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After FASA had published the first twelve BattleTech novels in-house, Roc books, an imprint of New American Library, took over publication of the ongoing novel line, later adding the MechWarrior and MechWarrior: Dark Age novel lines which are also set in the BattleTech universe. As part of the novel line, they reprinted all but one of the novels that FASA had previously published.
New American Library[edit]
New American Library (NAL) began publishing paperbacks in the 1940s. After Allan Lane began his Penguin imprint in the UK in 1935, he launched an American branch, Penguin Books, Inc. (PBI), in 1945, hiring Kurt Enoch and Victor Weybright to manage the American division.
In 1948, Enoch and Weybright branched off from Penguin to establish their New American Library of World Literature, Inc. Weybright headed the company as Chairman and Editor-in-Chief (1945-1947), while Enoch served as President and Chief Executive Officer (1945-1947).
With its two leading imprints, Signet and Mentor, NAL authors included Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Ian Fleming, James Jones, D.H. Lawrence, Mickey Spillane and John Steinbeck. The company quickly built a huge readership for inexpensive popular fiction, circulating over three million copies of James Jones's From Here to Eternity in its first year of publication.
Ownership has changed several times. The Times Mirror Company of Los Angeles bought NAL in 1960. Odyssey Partners and Ira J. Hechler purchased NAL from Times Mirror for more than $50 million in 1983. In 1987, NAL was acquired by the Penguin Publishing Company, its original parent company. Today, the NAL imprints - Signet, Onyx, Signet Classics and Roc - publish over 400 titles each year.
BattleTech publishers[edit]
From 1991 to 2002, Roc Books published altogether 57 titles in the classic BattleTech line (including one omnibus edition of their Legend of the Jade Phoenix trilogy and reprints of 11 of the 12 FASA novels; The Sword and the Dagger has rights issues precluding a reprint) and 6 in the spinoff MechWarrior line, plus one crossover novel (No Limits) that was not considered part of the BattleTech novel line.
According to author Michael Stackpole, sales eventually plateaued and Roc would dictate book lengths to authors to save on page count and thereby production costs, which was seen as frustrating for the authors and detrimental to the fiction. After 2002, Roc voiced no interest in continuing the classic BattleTech novel line beyond Endgame even though Shadows of Faith, the next spine novel that was supposed to usher in the Jihad era, was already being written. They did, however, launch a new novel line to go with the new MechWarrior: Dark Age game that was set some 70 years in the setting's future after where Endgame had left off. From 2002 to 2008, Roc published 30 titles in that line before stopping to publish BattleTech fiction altogether.
Although short stories and even whole novels were being published electronically through BattleCorps since 2004, and a number of print anthologies was published by BattleCorps' parent company Catalyst Game Labs after the shuttering of the novel line, it was not until 2015 that another proper BattleTech novel (Embers of War) was published in print.
See also[edit]
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