I never liked the rebranding as "Corps of Engineers"-- it's only marginally more enticing than "S.C.E." If I was King of the Books, I'd've called it "Star Trek: Miracle Workers."
2 books per month to 1 per month....
- Thread starter Nathan
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Unfortunately, Ian, your chronology doesn't line up and is off by six months.
The last of the Slings & Arrows eBooks (which was also the last of the first run of original eBooks until the Typhon Pact one-shot) came out in the spring of 2008.
The global economy crisis didn't kick off until September, when Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy. And at that point, all bets were off.
The decision not to publish any eBooks beyond Enterprises of Great Pitch and Moment was made well before the economy went in the toilet. The author page in one of Christopher Bennett's books (The Buried Age, maybe?) says that his next work would be a Corps of Engineers story that would have been published after Slings and Arrows. There was certainly an editorial intent to continue the eBooks into 2008 and beyond; the question is why Pocket made the choice not to continue.
Honestly, I think it was a dollars and cents issue. Pocket had been publishing these eBooks for about seven years, they had a good backlist, but it didn't look like the eBook was ever going to take off. Ironically, about the same time that Pocket made the decision to quietly kill the line (which, given production lead times, would have been at the end of 2007), Amazon introduced the Kindle. The rest, as they say, is history. Essentially, Pocket killed their original eBook program at exactly the moment that eBooks became a mass market phenomenon.
And none of this has anything to do with the global financial panic. Not to say that that didn't affect Pocket, because it did, but the eBook decisions were made well before it.
It's true that I did have a second CoE story under consideration when the line was ended, but that info wouldn't have been in an author page, since the cancellation came before my outline was actually approved and before any contract could be drawn up. It was one of several proposals awaiting Paula Block's approval at the time the line was cancelled (and it's partly my own fault it wasn't published after all, since I rethought parts of the proposal and asked Keith to let me rework and resubmit it, thus delaying it considerably). So it must've been something I mentioned online instead, as a story that might have been, but never as something officially sold and scheduled.
Actually the SCE series was kind of like Strange New Worlds -- it was always on the brink financially, and it's impressive it was allowed to continue as long as it did. True, maybe if the decision-makers had decided to hold out a little longer, they would've reached the point when e-books started to become profitable at last, but they had no way of knowing that at the time, and made the only decision that made sense with the data they had. And let's remember that these are (as far as I know) the same people who decided to take a chance on the series in the first place and resisted cancelling it for so long even when the safe move would've been to kill it much sooner.
I swear it is, Christopher, because I remember asking Keith about it at a Farpoint, so it was a book published toward the end of the year. My Trek collection isn't at hand, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's probably in your author bio in the back of The Sky's the Limit, which would fit the time (the winding down of the line) and Keith's response (that Pocket was playing out the string with Slings & Arrows).
It can't be in The Buried Age, because that went on sale at a Shore Leave so if you had announced the CoE book in the author bio there then you would have been asked questions about it.
Going back even further in time, I remember when the only Star Trek literature I could find at the time, were the semi-monthly gold key comic books and the irregularly released Bantam novels back in the mid to late 1970's.
Swear all you like, but I'm the author, and I know for a fact that the outline never sold, I never got a contract, I never wrote the story, and I never got paid. The only thing I've ever sold that was cancelled after the sale was Seek a Newer World. My CoE pitch had been tentatively okayed by Keith and was sitting on Paula's desk, but the line was cancelled before it was formally approved or sold. And there's no way that an unsold, uncontracted outline would get announced as upcoming in an author page, not unless there was a miscommunication somewhere. But I checked the author pages of all my books from around that period and there's no mention in any of them of an upcoming CoE story.
All I can think of is that maybe you're misinterpreting my author bio from The Darkness Drops Again:
Maybe you misread that to mean I would be returning to SCE/CoE itself, rather than to e-books in general.
Another line of disproof: Amazon.com never cleans up its listings, so anything I've ever had announced would still be listed on Amazon under my name. They've still got an entry for Seek a Newer World, and they even have one for "Hidden Truths," the working title of my Constellations story "As Others See Us" (I still have no idea how that got indexed as a hardcover novel). But there's no entry for a second CoE story. Therefore it was never announced.
Christopher, take a look on page 164 of Constellations and tell me which Corps of Engineers eBook you're talking about as forthcoming.
I'll take my apology now.
Thanks.
I'll take my apology now.
Thanks.
Allyn, I just checked my copy of "Constellations". It mentions an upcoming Corps Of Engineers book, and at the bottom of the bio it says that "S.C.E #29" is an upcoming trade paperback release. The bios referring to two separate stories.
Conceded -- partly. You said that the claim was that my "next work" would be a CoE e-book; in fact it just says that it's one of various things I was working on at that point. The phrasing "next work" implies something that was definite, that was sold and scheduled, and it remains true that that was never the case with this project. You'll note that right afterward I mention an original science fiction novel that I hoped to sell soon -- which was Only Superhuman and which I didn't sell for another several years. So that was just a general listing of my active projects including spec work, not a formal declaration of what my next published work would be.
So this is just a simple mutual miscommunication. No harm, no foul.
I like the current release pace as it is, I like to read a lot of fiction outside Trek too and I'm at least a year behind in my Trek reading pile. I only buy non-TOS fiction as it is.
Oh, God. This.
Same here; I remember saving up my allowance money so that I could purchase Enterprise: The First Adventure at the local pharmacy's (rather extensive) book section, which I finally succeeded at in April, 1987 (over 5th grade spring break, from what I recall).
So many of those early Pocket novels got bought and paid for that way for me; at that time I was branching out into other, non-media SF novels (Asimov's Foundation, Frank Herbert's Dune books), but I still have fond memories of walking into that drug store with three or four singles and some coins (for sales tax) to buy the latest TOS novel.
Good times.
Also, this -- I get to read the odd ST novel now, but most of my intake these days comes from non-fiction, historical fiction, philosophy, etc. Still, having a more limited release window helps prevent overflow and having a "pile of shame" accumulate (well...a SMALL "pile of shame," in my case).
The wait between the "Star Trek II" novelization (July 82) and "Black Fire" (Jan 83) was interminable!
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