Question About Future Shatnerverse Novels?

[Thrawn]

Yeah, but Del Ray is having their next Star Wars books in hall Hardcover!

Blasphemy I'm sure but I suspect Star Wars books sell a lot more copies than Trek books. (individually I mean. I know there's a hell of lot more Trek books overall.)

There aren't THAT many more Trek than Wars books on a year-by-year basis these days; the Star Wars publishing schedule is pretty thick. And yes, they do sell a lot better, I think they pretty much have to given the difference in shelf space these days. Trek usually gets one or two shelves and Wars usually gets 5 or 6.

 

[Dayton Ward]

^ Yeah, but three of those are taken up by copies of Clone Wars: Wild Space.

 

[Therin of Andor]

^ Yeah, but three of those are taken up by copies of Clone Wars: Wild Space.

Is it not good?

Karen Miller is a friend of mine, a Sydney based SF author, but I don't read SW fiction.

Oooooh, just checked out some Amazon reviews...

 

[Dayton Ward]

I'm not making any judgments on the book or the author. I simply observed the odd phenomenon of one hell of a lot of copies of that one book at a local bookstore a few weeks back.

 

[Steve Roby]

There were a hell of a lot of them at my local Chapters, too. Looks like the new Clone Wars books are getting a really big push. ISTR reading good things about them, though the Clone Wars stuff in general doesn't interest me much.

 

[JoeZhang]

I didn't realise that Star Trek books were even published in hard cover! I saw the shatnerverse ones but considered those oddities.

 

[DimesDan]

I didn't realise that Star Trek books were even published in hard cover! I saw the shatnerverse ones but considered those oddities.

Unity was a hard back and so was Reunion, not sure about others though - although obviously their have been other HB releases.

 

[captcalhoun]

eXcalibur: Restoration, Stone and Anvil, After the Fall and Missing In Action from NF were all HC premieres.

as, notoriously, was Gateways: What Lay Beyond.

 

[TJ Sinclair]

Star Trek hardcovers go back more than twenty years. Spock's World, I believe, was the first, published in 1988 (there may have been an earlier one, but I'm pretty sure that was the first). Then came The Lost Years, and many more followed. Probe, Dark Mirror, Sarek, a whole hell of a lot of hardcovers before you get to the modern crop. Does anyone here have a sense of history?

 

[DimesDan]

Does anyone here have a sense of history?

Yes I do, but I used Unity and Reunion as an example as those are the only two Trek hardbacks I own.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Star Trek hardcovers go back more than twenty years. Spock's World, I believe, was the first, published in 1988 (there may have been an earlier one, but I'm pretty sure that was the first). Then came The Lost Years, and many more followed. Probe, Dark Mirror, Sarek, a whole hell of a lot of hardcovers before you get to the modern crop. Does anyone here have a sense of history?

Actually, Star Trek hardcovers go all the way back to The Star Trek Reader, in 1976 -- an omnibus from Dutton reprinting 3 volumes of James Blish's adaptations of the series. It was followed by 3 more volumes over the next couple of years.

In the early '80's, Gregg Press reprinted 17 of the earliest Pocket Star Trek novels (including the novelizations of the second and third films) in hardcovers -- mostly for the library market. These are lovely volumes, which I only acquired a couple of years ago.

Pocket has published something like 70 Star Trek novels in hardcover, starting with Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in early 1980, through Collision Course, by Shatner and the Reeves-Stevenses, in 2007.

 

[Dayton Ward]

Well, if we're really going to be completist about this, Trek hardcovers go back to 1968, and Mission to Horatius.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Oh, and I almost forgot! The Science Fiction Book Club reprinted the 4 Star Trek Readers over and over and over again, and were still offering them well into the '90's, long after Dutton had discontinued their editions. Most copies you find these days are the SFBC edition -- the Dutton editions are rare.

In the '80's, SFBC reprinted a number of Pocket's Star Trek novels between hardcovers. The first five movie novelizations were reprinted by SFBC, as well as 11 original Star Trek novels - including the three Pocket "Giant" Star Trek novels, Enterprise: The First Adventure, Strangers from the Sky, and Final Frontier.

After Pocket started doing their own hardcovers, SFBC would usually reprint them in their trademark cheaper editions, which didn't include such luxuries as foil embossing and raised lettering that sometimes featured on Pocket's hardcovers.

