A&A Official Star Wars Publishing Q&A thread

Yes absolutely great insight, many thanks! Interesting about the rogue one junior novel being a number 1 bestseller. Sainsburys were doing an offer buy rogue one blu ray and get the novel free or very cheap if I recall.

 

Yep. Always a better chance when it can be part of a deal like that.

 

The following SWEU novels don't have Legends covers yet:
- Children of the Jedi
- Coruscant Nights II and III (Street of Shadows and Patterns of Force)
- Crosscurrent
- Fate of the Jedi 4, 6 and 7 (Backlash, Vortex, Conviction)
- Knight Errant
- Legacy of the Force 7: Fury
- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor
- MedStar II: Jedi Healer
- Millennium Falcon
- Scourge
- Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine
- Tales from Jabba's Palace
- Black Fleet Crisis 1 and 3 (Before the Storm and Tyrant's Test)
- The Corellian Trilogy 1 and 2 (Ambush at Corellia and Assault at Selonia)
- The Force Unleashed II
- The New Jedi Order: Dark Journey
- The New Jedi Order: Dark Tide I: Onslaught
- The New Jedi Order: Edge of Victory II: Rebirth
- The New Jedi Order: The Final Prophecy

I count 24. And then there are a few special cases:
- Legacy of the Force 4: Exile (a Legends cover exists, but it hasn't been spotted in print yet; the latest print edition has the old cover but a timeline that says "Star Wars LEGENDS novels timeline" at the top; I guess it's a misprint)
- The New Jedi Order: Ylesia (the only e-novella that hasn't been retrofitted with a Legends cover yet)
- The Dark Lord Trilogy (a bindup consisting of Labyrinth of Evil, Revenge of the Sith Novelization and Dark Lord)

 

Is there a reason that Bloodline was changed from New Republic: Bloodline?

 

Yes, many reasons. First, It was extraneous and taking up space on the cover without really doing anything. Once we had "in the years before THE FORCE AWAKENS" on the cover as a reading line, the subtitle was completely disposable.

Second the original thought was if we did more stories in the New Republic era down the line, putting "New Republic" as a subtitle on all of them would connect them into a defacto series....though not necessarily one that had to be read sequentially. We decided to move away from that because it was locking us into a title structure that might not work in the future. We already have to get ALOT of text on a SW cover. "Star Wars" "a long time ago..." an author name, potentially "NYT Bestselling author", other reading lines. Having extraneous subtitles or overly long titles doesn't leave a lot of room for compelling cover art.

Finally, the story of the book was bigger and more important. The NR subtitle was set right when the book was originally conceived. But over time, we saw that there are events and revelations in this book that have repercussions forward and backward in the story of Star Wars. Having the "New Republic" subtitle made it sound like a smaller story.

 

Shame. I was quite looking forward to Star Wars: New Republic: New Republic Nights: A Novel of the New Republic era. A Star Wars story.

 

Now that the Last Jedi is out can we get any more insight into what the collaboration was like between Rian Johnson and the team working on the film and Claudia Gray while she was writing Bloodline?

In general what is the process like for books which touch on things that will appear in future films?

 

The process is we put the details events etc into the book and our dear readers discover the connections usually once the film is released.

I apologize if that answer is glib. Do you have a more specific question about the process I can elaborate on?

 

I was actually expecting a bit more in TLJ poltically than we got. IIRC, the whole Centrist/Populist thing and the Napkin bombing came from Rian, but neither figured into TLJ.

My memory on that could be faulty, so apologies if I'm wrong!

--Adm. Nick

 

Your memory is correct. And while never part of the core plotting of TLJ there are certainly echoes to it and some events in the film which suggest all of that Bloodline stuff is quite foundational to why/how the galaxy is acting/reacting the way it is.

 

Indeed. I'm hoping that the lessons learned (or being learned IU) will end up with a more stable, stronger, but still egalitarian & democratic New Republic post-IX!

--Adm. Nick

 

I mean more in terms of direction. Like do you approach the filmmakers to say we are writing a book in this era with this characters is there anything we should avoid or is it the other way around where the filmmakers say they'd like you to elaborate a bit more on x.

 

Your question isn't limited to books related to films. In all cases when we approach a new book we're aware of other media in progress that might cover similar material (specific events, characters, time periods, etc). We know the parameters and look for ways for our book to interact with that other property. Sometimes those ideas come from us or the author. Sometimes from other creators. Often its framed by our LF friends who obviously have a better understanding of the whole than anyone.

And in all cases there are usually off limits stuff. Not just in terms of "hey don t spoil this movie moment" but also sometimes in smaller ways. Like deciding not to establish a small piece of Canon as a throwaway line because that might be better worth exploring in a larger more focused way later.

As far as what notes we get. Sometimes its super explicit but more often its more general, with more places for specifics to be defined. Such as "Inferno Squad was formed right after the DS1 was destroyed. By the time of Battlefront 2 they've operated for several years."

 

So @DarthInternous was it Del Rey's decision to add a 4th Inferno squad member that was never going to be in the game? Or was it the story groups or perhaps Golden's idea to add that character in? That character was a good addition to the novel.

 

Some of the exact details escape me (because this is not the sort of thing we "keep score on". An idea is an idea, regardless of source), but I believe our friends from EA provided the core idea that the squad had another member at some point in the past. The various details, identity of the squad member, what happened to them, etc. came together as the book was being outlined and written.

 

Aside from Thrawn: Alliances, are there any other Star Wars original novels coming out in 2018?

 

This is one of those questions that I will not answer, as it falls into the category of discussing future/potentially unreleased material.

 

Am I correct in assuming that these fixes are pushed out to digital versions of the book when my phone prompts me to "update" them?

 

Correct. The fix is instantly put into the digital editions of the book since you can push out an update rather easily. Those updates might also be to change any excerpt/back ad material that was originally included or if some technical glitch is discovered in the ebook file.

Corrections only enter the physical editions once a reprint occurs. To my knowledge, audio books are not updated with corrections to typos/errors due to the production logistics of re-recording parts of a book even months after publication. Exceptions may occur in the event of a truly egregious error.

 

Do you think the 30 years between RotJ and TFA can be more freely explored now that TLJ is out?

 

I don't know how much of this can be answered, but as "Sword of the Jedi" was hinted at since the NJO, how much planning went into this series? Were there just a bunch of notes that kept coming together when this title was mentioned throughout njo, legacy and fate? Or did you guys not have too much planned and were just going to start that from scratch?

I am reading njo now and just curious. I will always have hope that this series may still someday happen...

 

While the term was present in other books for a long time, the planned trilogy of same name was not conceived of that far back. It did not come until much later - but the term "Sword of the Jedi" was very evocative and thus made for a good title once a new book trilogy centering on Jaina was started. It just made sense as a title, in the same way that calling a 2017 movie about Luke Skywalker "The Last Jedi" made sense, even if the phrasing was from the 1980s.

And because any question about "SOJ" always comes with "how much work was done?" I shall repeat here what has been said before, despite some continued skepticism that the books exist in some finished or semi-finished form (they do not).The broad strokes of the series were decided. It was going to be three books, and the main character was decided (Jaina). Where it would take place in the timeline and the broadest story beats were discussed. No outline was finalized, and no writing on the actual series began in any form before the series was cancelled.

 

Is it okay to share those broadest story beats? Just out of vague curiosity.