“Anthologies never make enough money in publishing.” Dean explains. “Nature of the beast, but Pocket Books and Paramount wanted to fund this to get the new writers in, to keep the fans writing Trek, and it worked for ten wonderful years. But even deep pockets like Pocket Books and Paramount couldn’t continue to lose as much money as this was costing them, so ten years seemed to be like a good place to stop. I didn’t expect it to go past year one, to be honest.”
“You have a book full of stories by unknown authors,” adds Allyn, “and they're being paid very well. Three cents a word is considered a professional pay rate, and SNW paid ten cents a word, plus the bonuses to the top stories. In addition, the books were completely scattershot in terms of their contents; the anthologies didn't cohere. There was also a certain disposability to the stories; these stories were just there, and in an era when readers were expecting more inter-story continuity, Strange New Worlds marked itself out as something different that could be safely ignored. Add these together, and you have a book that is going to have low sales – no marketable authors, strange story choices – combined with a high cost to bring to market. End result is a book that was going to be on life-support until the money ran out.”
William suggests that the range’s branding might’ve played a part in its downfall. “My own suspicion is that the ‘by the fans, for the fans’ tagline led some would-be buyers to believe that the SNW collections were not professional works, and caused them to pass them by.”
