Yes but do all those people read the books? (I'm not insinuating anything just asking)
Latecomer To This: JANEWAY DIED?!?
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Yes but do all those people read the books? (I'm not insinuating anything just asking)
Why would that be true? It's the same fallacy, of generalizing to a large population from a small, likeminded sample.
It would help if you could be a bit more precise than "sheer numbers." That phrase really doesn't tell us anything.
But, as the old adage goes, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Of course the fanfic crowd is going to be larger. All you need is an Internet connection to be part of that crowd. To read the novels, you actually are laying out extra money beyond that. How many people who can get fanfic stories for free will shell out their hard-earned money for the books on top of it?
What about the people who may read the books, but aren't tied into the Internet? They do exist.
Again, I think you're looking at numbers that are, in reality, a lot lower than you think they are. Going by one individual sample group isn't the best way to judge what's the real situation here.
It's hard to estimate the number of fanfic writers out there, really. I can go to FanFiction.Net, for instance, and find that Voyager is the most written-for series at 5455 stories logged (the next would be ENT, at 3223). Selecting Janeway in the character tag list (which I'm almost sure is the same list I wrote for the site damn near ten years ago), I get 1925 stories with Janeway as a central character. Of those, some are bound to be chapters of a larger work or otherwise written by the same person, so the actually number of writers is somewhere south of 1925. And, as Hartzilla mentions, there's no way of knowing how many are actually readers of the official novel line.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
But if fan fiction is holding that many people's attention, then shouldn't publishers check it out to see just what readers want. I would love to buy books that reflect what I read in fan fiction.
In fact I do buy those books that reflect what I read in fan fiction, it's called Science Fiction Romance. Sometimes you find them in the romance section of a book store and sometimes it's in the Science Fiction Section. In the last two months I have purchased six books, all of them Science Fiction/Romance.
Three Rowena Cherry books, one Susan Grant, one Susan Kearney (who also wrote "The Battle of Betazed") and one Linnea Sinclair. As soon as I can get to a bookstore I will be purchasing Susan Grant's latest "The Warlord's Daughter".
Most fan fiction writers and readers also read books, lots of books and a good number of fiction writers have some history of fan fiction whether it's been on the internet or not.
There is a very strong possibility that if Pocket books would open the Trek lines to include a romantic subgenre you could attract a lot of new readers.
Just take Susan Grant's "Moonstruck" for instance, female starship captain, a former enemy for a first officer who comes complete with a old rag, tag crew, a brash young helmsman. Is any of this sounding familiar? Oh and by the way that first officer, he has tattoos.
The Original Series was canceled because someone underestimated the numbers. You all are falling in that same trap.
Brit
How do you know?
And for that matter, I wouldn't at ALL be interested in reading the kind of book you describe, so if they did release those, they'd lose my sales. How do you know they'd gain more than they'd lose?
Or, like Lynx, do you just "have a feeling"?
Thrawn, I never thought you would be interested in that kind of book. What I am saying is there is a market for that genre. We don't want to keep anyone from writing the kind of Trek Books you want to read. What we want is to be allowed the same privilege.
Why do I think they'd gain more than they'd lose?
Just google the phrase "Romance Novel Sales", what you will find is that just about half of all the fiction novels sold are romance novels and that one quarter of all the books sold across the board are romance novels.
Science Fiction/Romance is relatively new but it is gaining popularity, a lot of the interest is centered around blogs like "AlienRomance" and "The Galaxy Express."
Again, I do want to say that I don't expect or even want to replace the kind of Trek Books you like to read, I just want to be able to read the one's I'd like also, and I would like to know that Kathryn Janeway is one of the characters in those books.
Brit
I have read, in the past, quite a bit of fan fiction, but to tell you the truth Brit I have yet to read one single story I thought was anywhere near as good as what is officially published. Thus I have given up on fan fic as a waste of my time. As for sci-fi romance there is room in Star Trek for romance as part of a story but but I really do think to go the direction you are suggesting would be a great departure from what Star Trek is about. If you really need that kind of material stay with the sci-fi romance authors you have discovered but don't try and ruin our Star Trek with it!
Kevin
Kevin
Well, given that there's a set number of Trek books published a year, publishing any of those would be replacing one I'd want, but that's beside the point.
As I see it, all the Trek books have taken characters and told stories about them that more or less fit within the same genre of general storytelling; what you're talking about strikes me as staggeringly unlikely.
I mean, it's sort of like saying "all I really want is a spinoff series of just Data solving Holmes mysteries on the holodeck. I don't want them to stop publishing your books, just give me two or three of those a year also." Isn't it?
