something else.”
There were no Tales for Caius or Gavin, while I realise they would possibly have been giving some plot points of certain books especially The Eightfold Knife any plans now that The Dwarven Prince has been released especially to flesh out Caius’ backstory? (Always knew there was more to him than he was letting on).
Also I have FROSTBORN: THE KNIGHT QUESTS but it doesn’t contain The Traitor’s Tale. Was there any reason it was left out when the Soldier’s Tale was released later?
I never did Tales for Caius or Gavin because Caius’s background was always going to be a big plot point in THE DWARVEN PRINCE. To be honest, I never did one for Gavin because he was so young when he was introduced that his entire background was a plot point for THE EIGHTFOLD KNIFE, so any story would have been a spoiler.
That was also why THE TRAITOR’S TALE wasn’t included in FROSTBORN: THE KNIGHT QUESTS. Everything else that happens in FROSTBORN: THE KNIGHT QUESTS happens before the FROSTBORN series actually begins, but THE TRAITOR’S TALE takes place between THE DARK WARDEN and THE GORGON SPIRIT, and therefore has spoilers for the rest of the series.