Last week in the mail I got this huge packet of royalty statements from Pocket Books. Now understand, when I say huge, I mean huge. Maybe 200 pages. I’ve written shorter novels to be honest.
These statements are only for the books I did with Pocket Books that are still in print in one form or another. And a bunch of them are Star Trek books of one sort or another.
Looking through those statements, it reminded me that I got a letter recently from someone questioning my credits. This poor person could not believe that anyone could have written over a hundred novels and since I was lying about that, I couldn’t know anything about book pricing. (Not kidding.)
Letters like that I just toss away and I did with that one. (I personally know writers who have produced three and four times the numbers of novels I have done. And for me, all it takes is a mild Google search under this name to find fifty or sixty of the novels I wrote, not counting all the pen name work.)
But the combination of that person’s silly letter and the Pocket Books royalty statement made me realize that it’s been a long, long time since I had a traditionally published book out under a name I can claim. So I figured that with a few posts over the next six months, I would take a group of the books I did and just talk about them for a few minutes.
One group will be all the superhero books I wrote. Another group all the movie novelizations. Another group all the game novels. But first, tonight, since I was mostly known under this name as a Star Trek writer and editor (and the former publisher of Pulphouse Publishing Inc.), I figured I had to start with Star Trek books.
How Many Star Trek Books Did I Write or Edit?
I honestly don’t know or remember and am too lazy to go try to figure out. I’m pretty sure the total is over thirty, but even a Google search won’t help on all of them since I did a few ghost novels in Star Trek.
For example, the Eric Kotani novel “Death of a Neutron Star” was supposed to be a complete ghost novel. But then about five years back a fan came up to me at a convention and asked me to sign it. I asked him why I would do that, since I hadn’t written it. (I actually had from a wonderful Eric Kotani idea and partial manuscript, but was under a non-disclosure agreement.) He said, “Your name is on the inside.” Sure enough, no one had bothered to tell me I was outed on that book.
Notice, all three images on the top of this post have pen names on them.
However, I can remember the first Star Trek novel Kristine Kathryn Rusch and I wrote very clearly. It was the deep winter of 1992 and Star Trek DS9 was about to start in early January of 1993. I had bought a story or two from John Ordover for Pulphouse Magazine and for some reason John and Kris were talking one night on the phone about another project. (Kris was editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) John had just gone into the Pocket Books Star Trek department as an editor and his job was to revamp the program from mostly fan-written books to professional-written books. (Three editor/writers talking. Always fun.)
At the time we had a big backyard dish that picked up signals of programs before they aired, so we had seen the first episode of Star Trek: DS9 just the night before and way before it officially aired. Kris and John got talking about it. And one thing lead to another and John asked Kris if we would be interested in writing a book for the new series.
Yeah, duh. (The high school kid inside of me that used to go home instead of going out so I could watch Star Trek in the 1960s just about died at that moment.)
We were all afraid that six names would not fit on the cover, so Kris and I came up with the pen name Sandy Schofield and the novel “The Big Game” came out in 1993. (I can tell you from my royalty statements that so far it’s sold about 150,000 copies. Nice.)
From there Kris and I started doing more and more Star Trek novels together. I also did a bunch of Star Trek novels and projects on my own. A few I did on my own had Kris’s name on them, a few didn’t. And I ain’t saying which books those are.
Our bestselling Star Trek book was “Star Trek: Next Generation: Invasion: The Soldiers of Fear.” Part of the cross-over Invasion series between the four Star Trek series. That’s still selling like crazy and I don’t even want to mention how many copies that’s sold. It’s a ton. It also got Kris and I to #12 on the New York Times Bestseller official list when the list was only ten long. (The official list is now 15 spots long.)
Along the way John Ordover and I came up with the idea for “The Captain’s Table.” That was basically a bar unstuck in time that any Starfleet captain could go to at any point on any planet. I designed the bar since I had been a bartender and came up with the cast of regulars. (Yes, we knew about Spider Robinson’s bar which rifted off of Arthur C. Clarke’s bar and so on back into time. And old sf idea brought to Star Trek.)
