BilmBlog500

So as I've mentioned in my posts this week, I've been taking on new clients very selectively.  And things have been going well enough for most of my long-time clients that I've usually been doing new contracts with current publishers.  I think it's possible that my last major multiple submission was over three years ago when I sent out Adam-Troy Castro 's Emissaries from the Dead . My, but the world has changed a lot since then. Most major publishers have now given staff Sony Readers or other such things to do their reading on.  Pretty much everyone takes submissions electronically.  An entire big multiple submission was done without a single piece of paper.   And I read multiple drafts of the manuscript on my Kindle and the final little tweaks just looking for the track changes on my computer.  Once upon a time, everything was on paper.  In the early years of JABberwocky, I would even do my own deliveries.  It saved an awful lot on postage.  It saved even more beca...

So now I have 2 broken Kindles.  Notice that nice horizontal line across the top of my Kindle when turned off. Everything else works fine.  I can watch the pointer line on the side go up and down when I restart or turn my Kindle on or off.  I can use the USB connection.  But the Kindle is dead. So what does one do? They want $180 to send me a refurbished Kindle, plus shipping. I don't want to send them $180.  I've gone through two of them now in 15 months. I don't want a Sony Reader. I don't like the screen and the glare and the note-taking isn't good and intuitive as I need it to be.  I like the wireless subscriptions on my Kindle.  And the other thing is that all of my problems have been with the screen, and all the screens on all the e-readers use the same basic E Ink technology so I'm not sure I trust any of them right now. I don't want to go back to reading manuscripts on paper. I didn't do anything to the Kindle yesterday.  It was fine in the morni...

I posted yesterday about some of the new things going out to market this week, and I thought I'd give a post geared to people who might have similar hopes for manuscripts on my reading pile, where the eldest manuscripts have been almost six months in repose. Which nags at me no end.  Especially since some of these people are friends, or people we at JABberwocky have been grooming.  Or are ignoring me when I remind them that I don't demand exclusives and are kind of patiently waiting for Joshua Bilmes to read and respond. I'd like it if my life were full of perfect first drafts, but it's not. I'd like it my days were full of time to sit down and read manuscripts.  But they're not.  The work day can push well past 6:00 some nights, and then by the time I have gym time and eat dinner or finish the newspaper it can be 10PM and I'm just not up to tackling reading, and if I was, I wouldn't be receptive to what I was reading anyway.  Even though I've cut wa...

So on Saturday I took on a new client for the first time this year, an author named Myke Cole , here depicted doing the official photo op exchange of signed representation agreements for LATENT. When I started my own literary agency in 1994, I could afford to take on things that were OK that I might be able to sell because I had a lot of time on my hands and had to do something with it.  As the years progressed, the bad news was that I got choosier and choosier about what I might agree to represent, the good news that my track record for actually selling the things I took on increased quite a bit.  So needless to say, I am taking on Myke's Latent because I like it quite, quite a bit.  It's a mix of military sf and fantasy that's different from pretty much anything else but very accessible to just about any sf/fantasy fan.  Joshua proposes and editor disposes, and time will tell how many publishers will come to share my enthusiasm. A few things worth mentioning about the pro...

So I get mail today from Time Warner Cable telling me about the wonderful new Navigator program they will be rolling out for my set-top box. Of course this means basic things I used to do easily are no longer doable. Previously, I could have the clock on the box turn off when the box was offer, and have the channel # show on the box when I am tuning.  Now, I can either have the display off all the time whether the box is on or off, or I can have the clock on or off but now show the channel when I tune, or have the channel show when I tune but only if I want to have the clock on all the time. And then there's the VCR timer.  It used to be I could go to one place, tell the box to turn on to channel 28 at a particular time and record a program once, daily, weekly, etc., and then turn off.  Now, I have to set a Power On timer to start programming, but then have to go to a separate place if I want to set a Power Off timer.  So it will take me twice as long to set up my recordings.  Of c...

(500) Days of Summer.  Seen Sunday morning/afternoon at the AMC Empire 25, Auditorium #6.  3 slithy toads. Public Enemies.  Seen Sunday afternoon at the AMC Loews 34th St. 14, Auditorium #14.  2 slithy toads. Humpday.  Seen Sunday afternoon/evening at the City Cinemas Angelika Film Center, Auditorium #2.  2 slithy toads. (500) Days of Summer is a wonderful romantic comedy.  It made it to #13 at the box office while playing on only 27 screens, and if there's any justice it will prove one of the sleeper hits of the summer. It's good on so many levels, smartly scripted, well-acted, well-directed, referential and reverential, fun both to look at and listen to. Smart.  At the most basic level, there's credit to be given because (as with the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Definitely, Maybe) it's a romantic comedy without all of the cliches of same, but still entirely satisfying.  Rather than having some last minute race to the airport, the movie takes time out to reference Bergman...

