In particular, I could see two ways a shoddy novel could get published as a tie-in when it wouldn’t regularly.

One is where you have a less-than-awesome person in charge of the product. They’ve been given the position by a money person and with clear business goals. Artistic merit may be a close second or a distant one, but either way I expect that depends more on the character of the person in charge than any necessary feature of the process.

The other is when even a good product line manager ends up, for whatever reason, with a manuscript that isn’t so great. I’d expect that for somebody running a line of tie-in books, there’s a much greater incentive just to print it and move on to the next one, rather than killing it and starting over. It’ll sell anyhow, and you have a quota to meet.

Since he’s been brought up, I’ll point at Matt Stover, whose condition (as I recall from his blog) for writing Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor was that he got to write more of his own stuff. Without those tie-ins, we WOULDN’T get more great original work from him, and I would bet many other authors are in similar situations.

Depends on the fandom, actually. You get into a more popular or more anal fandom, and if you screw up a detail or go alternate-universe without your writing justifying the hell out of it, the die-hard fen will DESTROY you. Figuratively. Mostly. (Of course, as you’re not getting paid, you don’t have to care anywhere near as much — but if your goal is to become “Internet Popular,” as the majority of “PLEASE, O PLEASE, COMMENT ON MY STORY” beggings seem to indicate, you do have something to lose.)

Another reality is that without writing the Predator novel there is NO WAY I could’ve written my new original novel, Finch, which I think blows Shriek and City of Saints out of the water. So, you have to look at it from a lot of different points of view. I learned so much from doing the Predator novel that I can’t even tell you. It added so many weapons to my arsenal.

Third, doing the Predator novel doesn’t mean there’s an original novel I *didn’t* write. I would’ve just filled that slot with more nonfiction and some short stories.

I think John’s got the right perspective: you just can’t make a blanket statement about tie-ins. At the same time, from the writer’s perspective, they probably won’t be as *personal* as the original work. The question then becomes: does that necessarily mean they’ll turn out worse than work that’s more personal? Yeah, sometimes. And sometimes not.

Jeff

mzmadmike: see…that was really the point I was trying to make in the first place…The root cause is that there are a hell of a lot of people who are think that the words “Star Trek” on a book cover are more important than the words “Vonda McIntyre” on a book cover. I think that’s sad. I am having a hard time understanding why people think this is anti-author.

Also, the logical extension of your “solution” is that one should suggest that others also buy original work. You can see pretty clearly right here how that goes. It got me labeled as an author-hating elitist.

I *like* Star Trek, or at least some of it, but there’s a hundred thousand pages of it on the shelves. I don’t think it is elitist to suggest that is enough. Such statements unfortunately seem to be like red-flags before bulls. People act like I ran over their puppy. No, I don’t hate Star Trek, and no I don’t think Star Trek authors are “hacks”. If Scalzi and others wrote five hundred books set in the Old Man’s War universe, I’d feel exactly the same about that.

It used to be that new authors cut their teeth in the SF magazines. That’s where all that old Heinlein and Dick and Silverberg and Ellison and, indeed, Vonda McIntyre came from. Today, those magazines are all but dead.

Go buy some.

I guess it depends on whether or not you like the background material or not.

I certainly didn’t feel my work wasn’t “original.” I wrote every word.

And if you feel it’s shameful that authors do work for money (sort of like an orthodontist who spends most of his time straightening teeth, rather than reconstructing jaws damaged in accidents–much more “honorable” work), the solution is for you and your friends to buy a lot more copies of the authors’ “original” works. Problem solved.

123: Shakespeare wrote lots of plays that had lots of characters and stories that the audience also knew. One presumes that his Courtier friends said: “William, we wish you’d stop writing that god-awful popular swill for the unwashed groundlings, and get back to those serious sonnets and a ‘Venus and Adonis’ sequel.”

Homer sang tales that had many familiar parts to his audience. “The Illiad” — fan fic, right?

I’ve sought out tie-ins because I know the writers, and avoided others because I didn’t like the setting. I generally prefer original fiction because the authors are not bound by some of the restrictions a licensed property requires.

Just as an aside, it’s funny that a respected author can write a comic book (the epitome of a licensed work) and not get any flack for it.

Personally, I’ve ghostwritten one tie-in novel. It was a lot of work and I’m as proud of it as any other work I’ve done.

A good tie-in is a good book.

A bad one is a bad book.