There's been some recent news about an up-coming Star Wars book by Karen Traviss, based on an Amazon.com entry.
Now, it also turns out that there's another Karen writing new Star Wars novels. Eddie van der Heijden, from the Star Wars timeline fansite Once Upon A Galaxy, has found an Amazon listing for an up-coming book by Karen Miller, an Australian author known for her fantasy novels and Stargate tie-ins.
You can see the Amazon page here, but Eddie has gone one better. He's established e-mail contact with Karen Miller, and directly confirmed that she is involved.
Moreover, if you ran a Google search for "Karen Miller" "Star Wars" earlier today, it would have brought up a link to her blog, and a statement confirming that she's writing "2 new Star Wars novels", and stating that they will be "set in the prequel era".
It looks as if that entry has been rapidly removed, though: by the time I got there, there was nothing on the actual website, and now the Google cache has updated too, so even the dead link has gone.
But, while there's no DelRey or Lucas Books confirmation yet, it seems pretty certain that Karen Miller is writing for Star Wars, and her own words indicate that she's working on two Prequel-era novels. The question is: what are they?
Well, these could be the first hints we've seen of the new contract to replace the one with DelRey that expires this year. Or, alternatively, they could be computer-game tie-ins, like the Republic Commando books and Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine. These generally operate on separate contracts from the other novels, so their numbers aren't limited by the primary contract.
It's just speculation on my part, but I wonder if they may be connected to The Clone Wars TV series?
Something else worth noticing is the price-tag: $14 for the Karen Traviss book, $15 for the Karen Miller one, according to Amazon. That doesn't fit either hardbacks or conventional paperbacks, but would be about right for trade paperbacks, large-format softbacks. These are something of a departure for Star Wars, but a format that DelRey seem to be moving into. It's been the way a couple of recent Star Wars novel omnibuses have been presented, for example.
Given that this format has been used for omnibuses, I wonder if the $14 Karen Traviss book listed for May is a trade paperback omnibus of the three Republic Commando novels. It would be well-timed to coincide with the hardcover release of the next book in the series, Order 66.
Of course, the Karen Miller book can't be an omnibus, as she's not written any previous Star Wars novels. It's even possible that the book that Amazon is listing for May, supposedly by Karen Traviss, is actually the first one of the two by Karen Miller. If so, that would strengthen the probability that these are some sort of tie-ins separate from the main novel contract.
But all that's just speculation for now. Kudos to Eddie for finding this... and also thanks to Dunc from fan-site Club Jade for the Amazon link, and to message-boards poster Tam_Elgrin for the "prequel-era" info.