And distributing. I have yet to see a copy of Dead Man' Bluff in stores.
Many, many bookshops these days chose to order only one or two copies of a new Star Trek novel for the shelves. If it sits there too long, they don't order the next one.
Unless you pre-order. If it moves quickly, they might increase the next one, but they are usually advertised three months ahead.
Over thirty years of collecting, I've pinned down my local shop that still buys lots of ST novels, and have had a regular standing order for the novels for many years. I deliberately fostered relationships with about ten trustworthy shops in that time. Some are better at getting comics, some toys, some magazines, others books. I very rarely miss out. But then there's Amazon.
Trek and the publishers do a terrible job promoting.
Pocket continues to promote new titles with extracts in the official ST magazine. The magazine often commissions brand new artwork or doctored photos to create previously unseen images to accompany these extracts. Surely, targeting avid ST fans in a ST magazine is still the best way to promote new ST novels?
I seem to recall someone (Marco?) once saying that Pocket had tried ads in other mags with no noticeable increase in sales. Even the once-mighty "Starlog" is gone. Where would you recommend Pocket try tossing their advertising budget?
For a very long time, Diamond Distributors had regular, large, pictorial descriptions for each new novel in their monthly orderpak, but Diamond
chose to stop distributing Pocket items because they claimed that comic shops were no longer ordering sufficient quantities of each to novel for them to be bothered. Now shops have to order direct from Simon & Schuster.
