Another Mission Gamma Omnibus?
- Thread starter Divine
- Start date
Not yet, I presume that depends preety much on the sales of "These Haunted Seas". If they're acceptable for Pocket Books, I assume, we're gonna hear an announcement for such an Omnibus somewhere in Autumn.
Given the size of the last two books (final one particularly) relative to how much the prior omnibi included, I wouldn't be surprised that any omnibus they're part of will also include Rising Son and possibly even Unity.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
I hope your right KRAD, because I can't find a copy of rising son anywhere and if it were included in an omnibus like you have mentioned that would be great.
Total speculation, but it kind of make sense to include The Left Hand of Destiny with the Worlds of Deep Space Nine stories, since thematically, they sort of fit. Sort of.
^ Except that the three WoDS9 books are already sizable affairs, containing, as they do, six short novels. I don't think there would be room for more in any omnibus collecting those three together. Although... I wonder if it would be possible to fit in Left Hand is one took out Olympus Descending. It would be a tight squeeze, but it might be manageable. Then Olympus could go at the front of the next collection, right before Warpath, Fearful Symmetry and whatever follows from there, since those stories form their own, pretty rapid-fire arc.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
"Lives of Dax" has already been a trade paperback and a mass market paperback. It would probably be just as easy for Pocket to reprint the trade if there's demand for it from new readers wanting to complete their trade-size set.
Do the Omnibus books really bring in enough new readers to justify reprinting material that already exists and taking away a slot for something new? If they do I'm happy for the authors that they can get a little something more for their efforts and keep the material in print a little longer. I suppose for Pocket Books it is cheaper to print and omnibus than to re-print all the books? Just asking.
Kevin
Kevin
Well, I'm assuming if they didn't bring in readers then they wouldn't keep making them. As for new readers, they apparently do bring in quite a few, because we've gotten numerous people on here asking about them, and as the authors always tell us, what we get here is a very very small percentage of the books' audience.
But the trades don't "steal" a slot from the next MMPB anyway. And it would be much cheaper to reprint books in an omnibus than to commission new novels for a same-sized book.
It usually comes down to economics. Bookshops are often loathe to order in missing stock of one instalment of a series, and publishers don't reprint a MMPB volume until they know there's sufficient call for more copies. We saw "Mission Gamma: Twilight" out of stock - and out of print - for a long time, so long that eBay and Amazon resellers were making a killing - and so the trade omnibus was deemed to be the most cost-effective way to get cheaper reprints into the hands of readers who were demanding it.
As Ian said, it doesn't take away any slots, because there's no set number of trade paperback slots in a given year, unlike with mass-market paperbacks. The omnibuses are a way of making out-of-print books available again, and they're good business sense because TPBs are increasingly popular with book vendors these days.
