On the actual Time-Flight page, I have a little rant about how, with this novelisation, Target switched to publishing the hardbacks several months ahead of the paperback. That felt to me like a transparent cash-grab.
There is, however, another shift wrought by Time-Flight, though one that doesn't actually arrive until April's paperback release. As The Target Book explains:
The first book to be numbered was actually Time-Flight, which was number 74. However the number did not appear on the first edition of the title and was included on the second printing later in 1983. Earlier published titles were simply listed alphabetically and then numbered from 1 to 73, these numbers appearing on reprint editions from 1983 onwards.
David J Howe, The Target Book; pp.79-80
It's tempting to think this was another move aimed at the eager fan-market they hoped couldn't wait three months for a cheaper paperback - stick some numbers on the spine, make it a collectors' range, ensure the people who were buying bought every single novelisation. Trouble is, as Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial points out: 'the hardbacks don't feature the numbers anyway' (ed. Paul MC Smith, Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial; p.184). Any readers who couldn't wait for the paperback release wasn't going to get a numbered collection of novelisations anyway. Maybe they hoped they could get them to buy both?
According to The Target Book, the numbering was the brainchild of W H Allen Managing Director and Chairman Bob Tanner and his reason was a surprise at least to me:
'It came to me one day', he explained, 'that with the Mills and Boon titles, people don't ask in the shops for the books by title, they ask for book number 36 or whatever. So I thought that if we numbered the Doctor Who books, the same thing would happen. It was my idea, I'm afraid.'
David J Howe, The Target Book; p.80
Now, I'm a fan who'll semi-regularly play Sporcle games where I have to fill in the title of every Doctor Who ever, sometimes even including the Hartnell episodes, so maybe it's just me who can't imagine Doctor Who fans asking for novelisations by number, but Jean-Marc Lofficier's Programme Guide got its first edition in 1981 (and there'd been earlier quite well-known lists of stories published earlier than that) so I don't think I'm quite alone.
If the new hardback-first release schedule was aimed at fleecing the overenthusiastic (and, understandably, there's no actual statement to that effect anywhere so that might never have been the case anyway), then that suggests Target imagined a separation between the markets for the hardbacks and the paperbacks: the hardbacks were aimed at a fan market that desired the latest novelisation as soon as possible and were willing to pay a premium not to wait; the paperbacks were aimed at a market so casual that they just wanted an easy way to check they weren't double-dipping.
Tanner's 'It was my idea, I'm afraid' suggests things might not have played out exactly as he'd expected, but I find it a nice reminder that, to the fan eye, Who titles probably are as indistinct and easily-confused as Mills and Boon titles - not everyone knows their 'Seeds of Death' from their 'Seeds of Doom' and not everyone's internalised a system that lets them remember whether a story's concerned with the Daleks' destiny, resurrection or remembrance. All that said, clarity of title is one of the very few problems Time-Flight doesn't have...
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