They don't mind losing money on Star Trek fiction and giving us less choice by not publishing the Prodigy books as eBooks. But that means anyone who wants these as eBooks aren't going to be able to get. The age group they are targeting are probably using a tablet. So I don't see any reason not to have eBooks.
You did say "uninterested." I shouldn't have put "unwilling" in quotation marks, since it was a paraphrase rather than a direct quote, but the meaning seems basically the same to me. Sure, people can speculate. But when doing so, it's important to maintain healthy skepticism about our speculations and remain open to other possibilities. Especially when speculating about other people's motives, because people often have reasons for their actions that we aren't privy to. I've been tiptoeing around it since I don't know how much I can say publicly and don't know anything for certain, but what little I've been told about the situation suggests that whatever's delaying Trek novels is not happening on Gallery's end of the deal.
That would rule out a hold up in CBS Licensing, since other licensees are getting approvals. So if Gallery is willing, and CBS Licensing is also willing, then...? I wonder if Gallery finds themselves now in a situation not unlike Marvel Comics in 1998 -- it doesn't make sense financially to commission anything because, even with the move to TPB, Star Trek novels aren't netting enough to justify them. In other words, perhaps it's cheaper for Gallery to eat the sunk cost of the license than to spend money commissioning more books that won't recoup the investment.
Yeah, the idea that "someone else" is standing in the way of Gallery getting new novels approved should be rather concerning for Gallery. Particularly since Titan and IDW don't have any trouble getting content approved.
Forgive me, I'm not in the industry, so just wanted to ask... does this actually follow? Just because licensee A is getting approvals, isn't it possible that licensee B could still have issues with the same licensor?
That is not at all what I meant to suggest. I certainly was not implying the involvement of a third party; the possibility never occurred to me. Nor do I have any reason to doubt that Trek novels will resume eventually. The fact that it's taking so long is not encouraging, but publishing is a business that's often prone to extended delays. We've been through this before; there was a long delay in 2017 or thereabouts, though I don't think it was this long. I think people on this board were making doom-and-gloom speculations about the future of the novel line back then, but the books still came back. It's not a question of whether content is approved or not; it's a question of how long it takes. In my experience, getting studio approval for my Star Trek Adventures games is extremely slow. I've had games come out a couple of years after I first pitched them. And even if a license is cleared up, Gallery would then have to commission new projects, get their outlines approved, get them written, get the manuscripts approved, etc., and that's typically gonna take a year or a year and a half, maybe. Whatever Titan and IDW are putting out now, it was probably commissioned and given the go-ahead quite some time ago -- well, maybe not as long ago in the case of comics, since they're produced faster. Remember that Bantam was still putting out Trek novels for two years after their license expired. I agree -- it doesn't necessarily follow that the process would go the same for every licensee. They might be seeking different things, or they might just renew at different times so one avoids a business delay that slows things down for another. I gather that a lot of things in the publishing business are seasonal, or aren't done until a certain point in a cycle, so one thing might wait for months longer than another until they both get dealt with in the same batch of requests. There are all sorts of things that can slow things down, so a delay doesn't necessarily mean anything catastrophic.
Unless I’m mistaken over the six year period from January 2018- December 2023 (70 months) 28 novels are all that will be released. But don’t worry, it’s just doom and gloom speculation.
Perhaps they're keeping the license primarily to continue to sell their insanely enourmous back catalogue in those 99c monthly sales.
The slower output in the TPB era has been explained in previous discussions hereabouts. TPBs have a higher price point and are more favored by bookstores; they've always been more of a prestige product than mass-market paperbacks, and MMPBs have been pretty much replaced in the marketplace by e-books. It's an industry-wide publishing trend, so it doesn't suggest anything one way or the other about the Trek license. Granted, I do find it odd that S&S hasn't gotten back into original Trek e-books in the years since the last slowdown. It seems like it would've been a natural response to the paper shortages and shipping delays resulting from the pandemic. And I liked the novella format, having the option to do medium-length stories too big for a short story but not warranting a full novel.
