A&A Official Star Wars Publishing Q&A thread

I checked Amazon UK for a pb yesterday but only the hardcover was listed. (That's not unusual though).

 

If you're going to wait for the pb if there is one, keep an eye on the Amazon Marketplace - you might find the hc used at a pb price.

 

is there any reliable way to know if a Hardcover or TPB got bonus pages like art, sketches, black and white pages? or all variant covers collected? It's annoying to have to buy them all to see if or if not worth it.

Likewise, is nowadays all collected into tpb and hardcover or are there still exceptions? I am a single issues guy but also get tpb and hc too as well as omnibus and epic collections because I want those bonus pages but not everything has them.

 

I wonder if Paul S Kemp is still on the radar or even still writing. He was great. There's a few of those guys who were top-tier SW authors but seem to have fallen away in favour of "new blood". I'm definitely curious as to the story behind it. Been too long without a Kemp/JJM/Luceno novel. The quality of SW lit is definitely the poorer for it. (IMO, obviously)

 

That presumes that there is a "story" behind any of it.

 

Forgive me Cole, this appears to be more of a comics question. As I don't work in comics I'm not really able to provide you with an accurate answer to your query.

 

To answer the collective query about HC vs Pbk. Yes, as we've discussed a few times, the general rule is 6-9 months between initial hardcover publication and paperback. But, there are always exceptions and not every project is guaranteed to go to paperback. FACPOV still hasn't two years later. Could it still? Absolutely. Will it? Unclear. Dooku wasn't even guaranteed to go to print at all.

So how long "should you wait" before deciding to just buy the HC? Well, that's an individual question, and I'll leave that to individuals to decide.

 

Well of course there is a "story". The story could be as simple as "retired from writing", or "not interested in writing tie-in fiction" or "publisher decided to go another way", or simply "opportunity hasn't come up again yet". Not sure what you thought I meant by "story" but it doesn't have to be something controversial

anyway why did you bother responding to me if you weren't going to even attempt an answer?

edit: My assumption would be that a project just hasn't come up that suits them, but I would be interested to know if there was any information you could shed on any of those guys' future plans with relation to Star Wars.

 

All of them are still writing and welcome to do so for Star Wars at any time. When that will happen again, I couldn't say, as all have lives and careers beyond the GFFA.

 

Read any good books lately?

Sent from my SM-G390W using Tapatalk

 

Kemp seems to have some stuff going on in his life and isn’t as productive these days, Star Wars or otherwise. It’s a shame, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to do another SW novel any time soon.

 

FACPOV got a paperback here in the UK - Amazon UK.
US folks wanting it can order from the UK site - it's in stock.

 

how annoying

 

@DarthInternous can you describe/elaborate on the shift away from paperback publishing in the last 20 years?

This is my memory (which may be incorrect): early Legends novels were primarily released in PB format. In the middle of Legends the big publications (ie. Star by Star) were released in HB prior to PB. By the end of Legends most novels were released in HB prior to PB. In the new Canon, every standard Del Rey novel publication has been released in HB format 6-9 months before PB was released.

Can we follow the dollars? Releasing the more expensive format followed by a less expensive format when sales die down maximizes sales/profit? Is there research put into this in terms of reader enjoyment? Simply curious, I've long accepted I have to wait for the PB release (I prefer the smaller size and when I started buying novels as a kid the lower price was attractive).

Second Q: Do you ever browse this forum for market research? https://boards.theforce.net/threads/rank-the-novels-of-the-new-canon.50037411/page-13#post-55912999

 

(please bear in mind everything I am about to say is specifically about the US. Yes, publishing trends in other countries can differ. But, US publishing drives all of this, so that's the focus here.)

The short answer is, there's been an overall movement away from paperback original (meaning, first format published is paperback) across publishing over the last 30 years. And Legends novels were mostly all released in HC first, though there certainly were more paperback originals or paperback first publications earlier in the run. But, the trend away from those is directly tied to the trend in publishing overall.

Here's the longer answer, which is not specific to Star Wars at all. But Star Wars publishing is bound by many of the trends/realities of overall publishing:

It started as channels (meaning places where books are sold) that were primarily focused on paperbacks started to move away from selling books entirely, or limited their inventories drastically. This is often referred to "mass merchandise" and in the US that meant grocery stores, large big box general retailers (Walmart, Target, etc). Go into any grocery story in America - from Wegmans to Stop and Shop, etc (pick a regional favorite). How many of them have a dedicated section for selling books? The answer is none. Big box chains which had larger book sections have seen those shrink in the intervening decades. Why? Well the work required to sell a book (in merchandising, communicating to customers, etc) is higher than selling a vaccuum cleaner, television, cast iron pan, chair, shirt, etc. Plus in many places I'm imagining the margins are better (in part because of that ease). In shrinking those sections - what got squeezed out was all the paperbacks. All the books at the margins. What remains are higher price options with better margins for the store, and bigger name/brands.

What happens to publishers when there are fewer places that want to sell a product? Well, you try to find other channels to sell those products. Internet retailers are starting to become a player, so there's some shift to selling products more there. But, the reality also is that you start to squeeze your print runs on paperback only titles, and you probably cut back on how many you do, since each title is fighting for the same smaller shelf space with every other title. And it suddenly becomes REALLY hard to make money when you're selling a very low priced product and not doing massive volume. That's not a sustainable business model (in publishing or anywhere else). So the paperback market starts to condense.