Kris and I did the Star Trek: DS9 book in this series. The jackets on each book had the captain on the front in the cover art and a bunch of people in the back. All the writers of the series were in the back, but not on our own books. Kris and I are standing behind Janeway’s right cheek bone. You have to get the Star Trek: Voyager book in the series to see us clearly.
Kris and I did a lot of books from 1993 to 2002 in Star Trek. We did the first original novel (writing the book only from a few scripts and still photos) for the Star Trek: Voyager series and then we did the first original novel again, way ahead of the airing, for Star Trek: Enterprise. That is a very, very scary thing to do considering how exacting to characters and details all Star Trek fans are. I’m pretty amazed to this day we got as close to the actual series as we did on both of those books, considering we were writing them before the first episodes were even filming.
I also wrote the very first Star Fleet Core of Engineers novel for that series. It’s one of the longer books in the series.
As time went on, Kris and I also got to do some really fun stuff. We wrote a Star Trek comic book series for DC Comics under their Wildstorm imprint. Kris did the outline and I did the script since at the time she hadn’t read many comics. Thank heavens there was a good artist on my script because my script just wasn’t that good.
I got to write a few scripts for Paramount Pictures as well. One full-length feature film script turned out to be directed by Jonathan Frakes and was a live action game called “Klingon.” I ended up getting story credit since by that point I had no desire to join the Screen Writer’s Guild, let alone spend another moment in Hollywood. Then I turned around and novelized my own script for a paperback for Pocket Books. (A ton of money was made on that project.)
Of all the projects I did with Star Trek, three really stand out as being above and beyond fun. And two were from holodeck creations.
The first started the day John Ordover called me and asked me if I would like to do a “Captain Proton” book. (Picture of cover at the top of this post.) He called me because he knew of my love for the old pulps. On Star Trek :Voyager, one of the characters had created a great holodeck program featuring a Buck Rogers character called Captain Proton.
John’s idea was to put together a trade paper book in the form of the old pulp magazines, so under the name D.W. “Prof” Smith I wrote a short novel staring Captain Proton. (If you don’t get the pen name reference, let me just say I also wrote the entire short novel in that classic writer’s style.)
And then I also wrote three other pulp-style short stories for the book. One by Ray Hamil, one by Lester Lee, and one by Don Simster. (Of course all three stories were in the styles of the great old pulp writers that you should be able to figure out from my pen names.)
See why when someone asks me how many names I have published work under I have no idea. There are four pen names there. And no where on that book does it give Dean Wesley Smith as a name.
I also was allowed to write Captain Proton stories for Amazing Magazine and even had the cover of the magazine once.
The next fun project was the book Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Hard Rain. That novel stared Dixon Hill from the hard-boiled detective program on the holodeck. That was the hardest book I have written to date because it was a mystery in many sub-genres, set on a holodeck, while Picard could never be Picard, only Dixon Hill, and yet save the Enterprise.
Somewhere in the middle of all this John Ordover and I were trying to figure out how to get newer writers into Star Trek from the fan boards. The copyright issues were a nightmare. But finally John got the lawyers and his bosses and the fine folks at Paramount to agree to a contest and he called it “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”
And he hired me. The third really amazing project I got to do with him.
I had been the publisher and one of the editors at Pulphouse Publishing Inc. and had edited Pulphouse Magazine for years. I had also been the fiction editor for VB Tech Journal for two plus years. I knew short fiction and I had written novels in every series, so John knew I loved all of Star Trek.
My job was to find 23 professional-level short stories from writers who had not professionally published more than three short stories or a novel. That’s right. My job was to find professional stories from beginning writers. Scared didn’t begin to describe how I felt about that task.
The first year the number of manuscripts was over 3,000 and I found 17 stories. The first book came out in 1998 and some writers in that book have gone to major writing careers, including Phaedra M. Wheldon, Dayton Ward, and Christina F. York.
No one thought that the idea would go beyond the first year, but it just kept going even though Pocket Books lost a ton of money every year on the project. They did it for the fans. (Never happen in this world today.)
For ten years, from 1997 to 2006 I put together a major collection of Star Trek short fiction. Every year I worried I would never find enough good stories, every year after the first year I had too many great stories to fit into the book.
That last volume of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” that came out in 2007 was the last thing I did with Star Trek. I had stopped writing novels for them in 2002 when John Ordover left editing, turning to my own novels and short fiction instead.
