Trek Lit -- Sales down due to Quality

[Nathan]

Being someone who has read 90% of the trek books published -- starting over 30 years ago, some were kick-@$$ and others were down right $h!t. I am sure everyone has their own Kick-@$$ list and $h!t list of books. With the number of books (probably close to 1000 or so), that has be a list of clunkers. Say even 10% of the books are downright $h!t, that'd be a 100 books.

I get annoyed with some who say all the trek books are wonderful except for 1 or 2 books. I get the impression that some say "this Trek book is awesome cuz it has the Trek logo on the front!"

I always thought when the books went from 2 a month to 1 book a month, sales must've been tanking as the quality of books was being diluted.

Perhaps as I got older I realized how some of the books -- that I loved when I was a teen, is really downright crap and not worthy of a 2nd read.

Now that it looks like the Trek books are on hiatus -- or at least on a limited basis -- I wonder if sales really plummeted. I can see why as I thought the quality of books sorta was on a decline. Of course, some trek books recently published, some rocked, but I think there were more clunkers than usual than I remember in years past.

It seems the Destiny and The Fall series gets high praise but after that, most are "meh"

 

[DimesDan]

There is a well known reason why there is no output right now, sales and revenue from sales may have come into it, but that is merely speculation.

@trampledamage, would be better suited to merge with the existing thread?

 

[JD]

The current break in Trek books has nothing to do with sales or quality, the contract Pocket's contract ran out, and there have been delays in renewing it.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Well, it's just like Star Trek TV episodes. For every "City on the Edge of Forever," there's a "Spock's Brain"; for every "Journey to Babel," there's a "Man Trap."

Today's "bad" TrekLit, in all branches of the franchise, is at least as good as most of the "good" TrekLit from the Bantam era, and today's "good" TrekLit, again in all branches, is right up there with true classics like Spock's World.

And concerns over sales and/or quality might have something to do with the delays in the contract negotiations, or they might not; the same is true for the possibility that Titan is seeking to take over the TrekLit franchise (I will never be thrilled with the "Autobiography" series, that's even more reckless than the "Shatnerverse" is in disregarding all other TrekLit, but with the exception of some bad translation glitches, I like their handling of Prometheus so far).

 

[Nathan]

I guess if sales were up, the powers in charge would be putting the contract as a top priority as money is being lost by the "great books" that can't be published.

I'm just saying, the quality may be diluted a bit. Sure there are some great books there, but I think the number of "clunkers" published has increased lately, hence no one at biting at the bit to get the contract renewed.

Again, once it went from 2 books a month to 1 book, I think the quality improved a bit. There are some series I was never a fan of....i.e. S.C.E. and the Titan books to me were sub-par. Whereas I am a huge DS9 and Voyager re-boot (i.e. Beyer's reboot). But with only 1 or 2 Voyager books coming out per year, tough for me to stay engaged and I've fallen off the Voyager reading list.

 

[trampledamage]

There is a well known reason why there is no output right now, sales and revenue from sales may have come into it, but that is merely speculation.

@trampledamage, would be better suited to merge with the existing thread?

I'm just going to close this. If @Nathan is interested he can read the other thread to find out the many reasons why a license renewal can take a long time and why we don't know any thing about it.