Then the second big thing happens. What's the true advantage of a paperback over a hardcover book? Cost/price/portability. Cost to the publisher to produce, and price for the consumer to buy. It is a value product through and through. Welp, enter ebooks - which absolutely demolish those advantages, particularly on the price to the consumer and portability. 7.99 paperbacks can't complete with .99 ebooks, or as time would go on - FREE ebooks. So while issue #1 was about the channels for paperbacks drying up, issue #2 exacerbates that as the consumer base starts to dry up. Extensive research has shown that a vast driver of paperback sales - particularly in genres (crime, romance, sci-fi/fantasy) was the low price barrier. I'll buy this book because I'm only risking a few books, and I can buy a bunch of books take a risk on all of them and increase my chances that I'll find something I like. Well now consumers can do that same thing with ebooks, but x3 or x5 or x10.

So what happens when the consumer market shifts away from print and specifically away from paperback to ebook? (Yes, hardcover print sales were significantly affected by early ebook development - but paperback way more so.) Publishers start to shift their resources toward ebooks and further shrink the number of paperback first titles they are publishing. Ebook originals - which would have vastly been paperback originals - become a bigger player. Self-publishing explodes, and again many of those stories probably would have made it to traditional publishers as paperback titles. So now it's not just consumers or publishers, but also writers. The pool of potential paperback originals is now smaller, regardless of publisher appetite.

So we have retail channels contracting, consumer behavior changing, and in turn publishing/author behavior altering course to align. And all of this, we're still only up to about, the year 2007 or so. And this is becoming a really long answer so I'm going to hand wave things a little bit from here out. But, in the last ten years you have a new format (audio) becoming a big player. That squeezes on all the other formats, and provides another value proposition (through subscription serves like Audible) that impacts the value of paperbacks. And, then in the last few years, when ebooks plateaued and we've actually seen overall consumer trends coming back to print - that return to print is almost entirely in the hardcover space, with SOME move to the trade paperback space. It isn't coming back to paperback broadly, and certainly not to "mass market paperback" (those smaller trim paperbacks that SW is published in). That print shift not returning to mass market really proves the hypothesis that the value consumers have found their homes in ebook or audio by and large.

And bear in mind, everything I just said also accounts for a simple truth that most outside of publishing don't realize. People are not drastically reading more/less than they used to. The overall pool of readers is not really all that different. It's just the ways that people read that have changed over time. So there isn't some silent majority of former paperback readers who are just waiting out there for publishers to print paperbacks again and they'll come buy them. Those readers stayed, they just migrated.

Hope that was helpful.

To your second Q:
Not really. Several of the forums like that I don't really read, since I don't think they are aimed at me, nor should they be. I try to stay in my lane so-to-speak. I'll poke in now and again, but I don't really note any of the info or bring it back to the team. In general, I don't find the information in that forum to be valid from a research standpoint. Let me be clear that individual opinions and rankings are perfectly valid, but most of the posts there are just lists, no rationale or explanation. Some people do provide some reasoning, but even that is often with only specific call-outs to the titles that particularly impressed on them good or bad. Without interviewing each person there's no research to be gleaned. I can't possibly know why books are ranked in a certain way, how rankings differ user to user, etc.

 

Thanks @DarthInternous , that was a fascinating read into the changing worlds of book publishing not just Star Wars!

 

@DarthInternous, thank you for such an insightful response. Very much appreciated.

 

Hi, @DarthInternous! Are you allowed to share the promos the booth will be doing at NYCC? I'm mainly trying to determine if I should pick up the Dooku hardcover at the con, or hit up my local Barnes & Noble before getting on the road to the hotel. Thanks, and I'm looking forward meeting the authors and maybe you!

 

Hi Loopy - Sure thing. We don't have any special promos as far as purchases go. No "buy a book and get X", so really up to you about buying it before or during the con. Author Cavan Scott will be doing signings at the show. If you bring a book with you or buy one at the con you can get it signed. There is no charge for the signature, regardless of whether you brought your own book.

Rebecca Roanhorse and Delilah S. Dawson will also be doing signings. We'll have posters for Rebecca Roanhorse (and maybe also for Delilah, don't quote me on that. But we'll have books for her as well). Those are the "promos" we've got going on. We'll also have a fun little set of "missions" that you can do at NYCC. For each mission you complete, you'll get a prize.

Finally, I'm told that we found a very small number of Thrawn: Treason con editions from SDCC that we're bringing. When I say "very small" I mean, enough for one day or so. I believe they're just going to be first come/first serve, so unless you plan on being there very early Thurs, I wouldn't stress over trying to buy one.

Other books will be available, as well as free samplers and such. Hopefully that covers everything you were looking for. Definitely come by and say hello and please don't be shy about introducing yourself. I've got 4 straight days of manning the booth, so it's nice to have some friendly faces to converse with to help pass the time.

Safe travels to NYC.

 

Thanks! Those missions sound like fun. I'll have to make sure to keep stopping by.

 

@DarthInternous would it be reasonable to expect to finally hear some tidbits about Project Luminous this weekend at NYCC?

 

Along with at least two trailers for TROS.

 

I think that counts as a "tidbit".

 

I'm going to beat this dead horse one more time. @DarthInternous would you say less than 50% Jedi Lost gets a paperback release? If so, I'll risk buying the hardcover now.