A small site with one job: tell you what order to read the books in.
Built by a husband-and-wife team who got tired of searching Reddit threads for the right reading order — so we started keeping our own.
Who we are
Hi — we're Noah and Samantha Emig, the two people behind Mrs Books in Order.
Samantha is the "Mrs" in the name, and she is, without exaggeration, the fastest reader in our house. She works full-time as a Project Manager at Return Center, and still somehow finishes novels in a weekend that take other people a month. She's the one who gets genuinely offended when a series is read out of order. Most of what you see on this site exists because she wanted it to exist.
Noah runs a small web studio called OutrankX and spends most of his working hours building clean, fast, useful sites for other people. This is the site he builds for fun — usually with an audiobook running somewhere in the background.
We're not a publisher, a bookstore, or a literary magazine. We're two readers who happen to have the skills to put a site like this together, and enough stubbornness to keep it accurate.
How it started
The site has a specific origin story. A while back, Noah was working his way through a fantasy series he'd picked up on audiobook — the kind where prequels and spin-offs and companion books start stacking up in ways that aren't obvious from the covers. Which book came next? Did the prequel go before book one or after book four? Was the spin-off part of the main line, or its own thing?
There were plenty of "books in order" pages online for it. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that reading them felt like work. Walls of text where the actual answer was buried three paragraphs down. Ordering tables with no dates, or dates with no ordering. Pages that had clearly been written once and then left to age.
It felt like the answer to a simple question — which book is next? — should be something you can get in ten seconds, from a page that looks like it was made by someone who actually cared about the series.
Noah couldn't find that page for the series he was reading. So he built one. Then he built one for the next series. Samantha, the faster reader in the house, started weighing in on reading-order recommendations, and pretty soon we had the bones of a site. We decided to stop stopping.
What you'll find here
Every series we cover gets the same treatment:
The recommended reading order for someone starting fresh. Publication order, for purists and completionists. Chronological order, when the series has prequels, interquels, or jumps around in time. Release dates. A clear "start here" recommendation for new readers. And, where it's genuinely useful, an editorial note about why we recommend one order over another.
Author pages give you the full bibliography, grouped by series, with standalones listed separately. Book pages are short, factual reference cards — title, release date, where it sits in the series, the book before it, the book after it.
If you want the deeper guide to what each of those terms means, we wrote one: How to use this site.
Why we built it this way
Most book-order pages online are either too much or too little. Too much: a wall of prose you have to skim for twenty seconds to find a publication date. Too little: a bare list with no dates, no context, and no indication of whether it's current.
We wanted a middle ground — a page that respects your time if you just want the answer, and rewards your time if you want the context. So every series page starts with the quick answer at the top, keeps the ordering tables clean and scannable, and saves the editorializing for the readers who actually want it.
A note on accuracy
We're a two-person operation covering a lot of books, so we'd be lying if we said every date and title on this site was checked by hand from a first-edition cover. We use AI to help us pull together the data that goes into these pages — release dates, chronological ordering, series metadata — and then we go through it ourselves. Every page gets human editorial review before it goes live, and the writing and recommendations are ours.
That process is how we cover the ground we do, and it's fast and mostly right. But it isn't perfect, and we don't claim it is. If you spot a date that looks wrong, a book we've misplaced in a series, a title we've gotten backwards in a translation — tell us. We'll check it, fix it, and say thanks. Corrections from readers are how this site stays honest.
A little about us outside the site
We're dystopian readers at heart. The Hunger Games is the series we quote at each other most often, but the shelf is broader than that on any given week.
Noah mostly reads with his ears — audiobooks on road trips and whenever driving allows. Samantha reads the old-fashioned way, usually a physical copy. Between the two of us we cover a lot of ground, and we argue cheerfully about which format counts as "really" reading. (It all counts.)
What we're reading right now
How we plan to keep it useful
A couple of quiet commitments from us to the people who use this site.
We won't clutter these pages up. No popups, no autoplay video, no "read next" carousel that hijacks the page. If we ever run ads, they'll be unobtrusive, and we'll say so openly.
We'll keep the information current. When a new book drops in a series we cover, we update the relevant pages — usually within a few days. When a reader emails us about a date that looks wrong, we check it, fix it, and say thanks.
And we'll keep the editorial voice honest. If we think a series is better read out of publication order, we'll tell you why. If we don't have a strong opinion, we'll say that too, and point you to publication order as the safe default.
If you ever spot something we've gotten wrong — a date, a missing book, a retitle we missed — the contact page is the fastest way to reach us. Corrections from readers are how this site stays honest.
Closing
Thanks for stopping by.
Whether you landed here because you were three books into a series and wanted to make sure you hadn't skipped one, or because you're trying to decide where to start, or because you're just curious about the two people behind the name in the URL — we're glad you're here. Happy reading.
— Noah & Samantha