Exactly. Which is why Ellison's public criticisms of Marco seemed so out of the blue.
Need help putting my TNG Novel together
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Exactly. Which is why Ellison's public criticisms of Marco seemed so out of the blue.
So, how much did Gerrold get for the reuse of a tribble in Trek '09? Let me guess. They had an extra million hanging around doing nothing. So do reused ships, technologies, planets, concepts from the mind of other novelists and tv shows have to be paid royalties to the original creaters of those things and ideas or not? I might have missed something. Been away for a while.
Nothing, AFAIK. (Since he almost copped some heat due to tribbles' similarity to flatcats during TOS, I doubt he would have pursued it.) In any case, the tribble was just set dressing, not a key element of the drama. If Ellison really did have special clauses in his contract, Gerrold wouldn't have; TTWT was his first TV sale.
Characters from previous scripts earn a small royalty payment for the creator of that character. If T'Pau had been featured in JJ Abrams' movie, a royalty would go to the Estate of Theodore Sturgeon.
^And screenwriters get royalties, but as Greg said, that's because their union has fought hard to win that privilege. If CBS or Paramount used something from a Trek novel in a screen production, the novelist wouldn't get royalties for it (as I understand it).
Simple answer: no.
Just gonna squeeze in one more question here. Do you guys get more latitude creating your own series sandboxes evolving or developing the Star Trek universe in ever more complex ways and do other writer's get to hone in on that like somebody else writing New Frontier other than Peter David?
No easy answer here. The only honest one is: it depends. On what the current editor wants to do, on what the writers feel like doing, on what the licensor thinks, on what people think will sell. Sometimes authors suggest ideas, sometimes editors farm out ideas, but it's all one big, messy, collaborative process in which we have as much "latitude" as we can get away with, except when we don't. And nobody gets too territorial about their own creations since we're all just playing in the same sandbox, riffing on a universe created by other people over forty-five years ago.
I mean, I can't just unilaterally come up with my own "sandbox" and draw a line around it for my own personal use. But if, say, Keith is writing Gorkon books, I'll avoid horning in on his turf just out of courtesy--and to avoid confusion.
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If you can get away with it, sure. But, with tie-ins, you have to be able to play well with others--and understand that you can't just do whatever you want. Because these books don't belong to you.
But Peter David made the decision to kill off Janeway, I'm pretty sure that this was his idea, although CBS gave it the ok.
Sure, there are always ways to bring back deceased characters in the Trekverse, but killing them off in the first place must take quite a bit of persuasion, particulary when it's a major character from the live action side of the franchise.
Can you imagine if they had killed Kirk off in one of the novels, rather than on screen?
It wasn't his idea. It was the decision of then-editor Margaret Clark, she then instructed David to include it when writing Before Dishonor.
Does it really matter whose idea it was? Again, it's a collaborative process involving various people.
Even if I decided I wanted to kill off Sulu (or whomever), I would still have to talk Pocket and CBS into it. And if an editor at Pocket wanted to kill Sulu, he or she would still need to find a writer to do it. And if the idea first came up while everyone was sitting around at the bar at some convention, it's entirely possible that, the morning after, nobody would be quite sure who came up with the idea first . . . .
"You know, we should kill Chekov."
"No, no. We should kill off Sulu instead!"
"Can we get another round of drinks, please!"
The only thing that's certain is that all plots and ideas need to be get run through the approval process before they become books. I can't just kill Sulu, or invent a whole new starship crew, just because I feel like it.
Even if I decided I wanted to kill off Sulu (or whomever), I would still have to talk Pocket and CBS into it. And if an editor at Pocket wanted to kill Sulu, he or she would still need to find a writer to do it. And if the idea first came up while everyone was sitting around at the bar at some convention, it's entirely possible that, the morning after, nobody would be quite sure who came up with the idea first . . . .
"You know, we should kill Chekov."
"No, no. We should kill off Sulu instead!"
"Can we get another round of drinks, please!"
The only thing that's certain is that all plots and ideas need to be get run through the approval process before they become books. I can't just kill Sulu, or invent a whole new starship crew, just because I feel like it.
You've heard of the "New Frontier: No Limits" trade anthology of short stories?
Which gave Pocket an enormous amount of free publicity when Vonda McIntyre did it in the first original novel in Pocket's line, "The Entropy Effect". Even we were assured, in "Starlog", that the story happened before the events of ST:TMP, many of the fans were still up in arms.
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