News Paramount selling Simon and Schuster
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
- Start date
And they're not fungible. A Voyager novel can't and doesn't replace the not-published Deep Space Nine novel a reader wants to buy and read. A publishing program that attempted to service all the different series in a year would end with a dozen books in a year. Maybe that wouldn't be financially viable for the reader, and maybe some of the series wouldn't be financially worthwhile to pursue. Maybe Star Trek, as a whole, just isn't mass-market (in a cultural sense, not a book publishing format) any more.
I mean, that is true from a storytelling and legal standpoint, but I'm not convinced that's true in terms of aggregate customer demand. I strongly get the impression that for most practical purposes, Star Trek is treated as a single media tie-in line by S&S.
That's my impression as well. I mean, a lot of people may know of Star Trek beyond TOS and TNG, but I bet you wouldn't be able to get anyone not already a fan to name all the individual series. And even Paramount's own marketing leans in to this with the franchise branding of "Star Trek Universe," to give it a unified central name and branding that go beyond any individual series.
Yeah, those of us who love the franchise and watch the series separately view each series as a distinct thing. But to the practical purposes of how it's divided, especially in the face of other franchises out there, it's all just "Star Trek," in the same way that a Star Wars tie-in for The Clone Wars or the Mandalorian or Ahsoka will still just be called something for Star Wars. There's an internal distinction of what these things are, but it's really only done by the fans themselves, while those outside are just lumping it into an aggregate blob of "[Franchise]."
The sale has now officially closed:
https://deadline.com/2023/10/paramo...vestment-firm-kkr-book-publishing-1235587618/
https://deadline.com/2023/10/paramo...vestment-firm-kkr-book-publishing-1235587618/
It’s doomed now.
So, worst case scenario, the vultures pick apart S&S into pieces and destroy it as a publisher.
I feel like there’s some decent odds that another publisher - my first guess would be Titan, given their work with the Prometheus trilogy and the various character autobiographies - would be ready to pick up the Star Trek contract. Considering Star Trek is still a very active franchise, there’d surely be an interest, business-wise, in keeping that income flowing.
Basically, my guess that, while this probably isn’t the best thing to have this sale going through, it’s probably also not the end of Trek novels overall. Call me an optimist, but hey. Star Trek is all about hope in the dark times, right?
I feel like there’s some decent odds that another publisher - my first guess would be Titan, given their work with the Prometheus trilogy and the various character autobiographies - would be ready to pick up the Star Trek contract. Considering Star Trek is still a very active franchise, there’d surely be an interest, business-wise, in keeping that income flowing.
Basically, my guess that, while this probably isn’t the best thing to have this sale going through, it’s probably also not the end of Trek novels overall. Call me an optimist, but hey. Star Trek is all about hope in the dark times, right?
For what it's worth, I mentioned the sale to a colleague who works at my audiobook publisher GraphicAudio (whose parent company KKR used to own but had to sell in order to buy S&S), and they replied that they believe S&S is in good hands. According to the news, GA's parent RBMedia grew substantially while it was owned by KKR. And it was during that time that GA expanded from adaptations into original audio novels and commissioned my Tangent Knights trilogy.
I can't give the context of the conversation, but I've heard the same -- that S&S will be fine with its new owners.
Not sure if this is a coincidence, but I just went to https://store.simonandschuster.com/digitalhistory and all of my 400+ ebooks are missing and all previous orders are listed as "Being processed" (with the exception of audio books, which still seem to be present). Hopefully just a technical glitch, but unnerving at best. (The help page at https://www.simonandschuster.com/about/help_shopping is broken too.)
Still not sure if it's a coincidence, but if it's not it seems to be a technical issue rather than deliberate. I've been going back and forth with S&S support for well over a month now trying to get my library back. If anyone else has digital purchases, you may want to go see if your account is having similar issues.