Summary
I wrote Star Trek novels in every series and outside of the series as well. And I edited for ten years with Star Trek. I had great fun working with the wonderful John Ordover. I miss both Star Trek and editing. I don’t miss Star Trek enough to go back to writing it, however, unless it is for a very special project.
But I am coming back to editing shortly. We will have an announcement on that, so stay tuned.
My Star Trek years were great fun. I was frighteningly lucky to have found my way into that program and become one of their go-to writers. The high school kid inside of me who used to hunger for every week’s new Original Star Trek episode in the 1960s still feels amazement he was allowed into the inner circle.
However, during those Star Trek years, I was doing a lot of other writing as well. So in a month or so I’ll do another post like this about my novels in the superhero worlds of Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron-Man, and Superman. At least the ones I can claim. After that I’ll tackle all the movie novelizations I did. And then the gaming novels.
Wow, have I had a great time writing or what?
DEAN! You’ve had more fun as a writer on just that much than the whole alumni list of whole universities!
Stop having fun right now. We’ll never catch up.
I never doubted you, Dean. Everything in this blog sings authentic. Always has.
BTW, I’m a big Star Trek fan, and I can’t believe I’ve never heard of that Corp of Engineers series. Got to pick that up.
PV, Oh, I know most people dont doubt me. That wasn’t the point and that kid who wrote me is just like many other strange letters I get. If you want to be around a long time, you have to learn how to ignore the stupidity and I learned that decades ago.
As for the Starfleet Corp of Engineers series, i’t started out only as an electronic series in 2000, but then all the books were put into omnibus paper editions as well since at that point no one realized electronic books even existed. My novel was called The Belly of the Beast and set up the new crew for the next couple hundred books.
Wow, talk about a walk down memory lane. *g* My first professionally-published short story was in Strange New Worlds VI, and then I hit again in volumes VII and VIII. Dean even had to create a new category in the books for Bob Jeschonek and I because we wrote stories that were a little outside the Star Trek box. I’d been a Star Trek fan since the original series, and I gotta say, being paid to write Star Trek was hugely awesome.
Good news that you’re going to be editing again, Dean! Editing and challenge stories–you’re going to be a very busy writer guy.
Hey, I’ve read some of those books! Thanks for the stories.
Please, please keep doing this and sharing these stories with us. It is really fascinating to read and gets me all psyched up to create more of my own stuff. D.W. “Prof.” Smith – I love it!
Once or twice I’ve found myself reading a book and thinking “Man, this sounds like Dean’s voice.” Looks like odds are it was.
I’ve never understood the common belief that a writer can only create a few books in a lifetime. All you have to do to write a hundred books is to work hard and keep at it.
I’ve been in this business 12 years and I have 12 published books, two more coming out next year, and three more that have yet to be published. In those 12 years I had a part-time day job for six years, along with magazine and blog writing. Someone who ONLY writes books could cook through twice as many as I have no problem.
Not that I’m knocking writers who are slower. Everyone has their pace. As Dennis McKiernan once told me, “Quality, quantity, speed: pick any two.”
Thanks, Sean, but afraid I don’t agree with the myth Dennis McKiernan is passing with that statement. That’s the old myth that writing fast equals writing poorly. Nope, actually it’s the other way around for most of us. Spending more time in a chair writing, meaning producing more words, meaning being fast, usually improves craft and the art. So my saying is “Work ethic = quality.”
And the reverse of that… “Excuses and myths = frustration.”
Work ethic is speed. I type around 750 to 1000 words per hour before I need a break. Why I have more books is simply because I keep working to become a better writer, keep learning, and spend more time in front of the computer practicing my craft.
So thanks, Sean. And I like Dennis. Great writer. But I don’t agree with his statement at all. Just passing along a bad myth.
I’ve been waiting for you to post some stuff about your Star Trek writing, and the day is finally here! Hooray! I used to be in a fan club, reading the zines, and writing my own stories. Good days, good days.
I well remember rushing home from school to catch the series when it was rerun locally here in the early afternoons (no idea why the station did that–maybe they thought it was a children’s show?). My father wouldn’t let us watch it in the original run for some reason, so I missed it the first time around.
