Why did VOY get such a poor "Companion" book? There is no critical analysis of any of the episodes. There is scant to no commentary from the creators about their intentions or reactions to finished episodes. The DS9 Companion is excellent, and the TOS and TNG Companions very good as well. The VOY "Companion" seems to have been written by a software program.
Voyager Companion
- Thread starter david g
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Don't forget the TNG one also has about 6 "New" editions, and it was written more like the TOS one from the 80's (that also had 3 editions).
I have a bunch of companion books and I have never read them.
I've stopped buying that stuff. If it is really really cool and nifty OR important someone will tell me about it here.
I've stopped buying that stuff. If it is really really cool and nifty OR important someone will tell me about it here.
The author of the "DS9 Companion", Terry J Erdmann, is the husband of Paula Block, who vetted all tie-in manuscripts for Viacom/Paramount/CBS over many years. He had access to the writers and cast for the full seven years of production, and kept compiling bits as the years rolled on, possibly long before a book deal was secured. The author of the "VOY Companion", Paul Ruditis, had to play catch-up.
Sadly, the DS9 Companion didn't sell all that well, I understand, so expectations for a VOY Companion, a show with even lower ratings, were not set as high.
Same goes for the script books. It was interesting seeing the first draft scripts and comparing them to the final versions. Voyager only had its scripts released in the books.
Each licensed tie-in is supposed to be self-supporting. Paramount/CBS should underwrite Simon & Schuster's publishing efforts?
If I recall correctly, the problem with the "DS9 Companion" was, despite it being a critical success, not enough bricks-'n'-mortar bookshops were game to order in many shelf copies of such a hefty tome, knowing that - at the time - TOS and TNG books waaaaaay outsold DS9 and VOY books. Oversized "trade" books simply take up too much room on the shelves, often don't have a fast turnaround (ie. more likely to sell at Christmas), get easily damaged when customers put them back roughly after browsing, and the overstocks aren't able to be returned (unlike mass market paperbacks).
I'm sure I recall the editors of the day saying that, unfortunately, the first printing was over-estimated, and thus still in-print years after the fact. Stock in warehouses was not being ordered by bookshops, even though second hand copies started commanding higher-than-retail figures. So it never got a second printing; demand simply wasn't there.
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