Authors: How do you avoid contradicting future films/TV?

[KRAD]

The answer to the question that is the subject of this thread is: "We don't."

Moving on............

I'm wondering, are your novels just as monosyllabic and "I don't give a damn"-ish?

Christopher's reply was great, yours... well, not.

Well, Christopher's reply had the advantage of being serious.

But the reality of tie-in writing, particularly when working with an active ongoing property -- which is most of the time -- it's very difficult to avoid contradicting future work because the people making that future work are unlikely to take the tie-in fiction into account when crafting their stories. It's, sadly, a numbers game: millions of people watch a TV show or a movie; thousands read tie-in fiction. The best-selling Star Trek novel still only reached an audience that's less than 10% of the poorest-rated episode of Enterprise.

It's not something that most tie-in writers really sweat all that much because it's part of the job.

 

[Christopher]

And heck, where Abramsverse fiction is concerned, we've got a built-in safety cushion. If the next film contradicts our books, we can just say the timeline diverged again.

 

[SpaceLama]

Argh... lol