Don't you guys have like, handover notes for the next author?
Not as often as you might think (or as often as authors might like). Generally, it’s the editor’s job to make sure the next author picks up the threads of a book in a series, but the actual enforcement of that varies depending on a lot of factors - the editorial team’s involvement, the subject material, the publisher, the whims of the license-holder, etc.
I’ve worked in on-going fiction streams with a quite few intellectual properties, not just
Star Trek, and I’ve had different degrees of collaboration with the previous/next writer. For example, stuff like
Star Trek: The Fall and
Star Trek: Coda had a tight focus over their mini-series arc, so in those cases I worked closely with my colleagues to maintain the flow of the story. We traded lots of emails, calls and work-in-progress. On something like the
Warhammer Horus Heresy saga, we had bi-annual in-person meetings and ongoing email chains discussing the scope of the main story arc, but when it came down to the actual writing of individual books, we pretty much did our own thing; conversely, in the ‘main’
Warhammer 40,000 continuity there was little or no obligation to reference the works of other authors, as long as you adhered to the core lore of the IP. On the
Doctor Who stuff I did, writers were expected to acknowledge the broad strokes of previous stories, but not tied down to making everything marry up perfectly. When I worked on IPs like
Halo,
Stargate,
Tannhauser or
Dark Future, I had more or less a free hand.
Often the accepted guidance seems to be: as long as the work is in line with the source IP and doesn’t massively contradict the content of other tie-ins, go ahead.
It’s not all happy collaboration, though... I’ve had some unwelcome experiences working in ongoing series – like assuming I was free to take a character in a certain direction and accidentally torpedoing another writer’s next book pitch; having characters I’d created and invested in get killed off without any warning; other authors in a series who assumed they had the authority to red-pen and edit my work before it was published; and editors/publishers/licensors who either didn’t care at all about continuity, or who enforced it with such draconian measures that it was nigh-impossible to do anything interesting...
Personally, I always try to make myself available to discuss story content if someone following or preceding me wants to have that conversation, and I reciprocate if I feel there’s a need – like asking “
Hey, do you have any plans for that planet? Mind if I blow it up?”
