As my literary co-conspirator Dayton Ward reported earlier today on his blog, the first two books of Star Trek: Seekers, our new (hopefully) ongoing series set in the era immediately following the events of the original series, have been listed on the Simon & Schuster website for pre-orders. Sort of.

I’ll let Dayton explain, with this excerpt from his blog post:

Star Trek: Seekers #1 – Second Nature, by David Mack – July 29th, 2014 Star Trek: Seekers #2 – Point of Divergence, by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, August 26th, 2014 Now, there’s a few things to note about these: First, they’re listed as being only available in Kindle e-Book format. For those wondering, rest assured that the books also will be available as mass market paperbacks, along with all the various other e-Book formats. Next, they’ve appended “Star Trek: The Original Series” to both titles. I suspect this is just related to whatever sales/marketing copy was sent out, as “Star Trek: Seekers” remains the series title. For whatever it’s worth, they did the same thing with Harbinger, the first book in the Star Trek: Vanguard series. At the moment, Kevin is listed as the sole author of Book #2, which is just another example of how Amazon tends to dick up entries with more than one author. I imagine this will be updated/corrected in due course.

Eagle-eyed readers who remember the original pitch for the Seekers concept might be scratching their heads right now. Because Dayton and I have already been asked about this on Twitter, I might as well address the inevitable inquiries now. When we first announced the series, our vision was that the books would not have regular titles, only numbers, in order to evoke the retro look and feel of the old James Blish anthologies published by Bantam in the 1970s.

Long story short, we were overruled on this by the publisher. I’ll spare you the book-industry technobabble, but the simple explanation is that we were told the automated, meta-tagged, keyword-driven sales system that connects publishers, wholesalers, and retailers, would have suffered some kind of cyber-seizure if we had denied it titles. So, the books will now have titles. Win some, lose some.

In other Seekers-related news, we have been working during the past few weeks with artist Rob Caswell, whose mock covers inspired this whole project. We’ve prepped the cover templates for Simon & Schuster’s art department, and now Dayton and I are collaborating with Rob on the content and design of the cover art for the first two books.

For my own part, I expect to have a first draft of the book one manuscript completed in a couple of weeks and turned in to the editors before Thanksgiving, comfortably ahead of schedule. Then I can help my wife sort out our holiday obligations, and then I’ll get to work on my next Star Trek novel, Section 31: Disavowed, which will be a direct follow-up to A Ceremony of Losses, my just-released installment of The Fall.

Onward and upward, Trek fans!