Still, there is noticeably more Star Trek activity from Titan at the moment than there is from Pocket Books. Maybe there isn't a smoking gun yet, but theories that something is going on are a bit more logical sounding than typical tinfoil hat fare tends to be.
But
any active publisher is, by definition, going to have more activity than an inactive publisher, so that's kind of a tautological observation. There's more
Star Trek activity from IDW and Modiphius too, but that doesn't mean they're also gunning for Pocket's license. Titan, like those other publishers, offers different categories of tie-ins than Pocket does.
Besides, simultaneity doesn't prove causality, especially in a business as sluggish as publishing, where cause and effect can be separated by months or years. Also, there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes in business that the public never hears about. So it's a fallacy to assume that the thing you can see must be the cause. The cause could be something you've never even heard of. It could be something that isn't even about
Star Trek, that's about some bigger business concern at Simon & Schuster. Remember when Marco Palmieri was fired in 2009? That had absolutely nothing to do with his work on
Star Trek or anything connected to the franchise at all. It was a consequence of the global economic crash and the financial losses that required S&S to slash employees companywide.
Star Trek is just one small facet of what S&S does, so there are a lot of things totally unrelated to
Star Trek that might potentially affect the process of S&S's various license renewals.
Of course I'm just speculating -- I have no specific knowledge of what the cause of the delay might be. But that's exactly why I'm not going to latch onto something just because it happens to be in my line of sight.
