SWM wrote:Kytheros wrote:T'be fair, though, the paperbacks/new editions of older books should require relatively little time or effort on David's part, with special editions taking up a bit more, but not a massive amount, maybe a new forward/afterwards, maybe an expanded appendix. It's the new stuff that takes up time and effort.
Agreed, David doesn't have to do any special work for the paperbacks, and only has to sign the leatherbound. But the question I posed was, how many Weber books can the
publisher put out in a year before either saturating the market or interfering with the publication of other authors?
I would guess it would depend on the size of the publishing house. Let's face it, today with laser printers, computers, and machines that trim and bind pages automatically, it's not like someone arranging wood blocks of letters in an old style printing press. Setting up and printing 10 copies of a page that might have taken a whole day then probably takes less than a minute now.
And one would hope any publisher worthy of the name would have multiple print lines. If a newspaper like the New York Times can print literally hundreds of thousands of copies of the paper each day in time for them to be delivered all over the country, I don't see where it should be too hard for a book publisher to put out *at least* 30 new or reprinted books each month - 1 for each day - if not more.
Also, RFC doesn't just use *one* publisher. Some of his work is published by Baen, and some by Tor. For that matter, some of his other works might be published by yet others. I don't know off the top of my head. Actually, I sort of wish he'd gone with Baen for all of his books, since they have "Advance Reader Copies"; and Tor doesn't seem to be too good in that regard.
However, one thing *does* come to mind... ...namely that some genre of books don't lend themselves to quick authoring; and "serious" science fiction is often one of them. That said, perhaps RFC's decision to author so many different series at the same time might not have been the best one he could have made.
On another note... ...from the beginning of the thread...
Adding to that, David has mentioned that all the side-series (such as the Shadows books) are going to be brought back together into the mainline series, and that there might only be two or three books left.
And I suppose that "coming back together" could even happen in the next novel. After all, though not explicitly stated, we have Cachet (the Torch line) and Henke (the Shadow line) already on Mesa, and Honor could easily bring a contingent herself to aid in trying to "dig out" more information about the Alignment.
I'm assuming RFC, like any good series author, has a map of his "future history" he's writing to. That said, if the altercation with Haven took 10 books to resolve, it seems like one with *both* the Solarian League and the Mesan Alignment should take at least as many, rather than 3 or less. Unless he's going to do some serious time jumping, which would probably not make his fans all that happy. After all, in A Rising Thunder, the analysis presented towards the end noted the League probably would take 10-15 YEARS to reach a "tipping point". As for the Alignment, at this point Mantacore knows almost *nothing* about it except for it's existence. All that is going to have to be discovered; then confronted and handled, and that takes time. To date, none of the books relating to the "Honorverse" have covered more than a few years at most.
