I don't think that's true. It doesn't agree with what little I know, and I can't recall even reading it as a rumor before.
Paramount licenses the characters, concepts, terms, etc. of ST from CBS, and has a copyright on the films they create and thus retains the right to things that originate in those films (e.g. the Kelvin, Nero, Keenser, Starbase Yorktown, etc.).
People speculated all sorts of nonsense at the time. I never heard a single fan guess the right answer. As I said, this particular speculation is one of the dumbest ones out there, because if it were as simple as that, we could've just rewritten the damn books!! And because the risk of future contradiction has never, ever, ever prevented a tie-in from being published before, as anyone who's read TNG: Ghost Ship or DS9: The Siege can attest.
That's axiomatic, because no book gets written in the first place unless CBS approves the proposal.
I think that would be a matter of the overall license agreement, not the approval process for specific books. But it wouldn't explain what happened with the Kelvin Timeline novels. Again, if the books hadn't been approved initially, we wouldn't have written them at all. They were approved, we got the go-ahead to write them, we wrote them, the manuscripts were accepted and paid for in full... and then the approval was revoked for some reason. That's what's so anomalous about it. Either somebody somewhere changed their minds, or some new factor came into play after the fact, or something.
In any case, the decision to cancel the books was not about their specific content. That should be obvious from the fact that all four were cancelled at once. From what I understand, the cancellation was for behind-the-scenes business reasons that had nothing to do with the actual stories.
. I remember being excited for Cox's Foul Deeds Will Rise since that was one of those missions. His e-book that he did sometime after that was a good read too. I'd love to see more of that. I always loved the Lost Era books too, including the Stargazer books (though it's been years since we've seen one of those). Some of my favorite books are those that take place in between series in the Lost Era or between TMP and TWOK, and TFF and TUC. Bennett's Rise of the Federation are great stories too, since we know so little about the Federation's beginnings and we get to see the very beginnings of what we would eventually see with the original series. I think the only Star Trek universe defining event that we don't know much about that is left is World War III. There's been snippets here and there, obviously Colonel Green, and I remember the Optimum movement from the Federation book (and I remember seeing other references in a few other novels), Ward's Hearts and Minds novel came tantalizingly close. Someday maybe someone will tie it all together (at least as much as possible) to tell the whole story of World War III (that would be a great multi-series books). Cox did an excellent job with the Eugenics Wars, something that I thought would be impossible considering those events are now in the past, but he did it in a way that made fit with known history. I'm sure someone could someday do the same with WWIII.
