No, the licensing really is done on a series by series basis. IDW only has the license to do TOS, TNG, and Kelvin verse stuff. Pocket Books can do everything except Kelvin verse. Or more accurately, they can't touch anything from the Abrams movies which is why the novels are forbidden from touching the destruction of Romulus despite it happening in the Prime Universe.
That's odd. STO didn't initially have Kelvin verse licenses, but everything else, including the supernova...that or you simply can't protect 'hobos supernova destroys Romulus, Spock vanishes' under license terms, which from the perspective of the prime universe is basically what happens....they can use. I know the starship collection team had to pay a lot for a separate Kelvin verse license, but again, they had no problem getting everything else. Both STO and starships collection have deals in place with Simon and shuster for novel related stuff, but I think that's case by case and pretty extremely complicated. Who put out the starfleet academy book off the back of JJ trek? I thought they had the license but canned the books after it didn't go to plan, and because bad robot weren't happy when the prime universe couldn't be shut down? (Apparently the Hobbs supernova was to wipe out the galaxy even, but the STO guys were all...were all "er, we just paid for the license to that" and CBS were very much, 'do you have any idea how much money existed merch brings in? ShatnerKirk is the family silver.' And Bad Robot/JJ didn't get to emulate the Lucas merch approach as a result...hence the fizzle out on that front. So I heard. Allegedly.)
There's always been a degree of cooperation between Bad Robot and STO. Indeed, Countdown is connected to STO continuity and uses the STO Starfleet uniforms and their take regarding Data's resurrection and career. Everything from the Abrams movies in STO is done so with Bad Robot's blessing. Those were from Pocket. I don't know why an exception was made for them. Although no official explanation has ever been given regarding the cancelled novels, reading between the lines it seems Pocket didn't realize their license didn't cover the Abrams movies until very late stages. As CBS has almost always granted them the license to every series anyway, they assumed official notice was only a formality, and were surprised Bad Robot had to be on board for stuff based on their movies. That's why they were cancelled at a stage when they were already written, cover images and blurbs were released and they were available for pre-order. Not to mention the authors still had to be paid, too.
That scenario seems unlikely, given that Pocket would've sent outlines/proposals for each of the books to CBS for approval, as much as 12-18 months ahead of the books' planned publication. Manuscripts would've been sent for approval anywhere from 6-12 months ahead of publication, depending on any number of factors. I'm not privy to the details surrounding these four books, but the odds of it being an "Oh, shit. We can't do this, can we?" moment - based on my experience and the realities of the life cycle for these sorts of books - are pretty much nonexistent. A more likely scenario (again, conjecture) is that somebody changed their mind about wanting novels based on the JJ-films, for whatever reason. Such is the reality of tie-in writing...sometimes the people who own the toys decide they want to go in a different direction, or no direction at all.
StarTrek.com posted a news story announcing January's comics, and one of them will be Waypoint #3, which includes new DS9 and Voy stories. This will be IDW's second DS9 story following the four part Fool's Good miniseries which ran from December 2009 - March 2010, and they also did an arc in the ongoing Kelvin timeline series involving elements from DS9 from July 2014 - January 2015. This will be IDW's first Voyager comic story, and the first time Voyager has been seen in comics since Wildstorm's 3-part Planet Killer miniseries, which ran from March - May 2001.
I think there was a DS9 one shot quite a while back, before the Fool's Gold series, in the Captains Log or Alien Spotlight series. At any rate I'm excited for both the DS9 and VOY stories. I'll probably get all these when they're in a trade paperback.
I just double checked the preview on Comixology and you're right, based off of t's description Alien Spotlight: Cardassian was a DS9 story.
Oh, I forgot about that. Garak is a main character, and it also follows up on some plot points from the DS9 relaunch. (It's not very good. The art is pretty bad. All the Cardassians look the same. And Garak's dialogue doesn't ring true.)
Also, I think the Borg story of the Alien Spotlight series features Janeway, and of course Seven of Nine was in Braga's TNG Hive series.
Wow... is it possible that we might actually get Enterprise in comic form at some point during this series?
Oh, right from what I've seen flipping though it Seven actually seems to play a pretty significant role in Hive, but it was mainly a TNG story with her as more of guest star. I was really talking about a story where the Voyager characters are the main focus.
Not true any more if it ever was. I met one of IDW's editors in person six weeks ago, and she told me that she was looking for DS9 and VOY stories for the new comic.
Simon Spotlight, one of Pocket's fellow imprints of Simon and Schuster. It's mainly for books directed to kids and teens. (thanks MA)
Who does currently have the rights for Enterprise comics. Or does anyone currently have those rights? Do they even exist? (probably...)
Yes, thank you. The news about Waypoint 3 yesterday kind of clued me into the fact IDW can now do DS9 (again) and Voyager.
When you say "looking for"...does that mean soliciting? Like, is IDW accepting submissions? (I'm not familiar enough with DS9 and Voyager myself, but for a TOS story or something...sweet if true.