2022 book releases

I suppose we can now start anticipating 2022 novels et al. in a dedicated thread.

This Gregorian year will close out with Alex R. White's Deep Space Nine trade paperback Revenant on 21 December 2021.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Revenant/Alex-White/Star-Trek-Deep-Space-Nine/9781982160821
https://www.amazon.com/Revenant-Star-Trek-Deep-Space/dp/1982160829

As mentioned in this forum thread, the next Picard hardcover will be Second Self, due out 3 May 2022.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/bo.../Una-McCormack/Star-Trek-Picard/9781982194826
https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Picard-Second-Self/dp/1982194820

I am not sure what this Amazon page designated for 31 December 2050 is for; I guess it is a placeholder for an eventual future product.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1982151900/

Links to previous threads of this nature:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/2020-titles-announced.300730/
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/2021-books-announced.305748/

 

I don't know if there's been a consistent standard lately. I had the impression it was getting closer to a monthly schedule lately, but I don't know for sure.

 

Hmm. Let's analyse what schedule we have had since the novels permanently shifted to trade paperbacks and hardcovers:

26 September 2017 - DIS - Desperate Hours
6 February 2018 - DIS - Drastic Measures
5 June 2018 - DIS - Fear Itself
8 January 2019 - DIS - The Way to the Stars
9 April 2019 - TNG - Available Light
28 May 2019 - TOS - The Captain's Oath
30 July 2019 - DIS - The Enterprise War
13 August 2019 - TOS - The Antares Maelstrom
8 October 2019 - TNG - Collateral Damage
17 December 2019 - DIS - Dead Endless
11 February 2020 - PIC - The Last Best Hope
10 March 2020 - TOS - The Higher Frontier
14 April 2020 - KT - The Unsettling Stars
9 June 2020 - TOS - Agents of Influence
14 July 2020 - DIS - Die Standing
11 August 2020 - KT - More Beautiful Than Death
13 October 2020 - VOY - To Lose the Earth
10 November 2020 - TOS - A Contest of Principles
5 January 2021 - PIC - The Dark Veil
18 May 2021 - DIS - Wonderlands
15 June 2021 - TOS - Living Memory
13 July 2021 - TNG - Shadows Have Offended
17 August 2021 - PIC - Rogue Elements
28 September 2021 - Coda - Moments Asunder
26 October 2021 - Coda - The Ashes of Tomorrow
30 November 2021 - Coda - Oblivion's Gate
21 December 2021 - DS9 - Revenant

 

^Hmm, as I thought. Only nine books in '21, but it's once a month for the last eight months of the year, which makes me wonder if it will stay once a month going forward.

 

I think they have been testing the waters and surely by the end of the year they will know if they want to continue with permanent monthly releases from here on out or not.

 

I suspect a couple TOS, a couple DIS, a couple PIC, at least one SNW, a TNG, a VOY . . . if there are no animated tie-ins, maybe another TOS or another DIS or, with luck, a DS9. That said if there are going to be Jan/Feb releases they should be solicited sooner than later!

 

At this point, I'm doubting there's going to be a January or February release, otherwise we should have heard something by now. Indeed, I'm thinking there's a very real possibility the Picard novel due in April might be the first of 2022. If they are sticking to eight or nine releases for the year, that should allow for monthly releases for the remainder of the year.

 

Just checked the S&S website. The new Picard is now listed with a publication date of 3 May 2022. Nothing else listed.

 

Huh, weird. I could not find the S&S listing until your post prompted me to try again, and this time I found it.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/bo.../Una-McCormack/Star-Trek-Picard/9781982194826

 

Why not a novel per month?

 

I thought there was going to be new Star Trek books coming out once a month for the entire year in 2022.

 

No, no one's ever said that.

The books are now trade paperback and cost double what they did when they were MMPB. At eight books a year, that's only forty dollars more a year than when there was twelve MMPBs a year. If there were twelve trades, that would mean fans would be spending double what they used to, meaning an extra one hundred twenty dollars. S&S is likely aware of the fact most fans are living on a budget.

Besides, even at eight books a year, there's still more Trek novels per year than there for other franchises. Most other franchise's usually only do six or less tie-in novels a year.

 

But only slightly more than MMPBs would cost now if they had continued to keep pace with inflation at a normal rate instead of being fixed at $7.99 for an incredibly long time.

 

Well, for certain values of “slightly.” Star Trek books went to a $7.99 list price at the beginning of 2005. According to an inflation calculator I found online, that’s $11.17 in 2021 dollars. Which is still quite a ways from $16.

But for most of the last 55 years, the list price for mass market paperbacks has risen at a rate that substantially exceeds the rate of inflation.

James Blish’s Star Trek was published at the beginning of 1967 with a $.50 cover price. In 2021 dollars, that’s $4.09. But it may not be a fair comparison, because it was only 136 pages. So let’s look at something much bigger that came out the following year, The Making of Star Trek, which was $.95. That would be $7.45 in 2021 dollars — and it had two lengthy photo insert sections, which certainly added to the production expense, and to its value to the reader.

So, if publishers went by the inflation index, MMPB titles would be cheaper today than they were in 2005.

I mean, Star Trek books are a luxury item bought with discretionary funds. They’re worth exactly what the market will bear, no more and no less. That’s the way of capitalism. But I’m not buying the claim that doubling the cover price and moving to an all-trade line isn’t costing us more, because inflation. That’s verifiably untrue.

 

Is there a comparable franchise with such a breadth of source material? The various Trek series may be one license, but they're not fungible. From a consumer perspective, it's more like multiple franchises each getting 1-3 books a year.

 

The Warhammer IP tends to get overlooked, but it has a huge universe of lore and puts out at least one book a month (sometimes as many as four) from across its various franchises.

 

There's Doctor Who, which is mostly one source series that ran for 26 seasons originally (the first six of them running 9-11 months each) and about half that since its revival (12 full seasons and a couple of years of periodic specials, with a 13th season upcoming). It's had several modern spinoffs, but the core series is pretty huge. (Perhaps you could split hairs and argue that the original and new series are two different series, but they feature the same lead character in the same situation and premise.)

Also, I don't think you're using the word "franchise" quite right. To quote Wikipedia, "A media franchise, also known as a multimedia franchise, is a collection of related media in which several derivative works have been produced from an original creative work of fiction, such as a film, a work of literature, a television program or a video game." It's by analogy with a business franchise where multiple different stores are all part of the same larger corporate entity, like all of them being McDonald's instead of just a bunch of mom-and-pop burger joints. So the fact that Star Trek has multiple different parts sharing a brand and identity, rather than being just a single series, is what makes it a franchise to begin with.

 

But better quality paper and the authors get a bigger cut from sales.