Authors, royalties, publishing, and e-books?

[Etoile]

But did you send your editors hard copy printouts and a 3.5-inch floppy copy back in the 90's, or was it on a CD-R?

^ I never turned anything in on a CD, nor did authors turn things to me on CD back then.

A CD would be a fairly impractical way to transfer it, anyway. Remember the file sizes we're talking about, here - even now, full-length books in .doc format just aren't that big. A 3.5" floppy, at 1.44MB, is plenty to hold the file. A 700MB CD would be massive overkill - it would have been wasteful of the more expensive media to put a book on there and ship it off that way. Maybe if you wanted to send your editor a mixtape along with it, but otherwise a floppy makes much more sense.

 

[tomswift2002]

Well with 3.5-inch floppies, for making new digital versions, it would be interesting to see if S&S still has computers that have floppy drives, or even stand-alone drives. Otherwise stuff stored on floppy is probably inaccessible.

 

[Gul Re'jal]

^I'd rather assume they immediately made copies on hard drives / servers, which they can access any time.

 

[yenny]

A author get play a percentage of royalties base on how many books that had been sold, regardless if they are softcover, hardcover, e-book and Audiobook. They even get play a percentage of royalties if their book is made into a movie.

Yes they do have agents.

I have to admit I did wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, all the way since recently. I even want to come a actor. But give up on the idea, cause I didn't think I was smart enough to come one and there was no support from my family and they refuse to help me get into business.

 

[Greg Cox]

Or that anyone had to play good cop/bad cop with a publisher... .

Basically the idea is that the agent haggles with the editor over advances, royalties, sub-rights, late payments and such, so that the author and the editor can concentrate on the actual creative process without all that "business" stuff getting in the way of the author-editor relationship . . . .

Tech-wise, I've never submitted anything on a CD-Rom, although I did submit my first two books (neither of them Trek) on the old eight-inch floppies. As I recall, you couldn't store an entire book on one floppy, so I had to send in a set of them carefully labeled Part One, Part 2, and so on.

Without naming names, I've heard tell that at one least one bestselling author still uses the old-style floppies and that his publisher keeps one dedicated disk drive on hand to convert his documents into something they can use.

And don't get me started about the time Harry Harrison delivered his latest novel in WordStar . . . ..

 

[JD]

I've been wondering about something, and this seems like a good place to ask.
Has the rights for the movies and TV shows being split changed the way the way the books are published? Do you have to get aproval from people at both CBS and Paramount, or is it all still just handled by one person/group?

 

[tomswift2002]

I've been wondering about something, and this seems like a good place to ask.
Has the rights for the movies and TV shows being split changed the way the way the books are published? Do you have to get aproval from people at both CBS and Paramount, or is it all still just handled by one person/group?

I remember back in 2006-07 reading about the fall out of the split, and CBS acquired the majority of the rights, with Paramount retaining only the film rights. Plus on the 2 most recent Star Trek movies, in the copyright section of the movies, CBS is given a line indicating how Paramount licensed the characters and universe from CBS (it's in a very legalese type of writing). So, from what I've seen, even with what has been published, unless it has something to do directly with the movies (such as the Starfleet Academy series from a few years ago that was based on the 2009 movie), Paramount has no involvement in the licensed stuff, whether it be books or video games. (Also, CBS owns Simon & Schuster (they are sister companies).)

 

[JD]

I mainly meant in a situation like Foul Deeds Will Rise, where it is set in the movie era, and uses stuff from the movies, but at the same time is also a follow up to an episode. I should have been more specific there.

 

[KRAD]

I've been wondering about something, and this seems like a good place to ask.
Has the rights for the movies and TV shows being split changed the way the way the books are published? Do you have to get aproval from people at both CBS and Paramount, or is it all still just handled by one person/group?

CBS now owns Paramount, and while Paramount Pictures is a separate division from the CBS TV network, it's all ultimately one big corporate entity, just different subdivisions that handle different parts of it. How-some-ever, all the licensing issues are handled by the same office, to wit, CBS Licensing. As it happens, Trek novels are still handled by John Van Citters, who was the licensing guy at Paramount before they were gobbled up by CBS.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, CBS and Paramount are separate companies now since the split, but they're both subsidiaries of National Amusements. It's pretty confusing: There once was a company called Viacom that owned both Paramount Pictures (film) and Paramount Television. National Amusements wanted to split off its television and movie properties into separate corporations, so it changed Viacom's name to CBS Corporation and changed Paramount Television's name to CBS Television Studios, and it formed a new spinoff company also called Viacom which now owns Paramount Pictures. I guess the name changes were to help differentiate the TV arm from the movie arm.

Because CBS Television Studios used to be Paramount Television -- and since that essentially used to be Desilu Productions (which became the TV arm of Paramount when they merged in '67) -- that means they own Star Trek, just as they essentially always have despite various name changes and restructurings. But since Paramount Pictures produced the Trek movies back when they were part of the same company as Paramount Television, they retain the copyright to the movies they made, even though they're now a separate company. CBS owns all the concepts and characters, but Paramount still gets a cut from the sales of the actual movies.

However, the copyright page of Foul Deeds Will Rise doesn't mention Paramount, just CBS. Maybe if the book actually quoted dialogue from one of the movies, Paramount would get a royalty, but I guess CBS's ownership extends to the ideas and situations from the original movies. By contrast, Paramount gets a copyright notice on Abramsverse-based comics and books, presumably because those are made under the new, post-split arrangement.

 

[Timewalker]

How long, on average, does it take to write a standard length Trek novel ?

To the best of your knowledge, what's the quickest it's been done ?

I don't recall which thread it was in, but someone in TrekLit mentioned that Diane Carey claims to have written one of her Trek novels in four days, inbetween cooking meals on a ship.

 

[Greg Cox]

I mainly meant in a situation like Foul Deeds Will Rise, where it is set in the movie era, and uses stuff from the movies, but at the same time is also a follow up to an episode. I should have been more specific there.

As far as I know, there were no special issues with FOUL DEEDS. It went through the same approval process as any other Trek book.

 

[Scout101]

Since it was said a few times that royalties really don't matter, and the advance is where it's at, i'll ask the other question:

without getting TOO personal, what's the average advance on writing a Trek book? Fairly positive that there are big swings based upon who the author is and how 'big' of a name they are, selling history, etc. but what are some ballpark numbers? Assume standard novel length. Limiting it to Trek because obviously would be different on original work, or if JK Rowling decided to do another Harry Potter book or whatever.

Has been said it's at least a couple-month process, on average, and seems many writers keep a day job to pay the bills, as well. While trying to keep it vague and not specific (I don't need W-4s!), just curious about the range. Are we talking like 4-5k? 10k? 20k? More? Or maybe just more (or less) depending on your past work?

Sorry if I'm overly high or low, just trying to get a feel for how it comes out on your end, and where the range might be that you write a book or two a year and still rely on another job for bill and healthcare or whatever.

 

[David Mack]

I don't think any of us are likely to want to answer this.

 

[tomswift2002]

However, the copyright page of Foul Deeds Will Rise doesn't mention Paramount, just CBS. Maybe if the book actually quoted dialogue from one of the movies, Paramount would get a royalty, but I guess CBS's ownership extends to the ideas and situations from the original movies. By contrast, Paramount gets a copyright notice on Abramsverse-based comics and books, presumably because those are made under the new, post-split arrangement.

It could also be that something in Simon & Schuster's contract between Paramount Television and Paramount Pictures from the 1970's allows material from "Star Trek The Motion Picture" and "any future motion pictures" to be used interchangeably with material from the TV shows, and even with the split, that part of the contract remained relatively untouched.