Well the is a first time for (almost) everything.
Unbelievable that there a such idiots at Simon & Schuster.
Too bad I can't become President of the US, Trek novels first!
2019 Releases
- Thread starter Jarrod
- Start date
Well the is a first time for (almost) everything.
Unbelievable that there a such idiots at Simon & Schuster.
Too bad I can't become President of the US, Trek novels first!
The old days were 2 books per month for quite some time.So when are the rest being announced? I demand at least one per month, like the old days.
Yes, the glory days of Trek Lit.
.
A crying shame that is too. I love our current crop of authors so this is no indictment of them, but I'd love to see something by you, Peter David and some others from years past (assuming they'd be interested of course).
I'm curious. Can prior authors put in feelers at S&S and do they? Can someone who's a previously prolific author say to someone at S&S, hey I'd be interested in writing a Star Trek book again? I'm not sure what the procedure is on that. Maybe some authors have done that, I'm not sure. I remember reading some years ago after Peter David wrote Treason that he was getting the silent treatment from S&S re: future books, I think that was the last of his contract if I remember correctly (though he was able to write the 3 NF E-Books after that---I guess that was a one off thing since nothing has come out since then).
Yeah. I'm fine with one a month though. When they were doing 2/month I was falling behind, I couldn't keep up.
The only bad thing is it sounds like they will all be trades at $16/pop. While I'm not crying poverty or anything, that's a lot of dough to lay out every month for a novel. I can understand a price increase, but that's quite a jump from MMPB to trade.
I took this from Memory Beta (it's been a few years since I read "Raise the Dawn" so I needed to look it up, I believe this was his last appearance):
In 2383, he was serving as one of Kamemor's Proconsuls, alongside Anlikar Ventel. He resigned his position in June of that year, though, ostensibly to return to his former life in the Imperial Fleet. In reality, though, he had become an agent of the Tal Shiar, under Chairwoman Sela. Tomalak was finally arrested and left in the Federation to stand trial after his attempts to help the newly-formed Typhon Pact acquire their own quantum slipstream drive results in the destruction of Deep Space 9 and the Pact and the Federation being pushed to war. (ST - Typhon Pact novel: Raise the Dawn)
I know of some authors, whom I will not name, who have done exactly that... and they get nothing but crickets in reply.
A shame. And it seems to make poor business sense. A new Star Trek novel by KRAD for instance would probably sell a lot of books for S&S.
I know Sela is gone now. As to Tomalak: another unfinished story. I can't imagine that a Romulan would submit himself to a Federation court. Maybe he is showing up in one of the future novels. I guess he won't go down without pulling a stunt.
Actually, no. The byline is pretty much irrelevant to the sales of a Trek novel. A book's sales are more determined by series and by who's on the cover (Picard's or Spock's face on the cover will spike sales, as an example) than who wrote it.
That's true of most media tie-ins, sad to say. Heck, my best-selling book -- by far -- is my World of Warcraft novel, and that isn't because that book was particularly good, or because I wrote it, it's because it's a World of Warcraft book.
For what it's worth, the announced release schedule for the first third of 2019 is three novels in four months. So it's not quite every month. If the pattern continued, the expenditure would average out to $12 per month.
It's pretty astonishing, actually, that the MMPBs remained priced at $7.99 for a dozen years, from 2005-2017. In the equivalent span from 1993-2005, the price went up 4 times, starting at $5.50 and ending at $7.99. If it had continued to rise at that rate, it'd probably be $11-12 per book by now anyway. We just got lucky that that price was kept steady for so long. But it couldn't last forever.
Actually, no. The byline is pretty much irrelevant to the sales of a Trek novel. A book's sales are more determined by series and by who's on the cover (Picard's or Spock's face on the cover will spike sales, as an example) than who wrote it.
That's true of most media tie-ins, sad to say. Heck, my best-selling book -- by far -- is my World of Warcraft novel, and that isn't because that book was particularly good, or because I wrote it, it's because it's a World of Warcraft book.
Well, I guess you have a point there. Up to this point I've bought all the Star Trek novels that have come out at least for the last 15 years regardless of the author. Still, I'd love to see a book by some of you guys that haven't written one in a long time.
It seems these days S&S prefers to stick to a set group of authors, unlike the 80's and 90's where there seemed to be a ton of authors, and sometimes just single book authors (where someone only wrote one Star Trek novel). I guess some of that has been limited by cutting back on the number of novels per year. Doing 24 novels in a year would mean you'd need a lot more authors. But it's rare to see a Star Trek novel these days not written by one of the current group of writers.
I also get the feeling that we won't be seeing monthly novels anymore and as CBS puts out more online shows, like the new TNG show I think we'll see more tie-ins to current series and occasional original series novels and less novels from DS9, Voyager and Enterprise.
As an aside any word on the next Voyager novel "To Lose the Earth"? I check Memory-Alpha from time to time but it still shows that it's planned. I imagine Beyer is very busy right now, though I saw she definitely still plans on writing it (I think I saw some time ago that she was actively working on it). I wonder also will that be a MMPB or will S&S 'upgrade' that to a Trade (or can they--maybe it's contracted to be a MMPB, I don't know).
Yeah, I know. It's just a huge jump from 7.99 to 16.00 a pop. I wish the jump was a bit more gradual. I'm curious to see if the effect that has on book sales.
I always think it's funny when I went to complete my Bantam books collection that I was paying about 2.50 to 3.00 for a book and they were originally sold brand new in the 70's at about 1.50 (they were in good condition so I'm not complaining-it's just amusing I paid more for it used then it was new---you could argue with inflation though that brand new would have been much more than 1.50 today).
In my case it means that I won't buy that many Trek books anymore
That's rubbish for someone who edited and wrote. I wish these things were explained! Did you at least get an explanation (which you can't or won't share)? Or was it just(?) Marco leaving?
Definitely sucks, as it's a big price increase. Also will be a bigger form factor than most of the other 600(?) trek books on my bookshelves. Price jump is even worse, because I always pre-ordered them from Amazon, and most ended up costing about 5.50 after they matched the lowest price pre-release. So triple the price, but books won't be longer, just a little taller...
Annoying in that the cost to actually print the book is just about nothing, or at least that's the story of why eBooks aren't cheaper. Printing it bigger allows for a bigger price point, so I'm sure some bean counter did the tradeoffs for lost sales vs. increased profit on remaining sales, etc. Myself, i'm torn. But when the Star Wars books went all-HC, that was my point where i stopped buying and started getting them from the library. We'll see how this goes, but annoyed at the price jumping so high. to be fair, they DID hold the line a long time, and yes it's still cheap entertainment, and yes I like supporting the fine folks in here that write the stories, but still...
Why do you think they won't be longer? Trade paperbacks typically have about 15% more words per page than MMPBs, some 350-400 words, and it looks like the page counts on the Discovery TPBs have been in the 300-400 range. So if that's typical, that's something like 100-150,000 words per book, while Trek MMPBs were generally in the 80-120K range.
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