[tlhIngan Hol] wishlist for TKD 3ed

[De'vID]

On Sat, Apr 29, 2023 at 3:21 PM Russ Perry Jr via tlhIngan-Hol <
tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org> wrote:

> But that’s interesting by itself…. The second edition has been in print
> for 31 years?  And as someone else noted, they’ve changed the cover?


The red cover version has the same contents as the white cover 1992
version. Based on photos of the copyright page shared on Discord, the 1992
edition restarts the print run at 1, but the red cover continues the same
print run as the white cover version. Someone shared a photo of the red
cover version which was print run 40, so there's been at least 40 printings
of the white/red cover versions together.


> This implies that there *is* demand, and the publisher knows it, or it
> would have been out of print for years, maybe decades.  That makes me
> hopeful that a third edition is a possibility, though sadly, I don’t have
> any good ideas as to how to sell the idea to the publisher.
>

The fact that people continue to buy the old edition doesn't necessarily
work in our favour: from the publisher's point of view, if the existing
edition is selling well, the expense of producing a new edition may not be
worth it. Why take a risk with a product that continues to sell X copies a
year, if they're already making some money by doing nothing? They have
finite resources. They have to weigh updating TKD against, e.g., publishing
a new Strange New Worlds novel with Anson Mount and Ethan Peck on the cover
(i.e., actors who are actually onscreen in currently running shows) which
may be projected to sell 10X copies. Right now, there are no prominent
Klingon characters in currently running shows to put on the cover of a new
TKD. I dunno, maybe we can convince them to put old Worf (from Picard
season 3) on the cover. (I know some people here who might be upset by that
because of Michael Dorn's attitude towards the Klingon language in the
past, but I'm willing to bet that putting Dorn on the cover will increase
the sales of TKD overall.) But even in that case, is a new TKD going to
outsell a new SNW novel, or any number of other things they could do
which might cost the same amount of money?

And *that* is the case I have to make to the publishers in our
proposal, that a new TKD *would* be more profitable than projects with
similar cost. Even if 100 KLI members were committed to buying 10 copies
each, it's completely irrelevant if the publisher believes they can spend
the same amount of money and sell more than 1000 copies of some *other*
book.

(If we're *really* lucky, the next Star Trek movie or TV show will feature
Klingons or a Klingon character prominently, the way that Star Trek III, V,
and VI, followed by TNG, made TKD so popular to begin with.)

-- 
De'vID
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