In the late '90's and '00's they did a number of omnibuses collecting 2, 3 or even 4 Star Trek novels -- usually paperback originals, but occasionally omnibus reprintings collecting multiple hardcovers. Some of these are rare, such as the SFBC edition of New Frontier: Prometheans, collecting the 5th and 6th New Frontier novels.

Trek novels were also reprinted in hardcover in the UK, starting in the '70's, but I don't have any in my collection. Hmmm.. that gives me an idea!

 

[Daddy Todd]

Well, if we're really going to be completist about this, Trek hardcovers go back to 1968, and Mission to Horatius.

Good point! I've never considered a "turtleback" like MtH a "true" hardcover, but that may just be my own prejudice.

 

[TJ Sinclair]

Well, if we're really going to be completist about this, Trek hardcovers go back to 1968, and Mission to Horatius.

Actually, Star Trek hardcovers go all the way back to The Star Trek Reader, in 1976 -- an omnibus from Dutton reprinting 3 volumes of James Blish's adaptations of the series. It was followed by 3 more volumes over the next couple of years.

Yes, quite right, but, and I should have stated this more clearly, I was speaking specifically of Pocket hardcovers, since that's germane to the conversation.

In the early '80's, Gregg Press reprinted 17 of the earliest Pocket Star Trek novels (including the novelizations of the second and third films) in hardcovers -- mostly for the library market. These are lovely volumes, which I only acquired a couple of years ago.

Something that has happened a lot in the past with library editions, or book club editions, of a multitude of books in a wide range of genres.

Pocket has published something like 70 Star Trek novels in hardcover, starting with Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in early 1980, through Collision Course, by Shatner and the Reeves-Stevenses, in 2007.

The TMP novelization was done in hardback? Didn't know that, but not surprised. Still, I believe it was Spock's World that was touted at the time of its publication as the "landmark first original Star Trek hardcover" from Pocket.

 

[Dayton Ward]

The TMP novelization was done in hardback? Didn't know that, but not surprised. Still, I believe it was Spock's World that was touted at the time of its publication as the "landmark first original Star Trek hardcover" from Pocket.

The hardcover version of the TMP novelization was a limited edition-type thing.

Spock's World was indeed Pocket's first go at a hardcover Trek title intended for mass consumption.

 

[Daddy Todd]

The TMP novelization was done in hardback? Didn't know that, but not surprised. Still, I believe it was Spock's World that was touted at the time of its publication as the "landmark first original Star Trek hardcover" from Pocket.

The hardcover version of the TMP novelization was a limited edition-type thing.

Spock's World was indeed Pocket's first go at a hardcover Trek title intended for mass consumption.

The TMP hardcover was published by Simon & Schuster, Pocket's "sister" imprint. It was done as a signed-by-Gene/numbered/slipcased edition of 500. (My copy says "This is copy 1," but I'm sceptical I really lucked out and got #1.) It was also done as a not-limited hardcover edition ($9.95 price inside the jacket) that I recall seeing in bookstores in 1980 -- although it was probably meant primarily for libraries. SFBC's edition is a reprint of this version, including the S&S name on the spine.

So Spock's World was the first Star Trek hardcover from Pocket Books. (I recall thinking it was slightly silly to have Pocket Books, which was practically a synonym for "paperback" back in the day, doing hardcovers. But I'm rambling...)

 

[JD]

In case anyone who's intersted, here's a list of the books that have been categorized as hardcovers on Memory Beta. I'm sure there are more, but this was the only list they have on there. http://http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Hardcovers

 

[Christopher]

(I recall thinking it was slightly silly to have Pocket Books, which was practically a synonym for "paperback" back in the day, doing hardcovers. But I'm rambling...)

Not just practically. It was synonymous for a while in the '40s. And of course the Pocket Books imprint was named that because it was founded to publish pocket-sized paperback books, emulating the format that Penguin Books had introduced four years earlier in 1935. Pocket was the first US distributor of MMPBs.

 

[Daddy Todd]

And The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and published by you-know-who was the first Science Fiction paperback published in the USA, in 1943.

Forry Ackerman used to refer to mass market paperbacks generically as "pocketbooks" back in his Perry Rhodan editorials, but I said "practically a synonym" quite deliberately, because Pocket Books has been fighting for generations to prevent "pocketbook" from going the way of "kleenex" and "xerox." I didn't want to add to Pocket's worry over losing their trademark...