Looking forward to reading future posts about your other series works.
Dean, I love it when you post about all the writing you’ve done. It makes me think that perhaps, one day–if I work really, really, hard–I’ll be as prolific as you. In any case, it’s good to have goals.
Hack!
Anybody who has written more than, say, sixty-five books? Why, that writer has sold out!
Slow down, wait for the rest of us …
Steve
Steve…LOL… Aren’t you one of those who are way past me? You and Dave Bischoff. I do know that Bob Vardeman is up over three hundred or so. So no slowing down for me. Just getting thin, healthy, in shape, and picking up speed. I’m spending more and more time at the computer and having far too much fun these days.
Dean, anyone doubting your credentials obviously hasn’t been paying attention while walking through the sci-fi/media-tie-in sections of their local Barnes & Noble or any other major chain book store. I don’t think I’ve ventured through one of those without seeing your name in at least a decade. And that’s not even including your many pen names.
One minor quibble, Dean. You wrote:
I also wrote the very first Star Fleet Core of Engineers novel for that series. It’s the longest book in the series.
This is incorrect. My novella “Failsafe” (S.C.E. #40) and William Leisner’s novella “Out of the Cocoon” (S.C.E. #57), at 34,000 words each, are tied for longest single entry in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series, and the two longest two-part stories are my short novel Wildfire (S.C.E. #23 & #24) at 52,000 words, and Ilsa J. Bick’s short novel Wounds (S.C.E. #55 & #56) at 51,000 words. And the longest single story in the entire series is the three-parter, eventually published as a standalone novel, Foundations (S.C.E. #17, #18, #19) by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore (totaling 70,000 words, and each of which is longer than “Belly of the Beast”).
Just thought you’d like to know.
Hey, David, I stand corrected. Thanks!! I had no idea you guys wrote books that long in that series. I thought they had limited them to novella length adventures. As you can tell, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the Star Trek program after I stopped writing for the book side and only did the editing side. Thanks. Much appreciated.
I think the idea at first was to limit the length of entries in the S.C.E. series, but I wasn’t very good at writing short once I got rolling on action sequences.
Anyway, as I said, it’s only a minor quibble, and it’s not meant to detract from your many fine contributions to Star Trek or your amazing body of work. You’ve always been a paragon of professionalism, someone the rest of us can look up to and aspire to emulate. Keep up the good work, and best wishes for your continued success, health, and happiness.
- Dave
David, I appreciate the correction. I just wasn’t paying much attention after the first number of books and since Keith was running everything and I was off doing Strange New Worlds, I just never noticed, even though I read a bunch of the stories, including yours, in the Omnibus editions. So thanks, I really do appreciate corrections on stuff like this. (And I went and fixed it up front on the post.)
Thanks for the kind comments and keep those fingers moving. (grin)
Cheers
Dean
David, helped judge the Scribe awards a year or two ago. Mirror Universe was knife-fighting for the #1 slot like a deranged gladiator. What an excellent book you wrote. It was a real pleasure reading.
And just when we thought we knew everything there was to know about you, Dean! I, for one, am shocked that somebody would actually have the temerity to call you a liar. Sheesh! Makes me want to stop writing books in the Mack Bolan/Stony Man series, afraid what will happen if I start publishing more works under my own name (*** insert devilish grin here). Very cool to hear the little stories and stuff—I just love to read about those behind-the-scenes things that happen in publishing. It’s got everything: passion, love, hate, jealousy, ambition, struggle, conflict. Practically a blockbuster in the making! Who says real life isn’t as interesting as fiction?
Jon. Good to see you here, man!
Dean,
You have been on point and leading the way forward through the jungle flawlessly. The men in back (not black) are talking about you with admiration and confidence. They will follow you anywhere. You keep finding the traps and the mines and we who are in back breath easier for it. It is exciting to hear about your exploits and it gives the rest of us inspiration.
I am looking forward to the next few weeks as you share your past exploits.
Just remember you have another thirty years of writing to do. : )
What strikes me is your confidence. After all the years that’s a given, but were you ever subject to doubts? I know I’m in the right place doing the right thing, but someone recently told me my books were ‘failing’ and I wondered how to deal with that sort of heckling from those closest to me.
