A: Franchise fiction is more commonly known as licensed fiction or "tie-ins" - you come up with the creative stuff, but the copyright remains with the owner of the franchise. Stories where the universe is yours are known as creator-owned or own-copyright; I refuse to use the term "original" fiction, because much "original" fiction is far from original, and much franchise fiction is more original than creator-owned stuff. The difference is, crudely put, who stands to make the big bucks from it. It's about ownership of copyright, and not much else. Oh, and as I write both creator-owned critically acclaimed stuff and tie-ins, I hold the professional/moral high ground, and so can say that any writer or lit professor who dismisses franchise fiction as requiring less creativity is a bit of a twonk, and doesn't actually fully understand the craft of writing. Creatively, it's much harder.

Anyway, every week, I get mail from Star Wars fans who want to write Star Wars books professionally. Some have even finished novels and want to know how they go about submitting them to publishers.

If you've already written a SW novel without being asked, and you want to get it published, I'm afraid it'll never see the light of day except as fanfic. There's no point writing a SW novel if you haven't been contracted to do one -  Lucasfilm and Del Rey don’t accept any unsolicited manuscripts. It's all commissioned work. They decide what they want, and then ask a writer if he/ she wants to do it. They won’t even look at anything sent in that they haven't asked for (including ideas) for legal reasons. If you're offered a SW book contract, sometimes you get free rein to do pretty well what you want within very broad parameters they give you (like the Republic Commando books) and sometimes you get something like a movie novelisation where the story has - obviously - already been decided. It can also be anywhere in between. But, by and large with tie-ins, the owner of the franchise picks the broad subject area, and you come up with the story, or they indicate roughly what they're looking for and you submit ideas for them to choose from. That's true for most if not all major franchises.

The only way to get asked to the SW party is to be an established writer to start with, by which I mean you need to have your own books published and in the bookstores, and by a commercial publisher, not self-published or POD. The powers that be only approach professional writers because pros have demonstrated they can produce material to a certain market standard and understand the disciplines and deadlines of the job. There is also a group of specialist tie-in writers already out there, too, writing across a wide spectrum of genres - it requires a certain mindset that not all professional authors can manage, and it requires speed. You won't get years to write a book. In many franchises, it's weeks.

How did I get into tie-ins? Because Del Rey approached me out of the blue on the basis of my first novel, City of Pearl. I didn't know anything about SW and I wasn't a fan. I didn't even know what a tie-in was, to be frank, but I knew how to write a novel, and they could see that because I'd just sold a series to a major publisher. So the best advice I can give a would-be SW writer is not to write SW but to concentrate on creator-owned fiction and get a name for that, and then Lucasfilm / Del Rey might approach them. All the franchise work I've done has come up that way; editors call me because they know what they're getting. They've seen what I can do and what my strengths are, and they know I can do it very fast, too.

It's always hard to say this to SW fans who want desperately to write SW books, but being a fan of a franchise is not always the best qualification for writing it. Fans think that because they love a particular franchise and think they know a lot about it, then that'll automatically mean they can write good books. Alas, that's not the case, because a successful book is about the depth of the characterisation and the way it's written - not the plot, the subject matter, the continuity detail, or even a love of the universe concerned. It may even make it harder to write, because a fannish writer might not be happy to let go of favourite ideas and characters when they're told to, and they might write material that only means something to serious fans, not to the vast majority of casual readers on whom the industry depends.

In fact, if you write a franchise book that requires the reader to have some knowledge of the universe before they can understand or enjoy it, you've failed at your task, with a cap F. Books - all books, actually - have to stand on their own and be accessible, without needing "qualified" readers or accompanying handbooks. (Science fiction generally is notorious for alienating the general reader or viewer with its barriers of insider-understood tropes, but - thank God - we have BSG showing us that it doesn't have to be that way. Science fiction is purely the setting for human drama, as a great many people have said. .) My benchmark is that anyone should be able to pick up one of my tie-ins and get into it, even if they know nothing about the franchise. I do that by making the characters come alive, not by making the stage they're on too esoteric.

If you want to make a full-time living at writing - only 2% of writers do, by the way - then being so focused on SW or another franchise that you love is not the way to do it. You'll need to have a much wider scope than that, and unless you're exceptionally lucky with your own-copyright fiction, you'll have to do other tie-in work, and you have to approach that with the same passion that you would SW. That's the hard bit. Few professional writers can do it, which is why there's a core of specialists who can turn their hand to any universe. We have a way of finding something in any franchise that can generate enough enthusiasm in us to get the book done. Liking the subject matter to start with is not required. In fact, I've found that the less I know about a franchise to start with, the better the job I make of it.

It's the difference between a hobby - fanfic - and a job. If all you want to write is SW, or Trek, or BSG, then chances are you won't make it professionally anyway. You've got to have more stories than that inside you waiting to be told. If you don't feel equally passionate - or at least enthusiastic - about writing a wide range of stories outside your particular favourite universe, then you won't write well, and that means you won't get a crack at the stuff you want to do anyway.

©Karen Traviss 2008