More on The Clone Wars tie-in books

Publisher’s Weekly looks into the busy world of The Clone Wars tie-ins. The pertinent bits:

Grosset & Dunlap will be the primary licensee for children’s formats including junior novelizations, 8x8s, readers, movie photo books and activity books, starting with movie tie-ins this summer—the on-sale date for all books and merchandise is July 26—followed by TV-based titles in the fall. Other juvenile licensees include DK for sticker books, Visual Guides and DK Readers and Dalmatian for coloring and activity books. For older readers, Random House’s Del Rey imprint will publish one movie and four TV novelizations, and Dark Horse will release monthly comics and digest-size graphic novels. An “Art Of” title is expected as well.

Meanwhile, classic Star Wars publishing will continue; Scholastic will introduce a new series next year.

Paul over at TFN speculates that the Traviss and Miller mystery books may be the first wave of novelizations.

Book contract: New one exists, TV is separate?

A few vague words from Sue Rostoni yesterday regarding the book contract.

The new contract has been agreed upon, but the papers haven’t been signed yet and until they are I can’t reveal the publisher or number of books involved. The contract is with the legal folks and I have no clue how long it will take for it to go through the rounds, whether it would be weeks or months. I hope weeks, but we’ll see.

Keep in mind, doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a new publisher; also doesn’t mean they’re not staying with Del Rey.

However, I found this bit particularly interesting:

The animated and live action series are separate and will be contracted out separately — discussions haven’t begun for either of these yet.

What’s the ETA on Clone Wars now? 2009? If it was still 2008 I’d expect them to be in talks by now… Can’t have a major release without a Making of book! (Or maybe LucasBooks is just busy with Indy 4.)

Filk Friday

This week, we hop in the WayBack Machine ™ to a time when you could count the various SW Expanded Universe authors on two hands (and and probably divide them evenly between a “good” hand and a “bad” hand). Club Jader JeffP takes a look at the bad hand and asks Del Rey to deliver us from their evils in his Beatles parody “Imagine” (remember when Del Rey was the “new” Star Wars publisher?).

Del Rey moving into graphic novels

Del Rey’s new territory: original graphic novels. First up, a new Shannara story by Terry Brooks.

I doubt there’s anything Star Wars in the pipeline, since obviously Dark Horse holds the rights to publish SW comics, but I wonder if there’s wiggle room in the contracts that would allow Del Rey to do adaptions. Dark Horse certainly isn’t interested, (Their last attempt was way back in 1998) and the graphic novel treatment sure would make certain parts of the NJO a lot more digestible.