Louis, every writer I know worth their salt is always in doubt about their ability. I am no exception. Neither is Kris.
How to deal with friends who are trying to pull you down or hold you back? Walk away. They are not really friends. Over the years Kris and I both have walked away from a ton of friends who could not handle the fact that we were working harder than they were and thus having more success. It happens in every career in the arts. Your true friends will be happy for your success, support you without through in the rough times, and be there. Both Kris and I have been lucky to have a number of such true friends. (Example: Bill Trojan, the book dealer who died last August…he was a true friend to us and we were to him. I miss him every damn day.)
So the people around you who are trying to hold you back, walk away. And as for the lack of confidence, let that drive you to keep learning and learning and learning. You never know it all in this business. And the moment you think you do, that’s the moment you stop and let everyone else go past you.
Hope that helps. Not easy advice I’m afraid.
Dean:
I have read every Star Trek book mentioned here. I enjoyed the Invasion series, Soldiers of Fear specifically. Although it has been years since I have read any Star Trek books, I am glad I could be part of one of those cheques in the past.
Keep up the writing and the solid posts here – your posts have made me rethink many things about writing.
-Mark Gardner
The first started the day John Ordover called me and asked me if I would like to do a “Captain Proton” book. (Picture of cover at the top of this post.) He called me because he knew of my love for the old pulps. On Star Trek :Voyager, one of the characters had created a great holodeck program featuring a Buck Rogers character called Captain Proton.
I loved, loved, loved that Voyager episode (Bride of Chaotica I think it was called). But then I love old movies and serials and whatnot anyway, so it was a no brainer for me.
That book looks particularly fun…I’ll have to check and see if it can be had on Amazon (I’m sure it can). No fair that you had all that fun writing it!
Wow – replying to my own post.
Anyway, Captain Proton is on Amazon in pback (about $15 or so) and it’s on Kindle too (I think it’s $7). So it’s now on my wishlist. 
Hey, folks, didn’t post that so you could run and get the books. (grin) Honestly I didn’t because that just helps Star Trek keep my original books buried down the lists and I make next to nothing on any sale of one my Star Trek books now. All my money came back in the 1990s, although I have to admit a little cash keeps flowing on them, which is nice.
So I am proud of all the work I did with Trek, but my career has moved on and now I’m trying to bring up the original books, which I guess I will if I get a new story done for the challenge, huh? (grin)
Dean,
You are too funny.
I know you just wanted to make some points, and why not with something as well known as Star Trek? Besides, I’m so enamored of that particular episode(s) of Voyager and old movies/whatnot, I’m always on the lookout for such stuff. Besides, I’m all caught up with Kris’ Retrieval Artist series, so while waiting for another to come along 
, I’ve already bought another of hers – The Secret Life of Cats – which sounds like a lot of fun.
Just what I need in my life right now…which is probably even moreso why Captain Proton is so appealing to me right now.
I got my statement as well (a whopping five pages) and saw that Strange New Worlds 10 had sold 247 copies and is apparently no longer “out of print”… or are they just using print on demand for those?
Hope your announcement is that SNW is coming back. (Just when I figured it out the damn thing ended.) You should re-post that old picture of you sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by manuscripts.
Randy, I can say for sure that Strange New Worlds will never return, at least under my editorship. (grin) Nope, we are doing a new project. Think Pulphouse-like, all original stories, all professional rates, and Kris and I both are doing it again. Yes, Kris is returning to editing as well. Fun, huh? Stay tuned.
Dean, I am so very glad you decided to do this. It needed to be done. It’s fascinating and inspirational and it doesn’t hurt to remind everyone just how much of a theoretical advice giver you’re not.
Your writing, editing, and publisher credentials are like a massive onion (no I don’t mean they stink) with multiple layers being peeled away the closer one becomes more familiar to you, until probably only Kris knows every skeleton in your closets.
Now someone is going to come along and pooh-pah perhaps one of the most varied, eclectic and productive careers in the fields of writing, editing, and publishing (as done for a living) and dismiss everything you’ve done so that they can ignore any advice that bursts their personal bubbles:
Oh God, part of your career include successful media tie-in writing. I shudder, shudder I tell you.