Outside of fan fiction, I don't believe Star Trek ever has been a set of stories you could describe as "sci-fi romance". There's been the occasional romantic episode, but reducing a show from 26 episodes a year to one or two novels a year has tended to weed out the outlier sorts of stories and just give the ones most true to the overall spirits of the shows from which they come. Just as Data played around in the holodeck a couple times, so did Star Trek dip into romance a couple times per show. But I'd hardly expect a series of books about it.
I can't say you are wrong about a lot of fan fiction, but there are gems here and there. Most of the really good writers make the transition to professional and their stories come down.
I think the major problem with fan fiction is that most of the writers can't plot, and a great deal of the Janeway/Chakotay stories could be set in the present day and not lose a thing. For instance, I read a love scene (and yes I do know that a lot of fan fiction and romance is ...shall we say adult, and I am just as guilty of that as the next woman), but going along, you get to the scene when the clothes come off and Janeway is wearing a bra. That stops me cold because the lord knows that somewhere, someday something better has to come along.
I don't think what I'm suggesting is a departure, because I don't want to replace anything, I only want to expand the scope.
In fact there is a movement among the Romance writers and readers to actually brand books so that no matter what shelf they are placed on in any bookstore, you could see on the spine the genre of the book. So the Trek romance could coexist with the Trek adventure and the person pursuing wouldn't even have to pick up the one he wouldn't want in the first place.
Brit
Huh? That's already standard industry practice, and has been for decades.
And I would concede that point except for one thing, publishing and the way books are distributed is changing. Publishers are being strangled by what I believe are unreasonable contracts that allow retailers to hold invoices unpaid for a year and then only pay for what was sold. It puts all the marketing risk on the back of the publishers which IMHO isn't fair at all.
Now I love books, lord I even love the way brand new books smell, and I tend to read favorites over and over, so I keep books. But I think the Publishers are going to have to rely more and more on electronic books which require a lot less overhead and are paid for at delivery. So there may come a time when the number of books published will expand.
Ellora's Cave Publishing started out as an e-book publisher, the e-books are roughly half the price of their printed books, the last I knew, the author's share of the e-book price was approximately 30 to 35 percent of the total cost of the book.
One last thing, my avatar is not a photograph of Kate Mulgrew, it was constructed with Poser, and I feel pretty sure a lot of you are familiar with some of the modeling technique that produces animated Trek Ships. A lot of this stuff is found on Digital Art sites. My point is that what you are looking at is only a few steps away from actually moving. It doesn't take much to put that together with e-publishing and you will have a book with moving illustrations.
That just may well be your future.
Brit
Huh? That's already standard industry practice, and has been for decades.
It's not in the Romance genre, and it's important because romance can be Science Fiction/Romance, Paranormal/Romance, Suspense/Romance, BabyFic, Historical, Regency etc, and all of them can be either erotic or not.
Brit
I'm saying that with the ability to produce more diverse books with a lot less risk, Publishers may be inclined to take the chance on something different.
Now whether two characters are romantically inclined in canon are not is truly in the eye of the beholder. I read somewhere that an author writes two books, the one he actually wrote and the one the reader reads. I think television shows and movies are like that too.
No two people actually see the same details. This board is full of just those kinds of discussions were fine points are discussed because not everyone caught the same things. Your age and your experience and your gender will sharpen some images and blur others. Canon is supposed to be what we saw on the screen, problem is we saw different parts. We attached importance on things that the guy down the street never saw at all.
Now as nice as you all have been tonight, I've got to go to bed, it's midnight here in Texas and I have to be at work at 7:30 in the morning.
Night all
Brit
I think this is an extremely unrealistic number for Trek books.
Not to mention that all fan-fiction isn't registered at FanFiction.Net.
I don't think my Kes stories are registered there (at least not yet, I may have to do something about that) and I guess that there are more Voyager fan-fiction as well which is not registered at FanFiction.Net.
As for fan-fiction contra books, the fan-fiction are of different qualities. I've read some stories which have been downright bad but also some which have been very good. However, most of them are to short for my taste.
And I haven't found any fan-fiction story even comparable to the quality of masterpieces like "The Black Shore" by Greg Cox, "Marooned" by Christie Golden, "Her Klingon Soul" by Michael Jan Friedman, "Mosaic" and "Pathways" by Jeri Taylor or any of the wonderful Voyager books of seasons 1-3.
But when the door is closed, you have to climb out of the window instead. I prefer a badly written fan-fiction story where Janeway is alive over a book with the death scenario present.
Oh I'm sure it is because "Trek" books are licensed and the owners of the property have to have a share too. What I'm saying in general is that e-books by their nature are less risky for the publisher, they cost less to produce and the author's share is bigger.
Brit
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