Ah, okay. I think I get it. This is what I think you're dancing around, and to be clear, you didn't say it. The license expired, the handful of book this year are playing out the string of the last license renewal, and perhaps there wasn't a lot of movement on renewing the license due to the pandemic and the now-scuttled PRH merger. Result? We're presently in a fallow period that's going to last 12-18 months. Unfortunately. Thanks for the numbers. The license might not allow for it. Or it does but they can't make the numbers work to justify doing it.
Still, if we take into account the fact that other franchises usually manage an average of 6 novels a year, that should give us a total of 36 for that time period, eight more than there are. Although, looking over the numbers, I see Star Wars actually hasn't done many more adult novel releases in the same time period, and some of those are movie novelizations and audio drama transcripts. Although, Star Wars also has YA novels and other content aimed at younger readers.
All I have is a couple of fragments of hearsay, so I don't know anything for sure. I have no reason to believe that the novels won't start up again in time, but I can't suggest a timeline or anything. I'd think it would be odd if a modern license didn't include original e-books, audiobooks, or "any format now existing or yet to be invented in perpetuity throughout the universe," or however it's phrased in contract language. And my understanding (vague though it is) is that the reasons MMPBs have pretty much died as a format is because original e-books took their place in the market, suggesting that e-books are good sellers. So it's confusing. What other franchises? That seems historically a bit high. Franchises that manage to churn out tie-in novels regularly for a long time like ST, Star Wars, Doctor Who, or Stargate (for a while) are really the exception, not the rule. Look at how few Leverage or The Librarians tie-ins we got, say. And of course, the whole publishing industry was hit hard by the pandemic, and is probably still struggling to recover. The past few years have been anything but typical.
The suggestion that mass market paperbacks have been “replaced” by ebooks is misleading. In the late 2010s there was a sharp drop in MMPB sales due to the rise of ebooks, and following that supply-chain issues have dented their sales in because of the pandemic, but MMPBs sales have actually been climbing back up year on year. Their lower price point makes them appealing to certain genre readerships (romances and westerns are two good examples) and they retain popularity in markets outside the US. Arguably, MMPBs will probably never be as popular as they once were and ebooks have clearly consumed a good portion of their reader market share, but it’s incorrect to declare the format “dead”. That would depend on the terms of the deal. Like, some of the old Bantam Books Trek fiction was reprinted by them long after S&S got the license in the 80s, and other Bantam stuff was later reprinted by a totally different publisher (Titan). I imagine it would be up to CBS to decide - for example, if you look at the novels based on the Halo games, the early ones were published by Del Rey, then the license went to Tor, now it's with Gallery and those books remained in print (in ebook and dead tree format) each time it moved. I'm pretty sure all of us - readers and authors alike - are frustrated by the lack of clarity about the future of Star Trek tie-in fiction. But just because nothing has been publicly announced, it doesn't mean nothing is happening.
Oh, okay. I guess my information is out of date. I believe they were originally called pocket books, hence the name of Simon & Schuster's MMPB imprint.
In my area the bookstores haven’t carried any Star Trek novels in 6 months. The last was “In Harm’s Way” and I only ever saw two copies (one which I bought). Otherwise the closest (new) bookstore with Trek books is 2-hours away. But even the used bookstores near me have been having a hard time selling used Trek books (they’ve also mentioned that they’ve found sci-Fi in general to sell).
I don't know about the latter, but used-book stores (I always spell it that way since it's the books that are used, not the bookstores) having trouble moving Trek books has been the case for decades, because there are just so darn many of them and a lot of the people who'd be interested in them already have them.
Lately Star Wars has managed to fill the gap, so to speak, with trade paperback re-releases of their own discarded continuity novels with new cover art work. Seems like kind of a missed opportunity for Star Trek to not doing something similar with novels (maybe old TOS or TNG) that aren't impacted by the new shows (or even just adding the "Myriad Universes" label on ones that are, like Del Rey with their "Essential Legends" label). I'm sure there are probably good reasons why they aren't but I'd definitely re-buy some trade paperback reissues with new artwork. The MMPBs just don't hold up.