Collateral Damage - TNG Section 31 follow-up by David Mack

I honestly don't know. I would doubt it. In the past, it took approximately 8 months from manuscript acceptance by the publisher to produce a finished book on store shelves. Which, by publishing industry standards, is actually very fast.

 

On average, how much time does a Trek novelist have to complete a manuscript once they have a contract?

In Voyages of Imagination, I saw some people say they had 4 months, and authors doing novelizations mentioning they only had a few weeks. I have no idea how anyone could pull that off.

 

For me, it's usually tended around 6 months or more, but it's been as little as 3 on occasion.

 

My view exactly. If a story is entertaining and internally consistent I don't care if it's not consistent with the show or other novels.

 

Interesting. Is there typically a lot of back and forth between you and the editor? Progress reports, for lack of a better term. Or do you just get an outline approved, complete the manuscript, and smooth out the rough edges with your editor once you're basically done?

These questions stem from some comments by the LA Graf team where they mention making wholesale changes to their books at a point where the cover text has already been created. I can't imagine being able to do that with so little time to spare or without giving an editor a lot of new gray hairs.

 

Sometimes Margaret will just check in and ask how I'm doing as the deadline approaches, but it's not a regular thing. The delivery date is in the contract, and once the MS is turned in, that's when the editing and revisions start.

Cover art and text are often done well before the manuscript is finished, based on the outline or on consultation with the author. After all, the promotional stuff needs to get going early on, for the sake of catalog listings and release schedules and such.

There have been occasions where I've been shown the cover art to a book I was still writing and it's inspired me to revise the manuscript to reflect it. Seeing the cover to The Buried Age inspired me to revise the depicted scene with much more description of the setting and atmosphere, which really enlivened the scene. Similarly, seeing the strikingly stormy and ominous cover to Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder led me to take the manuscript in a somewhat darker direction tonally.

 

Ok good to know. Thanks. I’m just hopeful that at some point the desire is to have one book a month again.

 

This was something else I've wondered about. I assumed, at first, that the authors had little to no input because so many covers have general Trek imagery. Of course covers like the one for The Face of the Unknown tipped me off that this couldn't always be true.

So, does an author have any sort of veto power when it comes to covers? I mean in extreme cases where the artist has included characters that aren't in the book, or drew someone in a way totally inconsistent with how they are described.

I can understand that for promotional material, but I don't understand why in the case of the Graf novels the text that appears on the back of the book couldn't be changed if the books hadn't been printed yet.

p.s. Are you happy with the covers of your books? I think, for the most part, Alan Dingman has done a good job designing them for you.

 

As I said, cover designs are generally based on the novel outlines, which of course has to be approved before we begin writing the actual manuscripts. So the cover artists do know what the books are about.

Not veto power, no, but we can advise the editor if something doesn't fit or if we think something could be added, and they can change it at their discretion. The Trek editors are pretty good at seeking our input and addressing our concerns. And in a couple of cases, e.g. the last two Rise of the Federation books and The Captain's Oath, I've been asked to provide information about specific scenes from the books that the artist thought would be good to depict. But that was their choice to consult me.

I'm not sure, but in those pre-digital days, it may be that the cover art and text had to be locked in earlier than the interior contents. Or maybe it was an oversight.

I don't think he's done the actual cover art on any of my books, except the Mere Anarchy omnibus -- I think that "cover design" is more like the fonts, colors, layout, etc. and how it fits with the art and text. As for the art itself, naturally it comes out better on some than on others. I like the cover art for The Captain's Oath, which is by Stephan Martiniere, who also did The Buried Age. I like the symmetry of that, since they're both books about the untold stories of what Enterprise captains did in the years before the Enterprise.

 

Ah, I assumed a "cover designer" was the person who staged the scene so to speak. Sort of a very rough draft detailing the scene and how the characters would be placed in it. The actual artist would come in and create the designer's vision.

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

 

It's been done before.

 

Look at the Kelvinverse novels, although I believe it was one of the other companies, either Bad Robot or Paramount who put a stop to those.

 

Yeah, something like that. But I don't see them pulling planned books because the nu-TNG show starts and contradicts the litverse. They won't plan any further books, but I do believe they'd continue books already planned in this situation.

 

There were numerous times in the TNG-through-ENT era when a book would be contradicted by an episode before its release, but the book would still come out.

 

Hmm. True, but that does little to abate my loathing for revisionism with an established canon (or para-canon, for that matter), especially when it's pointless, or directly contradicts some previously established core element, or creates a "tail-wagging-the-dog" situation. (And since the 1939 MGM musical film of The Wizard of Oz manages to do all three with Baum's 1900 novel and its 13 canonical sequels, I will likely never consider it as anything other than a hatchet-job, and my opinions of Maguire's Oz works and Farmer's lone Oz opus are not much higher.)


<graphic arts geek>As to covers, remember, digital or mechanical paste-up, the contents of a typical novel are simply black ink on whatever paper stock is chosen, whereas covers are (at least for Star Trek) at least process color (CMYK), possibly also including embossing, hot-foil, varnish, and/or one or more spot colors (one of which might even be a spot-varnish, e.g., the dust-jackets of the first edition of the Vulcan's Soul trilogy). Just process color alone means critical alignment of four plates, whether it's four passes through a one-color press, or one pass through a four-color press, and varnish and spots mean either another pass or a more complicated press. And embossing and foil are letterpress processes. Even for a relatively ordinary MMPB, the covers might require as much press time as the entire contents (and infinitely more futzing around). </graphic arts geek>

 

True stories, not relating to Star Trek:

1) I once had to cut several thousand words out of a novel because the cover flats were printed with the wrong spine size. It was cheaper for me to cut the book to fit the spine than reprint the covers!

2) On my X-Men trilogy, Julie Bell painted the covers long before I finished writing the books. The covers were gorgeous, but I had a question for my editor:

"Why is Iceman on the cover of Book 2? He's not in this trilogy."
"He's not?"
"Nope."
"Well, it's too late to redo the cover . . ."

And that's why Iceman shows up halfway through my X-trilogy.

 

In fact, IIRC, Starfleet Year One even had a little note at the front of the book explaining how the book would not mesh with what was being seen in the then relatively new Enterprise TV series.

 

One of the first German Trek novels had a cover with characters who didn't belong to Star Trek at all. They were Characters from the movie The Black Hole. Quite off-topic, isn't it?
I did a quick research and Memory Alpha said the wrong German cover of The Covenant of the Crown was just the First Edition. They later changed the cover. Nonetheless....

 

Oh, I just remembered a STAR TREK example. Actual conversation regarding the first Khan book, which I was still writing at the time.

"Say, Greg, is there a helicopter in the book?"
"Um, no."
"Can there be a helicopter in the book?"
"Because . . . ?"
"The cover art features a helicopter."
"Okay, I'll stick a helicopter in somewhere . . . "

 

I would have thought that using a smaller font size would be cheaper still...