Star Trek Books Not Available as E-Books
- Thread starter JD
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Why did S&S have to go and screw up Mere Anarchy so much? It should never hae been printed.
Has it occurred to you that the writers get more opportunities for royalties if the work is published in more formats? Don't be so selfish.
In fact, the only Trek royalties I've ever earned to date, beyond the initial advances, are on the paperback reprints of my ebook-first novellas in the Aftermath and Mere Anarchy omnibuses.The vagaries of the contracts mean that we get paid royalties right off the bat for such collections, since they're in addition to the advance instead of part of it. It's not a lot of money, but it's something.
What a weird notion.
How does that "screw [it] up" exactly? Besides, as Christopher said, screwing the authors out of royalties?
Not sure why that matters. It's not like CBS went in and deleted your e-book copies.
I'm old fashioned--I actually prefer printed copies wherever possible and I bought "Mere Anarchy" as a printed collection.
I only get the e-books if there is no other option.
KRAD's note above reminds me I still have to get the "Slings and Arrows" collection sometime, which someone noted has a similar feel to "Mere Anarchy" (though I'm not sure how similar it is) and the Corp of Engineers collection.
They should never have made made that hardcover a paperback.
They should never have collected those comics into a trade paperback. And if they go out of print that's just your bad luck.
They should never air feature films on TV. Or make them available via home video or streaming. Same with TV shows. If you missed their original broadcasts, no reruns. No home media. No on-demand streaming.
And if a book was originally released in print with no electronic option, too bad. That's just life in the bigs.
Yeah, all of that sounds ridiculous, too.
They republish e-Book original titles in print editions because they make money. My royalty statements bear this out. Nearly 20 years after it was first released, Royalties on our first S.C.E. novella on its own adds up to pretty much nothing, but for damn sure the paperback reprints have been pulling their weight.
They should never have collected those comics into a trade paperback. And if they go out of print that's just your bad luck.
They should never air feature films on TV. Or make them available via home video or streaming. Same with TV shows. If you missed their original broadcasts, no reruns. No home media. No on-demand streaming.
And if a book was originally released in print with no electronic option, too bad. That's just life in the bigs.
Yeah, all of that sounds ridiculous, too.
They republish e-Book original titles in print editions because they make money. My royalty statements bear this out. Nearly 20 years after it was first released, Royalties on our first S.C.E. novella on its own adds up to pretty much nothing, but for damn sure the paperback reprints have been pulling their weight.
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The mission statement of Slings and Arrows was slightly different than it was for Mere Anarchy. For the latter, the story took advantage of the unique nature of the original series, in that what we think of as "the original series" actually spans a couple of decades, thanks to the pilot, the series itself, and the seven movies.
For Slings and Arrows, I wanted to fill in a gap that was virtually untouched: to wit, the year that the Enterprise-E was in service prior to First Contact, with which almost nothing had been done. And that was a period that, as we saw in the fourth and fifth seasons of Deep Space Nine, had a great deal of stuff happening. So we see things like the sundering of the alliance with the Klingons, the ongoing Maquis issues, the dangers of changeling infiltration, the declaration of martial law on Earth, and the fallout from Lwaxana Troi's pregnancy, as well as establishing how and why La Forge chose to switch to bionic implants and how and why Data altered the capabilities of his emotion chip.
Too bad they didn't collect that into a printed format (and just to tick off JWolf let's do that to the Corp of Engineers collection as well
).But needless to say I don't see that happening at this point so next time I get on my IPAD I might as well download "Slings and Arrows".
"Slings and Arrows" is the one as yet unreleased in hardcopy, plus the last few CoE titles.
A few days ago I was reading an interview with Della Van Hise from, I think it was 2018, and she was saying that even though her book “Killing Time” is in print digitally, she is seeing zip-oh in royalties from it.
That's because it was published decades before e-books were a thing and the contract couldn't have accounted for them. Modern contracts do include e-book royalties, of course.
Never mind.
It’s surprising that they didn’t negotiate a new seperate contract, considering that in the US with stuff like film, video and audio, even if it’s owned by one person, and was a work for hire, they still have to negotiate seperate contracts for the digital rights otherwise they can’t release it. So it’s surprising that in the US, they could release a digital version when only the physical rights had been negotiated. (Yeah CBS owns the book, but since the author still gets royalties from physical copy, they still have some rights.)
Apparently, the rights they still have entitle them to royalties for physical copies. Seems kinda shitty, but that’s what corporate lawyers are for.
You raise a good point. When ebooks were becoming a thing, there was a tug-of-war between authors and publishers over who had the ebook rights to the backlist. Authors insisted they did because they had never sold those rights to the publishers. Publishers insisted they did because they were simply offering a different format as an ebook. There's no one other than S&S who can publish Star Trek ebooks, but unless a 1984 contract allowed for ebook publication can S&S really publish that ebook without the author (or estate)'s explicit consent? It's an interesting legal question.
As that article pointed out, Random House only started putting language about electronic formatsin their contracts in 1994. But in 1984, I don’t see how contracts could’ve included electronic formats (unless there were plans to issue the book on 3.5 floppies for like the Commodore 64). And then going back to the 60’s, no one would’ve been thinking about electronic rights as the technology did not exist.
I know that the EU courts have ruled that books, TV shows and videos made before (I think) 1997 have electronic rights in their contract even if the contract is from the 1950’s, so you don’t need a seperate contract there.
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