imnotparanoid said:
These people have waaaaaay to much time on their hands.
And thats coming from someone who spent the last 4 hours making orogami seals.
Well, yes and no. Something like a video game tie-in novel is by definition aimed at hardcore fans rather than a casual demographic. As such someone doing the writing should understand and respect the material they are writing for, since their audience is exactly the kind of person who is going to react that way, this is who the product is directed at.
Ultimatly in organizing novels attached to established properties, you need editors who can act as oversight, and also to carefully prevent authors from changing things around to try and personalize the work and make it their own (so to speak). Basically the universe is the star of the story, the author is just someone given the honor of being allowed to play around there.
You also have to understand that fans are increasingly concerned over novels set in existing universes due to the massive damage done by novelists to long-standing properties in the past. D&D novels being one of those, where gradually you started seeing the guys writing the novels who managed to get a non-gaming audience, actually bending the game itself to their whims. While this was profitable for a while, you can sort of see the end results with the current state of the PnP RPG industry compared to days past. While it was not exclusively the cause, the novelists chased away a lot of the gamers given time, the gamers were the core audience, and as time went on you saw the fad for the novels reduce (but never disappear, it's still probably the most profitable aspect of what remains of the business, but itself a shadow of what it once was) and without the core audience that had been gradually eroded edition, after edition, and novel after novel, and increasing competition from things like CCGs and MMORPGs... well, we see what happened.
Perhaps a more apt comparison would be the "Expanded Universe" mess in Star Wars and how you had authors like Karin Prentiss (I think that's the name) entirely redefining Mandalorians and gradually infecting other novels to the point where it became a sort of slow poison that has lead to her name being reviled by a lot of fanboys, and if reports are to be believed a lot of people turning their back on the EU.
I won't even get into Star Trek, though admittedly being one of the first universes to have massive amounts of tie-in novels, to a non-written central property, it sort of gets a past since it represents the baseline other similar projects should have learned from.
There have been enough GOOD tie in novels, where you can see how it should be done, and it increasingly makes the stinkers REALLY stand out. Honestly I think a lot of it has to do with both the writers and the publishers being after an easy write and quick buck, which is why there are so few standards applied. It's okay if you wind up with someone who deeply understands and loves the universe and watches themselves, it's not okay if someone decides to say do a couple of playthroughs of a video game as their only research and squat and poop out a novel knowing that the editors themselves don't know or care enough to catch them. I mean the guy who wrote "Deception" has a credit for publishing a novel, doubtlessly got paid, and due to the "Mass Effect Name" it probably sold pretty well... so really he's already won and got his springboard to other writing, which is probably what he wanted.
That's my thoughts at any rate.
