I did, with my ebook copy of Desperate Hours. Changed the reference to Saru's homeworld being Kelpia to Kaminar.
2021 books announced
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I did, with my ebook copy of Desperate Hours. Changed the reference to Saru's homeworld being Kelpia to Kaminar.
There was no novel in February or March of 2019, so it’s not unprecedented. With only eight releases a year, a three-month gap now and again isn’t that surprising.
Can someone explain why only 8 books a year?
Probably part of the new contract, I think it started once they came back after the new contract was set up. Might also be because they switched to trades paperbacks.
Ah, thanks.
To ease the financial burden on those fans who buy all the books. With only eight TPB novels a year, they're only spending forty dollars more a year then they did when there were twelve MMPBs. If there were twelve TPBs, they'd be spending double the amount they did when they were getting twelve MMPBs.
Most of us do live on a budget after all.
S&S can publish fewer trades -- and sell fewer copies -- and make more money than they would have on a dozen mass markets a year. I'm surprised it took them so long to make the format jump. I thought they should have done it a decade ago
Okay, who's gonna work out an average yearly word count on Star Trek novels to see if this is accurate?
Our contracts for MMPBs were typically for a target length of 80-100,000 words or thereabouts. Our contracts for TPBs are typically for 100-120,000 words. Okay, so it doesn't completely balance out -- there would have to be about 10 books per year to come out the same -- but I only said "kind of."
I think it takes a pretty grimly mechanical view of storytelling to treat x novels of y length as functionally equivalent to y novels of x length. If you value variety and diversity, a decline in the number of novels is bad news even if the “words per penny” hasn’t changed as much.
welcome to publishers
Nothing is constant. In most of the '80s, Pocket put out 6 novels per year. When TNG came along, it went up to 12. By the time Voyager was around, it peaked to 24. About a decade later, some 15 years ago now, it dropped back to 12. Now it's 8 or 9. It's still a pretty high output compared to most media tie-in book lines.
I'm not speaking for S&S here, since I'm not privy to their internal deliberations, but, in general, mass-market publishing and trade paperback publishing operate differently: different schedules, different profit margins, different markets, different return rates, etc. . . . so there are bound to be adjustments once you make the executive decision to focus on TPBs, which is part of a larger trend in publishing in general as opposed to being just a STAR TREK thing. (Tor used to publish four CONAN novels a year, plus one TPB; that hasn't been the case in forever. And my LIBRARIAN novels were all published as TPBs first, then only later as mass-market paperbacks.)
Trek does not exist in a bubble, apart from the rest of pop culture and entertainment. The TV shows move to streaming; the books become trade paperbacks, because that's where the businesses are trending these days.
Trek does not exist in a bubble, apart from the rest of pop culture and entertainment. The TV shows move to streaming; the books become trade paperbacks, because that's where the businesses are trending these days.
has there been one major driver pushing publishers more to tpb?
I can't speak with authority, but my impression is that the wholesale book market (grocery stores, drug stores, 7-Elevens, etc.) has been slowly fading away for some time. And that was always one of the primary movers for mass-market paperbacks. I've also seen it argued that ebooks are basically taking over the niche formerly occupied by cheap paperbacks.
Indeed, you can see the history in the very names we use for the different formats. "Mass-market paperbacks" were originally intended for the mass market: newsstands, drug stores, train stations, etc. They were meant be cheap and disposable. "Trade paperbacks" were intended for the trade, i.e. bookstores.
Fewer folks seem to be buying their books at drugstores anymore, and "cheap" paperbacks aren't all that cheap compared to ebooks, so mass-market paperbacks may be slowly going the way of the old pulp magazines.
Or at least that's one theory . . . . .
Still would want a novel a month...
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