My favorite of the Bantam novels is The Galactic Whirlpool by David Gerrold. He wrote that up in novel form after having pitched it during the show's actual run as a two-part episode. Sadly, it was never made.
Its story is a lot more complicated than that. After he failed to sell it to ST, he tried selling it as a movie. When that failed, he started writing it as a novel called
Yesterday's Children. The story veered off in a totally different direction, though (one that left the title as an orphan having nothing to do with the story). He published that book in the '70s. Then, in 1980, the same year he wrote
The Galactic Whirlpool, he went back to
Yesterday's Children and added several new chapters after the original ending to give it a different ending (which I didn't like as well as the original) and republished it. A few years later, it was reissued under the title
Star Hunt. Sometime after that, after leaving the TNG staff, he took the main characters from YC and combined them with ideas he'd had for TNG, developing a TV series pitch called
Voyage of the Star Wolf. When that didn't go anywhere, he did VotSW as a novel, and has since done two more novels in the
Star Wolf universe, both adapted from scripts written for the unsold series (and one being a reworking of his rejected TNG script "Blood and Fire").
So really, a sizeable chunk of Gerrold's career has grown out of that single rejected Trek pitch.
BTW, this is the first time an "Away Team" is used in Star Trek. TNG did NOT invent that concept!
David Gerrold was one of the original developers of TNG, and he was the one who introduced that concept to the series. He'd proposed the idea of a dedicated "contact team" in his 1973 book
The World of Star Trek, and when he came onto TNG's original staff, he incorporated that along with several of his other ideas into the series bible. (He also introduced the idea of the replicator in
The Galactic Whirlpool.)
