I just wonder that with all the research, reading, and writing going on with all our Trek writers, that any of them have time to post here, as well as read these posts.... I think the have forsaken sleep. Or have their own private Trek Writers Guardian of Deadlines-- "Many such journeys are possible through me" Thanks for all you do, Humble Authors!
The Raiders of the Lost Ark novelization, which had a lot of cool scenes and elaborations not in the film (Belloq meets with Hitler in Bertesgarten to discuss the Ark of the Covenant, it's mentioned Abner Ravenwood died in an avalanche in the Himalayas after going crazy and trying to find the Ark in the snow) but as far as I can recall, the book didn't mention much about how Indy and Marion broke up.
That's how I feel about a lot of the duologies of that era. Single-book premises that seemed to have been split into two for a "two-part event episode" effect when they'd have been better off as standalone novels. Galanter's Maximum Warp comes to mind as well. Avatar maybe should have been a hardcover "season premier" instead of a two-part paperback (and would have made a nice bookend with Unity). And not quite the same, but New Frontier Books 1-4 should have been marketed as Part 1-4 of the pilot event, with Martyr being Book 2 and the first "regular episode" of the series -- it looks silly having the omnibus leading directly into Book 4.
I think a Deep Space Nine hardcover would have been utterly unsellable in 2001. It was the lowest-selling book series, and hadn't had a hardcover since 1995. That would have been a huge risk. Unity only came about because of how fantastically the DS9 relaunch sold over the previous two years. If you wanted a big DS9 event in 2001, a duology was the only way to do it.
Yeah, at that point, the only hardcover DS9 novel was KW Jeter’s Warped, which, at least in my opinion, was lackluster and feels like it got bumped up to hardcover during its writing, so the stakes abruptly jump to justify that. So the Avatar duology made more sense, not just as a DS9 event, but even in the publishing model of the time - when both novel slots of a month are given to the same series, the same event, that says something to the audience about this being A Thing™. Between the success of the DS9 line that followed and the 10th anniversary, Unity as a hardcover made much more sense, but Avatar didn’t have that foundation going in. I will agree that the first New Frontier books should have been bundled up - maybe as two books instead of four. I figure it may have been financially motivated - weren’t they also cheaper than the standard book at the time, so probably Pocket was hedging their bets in the name of a risk in the books being the first novel original line. But still, at that point in time, where the novels were all hitting around 270 pages, four books that don’t even crack 200 just seems particularly weird in comparison to the rest of the books published at that point in time.
As I recall, Stephen King's THE GREEN MILE had just been published in that format, to great success. It was originally serialized as a string of cheap, skinny paperbacks published one after another. It was an experiment in serialized publishing that paid off big, with each skinny little volume hitting the bestseller lists. I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that those NF books were an attempt to jump on that bandwagon, which seemed like the Next Big Thing at the time. That's the historical context there, or so I remember. It was less about what was going on in the Trek line than about a then-current fad in book publishing in general.
The first four New Frontier books were absolutely written and released in a bid to emulate the success of The Green Mile, which was a big deal when it was published in that serial format.
I would have sworn John Ordover said something in Voyages of Imagination along the lines of: "booksellers kindly asked us to never do it again," but I don't see it in there, so he must have said it somewhere else, assuming I'm not making it up. (Bizarrely, VOI gives all of New Frontier less space than it allocates to some individual S.C.E. novellas!)
On that note, I saw authors defend it at the the time, but I'm glad they finally admitted that the final Gateways book was a cash grab.
I'm aware of that. It doesn't even bother me that they approached it that way, and it seems to have worked for them. Just my own aesthetics and ideas of what looks good on a shelf, I wish they'd been, for instance, Parts 1-4 instead of Books 1-4, because regardless of the presentation, they seem to collectively constitute one novel.
I also dimly recall Marco saying that he wasn't interested in hardcovers as a format, and I think Unity was the only hardcover from his office (other than his segment of What Lies Beyond). I have a similar recollection of that being said. Wasn't Peter David less than enthusiastic about participating in Voyages? I'd swear I heard him say, "I wasn't being paid for it, so..."