The New York Times around a week ago put up this wonderful 31-year-old image from Chester Higgins, Jr. as part of a post on their baseball blog  (which also ran in the printed paper) setting up a contest for entries in the Banner Day that is no more, winners of which can be found here . It's a real trip down memory lane for me which I had to comment on. Banner Day was a uniquely Mets promotion.  Between days of a doubleheader, fans could parade their banner on the field to be judged by a distinguished jury which might include some obscure person with a Mets connection, a radio host for a show I never listened to, and maybe an actual celebrity or half celebrity. It was a wonderful day which exists no longer. For one, it was a doubleheader.  The Mets continued to schedule a Banner Day doubleheader well into the 1980s at a time when doubleheaders were no longer scheduled.  While it was once quite common for teams to play two, it fell out of favor for many reasons.  Attendance grew an...

It was announced on Monday that Charles N. Brown, the founder and publisher of Locus, the newspaper of the science fiction field, passed away at the age of 72. The sf fan geek side of me is in very deep mourning. I first remember encountering Locus at a bookstore, maybe an sf specialty bookstore, in Ithaca.  This would have been at some point during my eldest brother's years at Cornell, and maybe with the magazine's first color cover?  Though that might have been some Voyager cover in the very late 1970s, which I think might be too late?  In any case, it was a kind of really special thing for a budding young science fiction fan to discover a magazine devoted entirely to talking about the business of science fiction publishing.  It was a thrilling experience to lay down money and become part of that community.  If Charles N. Brown didn't invent Locus, someone else would certainly have had to. As is often the case, when you start to do something for a living, some of the joy ...

So I was noticing today at the local Pathmark that all of the Entenmann's cakes are now in a square box instead of a rectangular one.  But I just can't for the life of me say for certain if this is because they've just decided to make the cakes square for some reason while providing the same amount of cake, or because it seemed like a nice way to hide one of those stealth price increases.  The current Marshmallow Iced Devils Food Cake has 510 grams of cake, 8 260 gram servings, 260 calories each, and that looked to be the same for the Black and White Cake, the Fudge Iced, etc.  So if anyone out there has a 2 or 3 month old Entenmann's cake in their freezer in the "classic" rectangular box, can we get to the bottom of this? And then moving from the squares and rectangles to the circles, orbs, spheres, ellipses and similar such things, there is more news on the Tim Hortons front. As described here and elsewhere, the Riese Organization, a longtime purveyor of in...

Moon, Seen Sunday Afternoon June 21, 2009 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Sq., Aud. #6 (Capitol).  2.5 slithy toads. The Hurt Locker, Seen Sunday Afternoon June 28, 2009 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Sq., Aud. #5 (Valencia), 3.5 slithy toads Moon is a science fiction movie for people who've never seen a science fiction movie (if you are in that category, add half or whole toad) by somebody who's seen either too many or too few.  Its best feature is an excellent performance by Sam Rockwell, an actor with a very long and very varied filmography from Ninja Turtles to Galaxy Quest to Frost Nixon.  He plays a worker on a lunar industrial basis, where he's alone save for the companionship of a HAL-like robot named Gertie, voiced by Kevin Spacey.  His job is to keep an eye on things and occasionally go out, retrieve full containers of mined moon rock, and send them on their way to Earth.  His direct contact with Earth is limited to the occasional exchanged video message. It's hard to disc...

Another agent has a guest post from a major account sales assistant at a major publishing house that talks about how books are sold to the major accounts, and promotions allocated.  It's interesting.  You can check it out here .

So I spoke a week or so ago about Citi Field , now it's time to dish dirt on the new Yankee Stadium, which I attended for a Mariners/Yankees game on July 1. As with the new Mets ballpark, it's very disappointing to see that the subway hasn't gotten much investment.  No handicapped access to the new park.  The main post-game entrance to the #4 train is still a block away by the old Yankee Stadium, though the front-of-train crowding is a little reduced because there are some mid-platform entrances that are along the way from some of the gates in the new stadium that take up some of the pressure.  And the entrances to the C/D trains are all still best accessed from across the street without much improvement.  However, there is a new Metro North stop a 5 or 15 minute walk depending from the new stadium that offers direct daily access to the Hudson Line and on weekends to the Harlem and New Haven line as well, and that makes getting to the park much much much more convenient for...

There were two trends in evidence at Book Expo that I'm not fond of. One is the switch to the electronic catalog, which was exemplified by HarperCollins, and which I started to see with some UK publishers at London Book Fair in April. In some ways, the paper catalog is a relic of a past age, and I can admit that.  It's fixed.  The London catalog for JABberwocky will always be out of date by the time I actually get to London and start handing it out.  An electronic catalog can be updated regularly.  It's very expensive to mail.  Postage goes up every year, and my catalog gets bigger every year.  With the percent of sales coming from major accounts as big as it is, you spend that ever-increasing sum of money to attract orders from a smaller pool. So yes, if I can cut back on the number I mail overseas after the Fair because more of my sub-agents are comfortable sending a PDF to more of the publishers they work with in a world of translation markets, that makes me happy.  Why,...

I did promise some more posts about Book Expo America... One of the most important questions of all is whether BEA has a future. BEA was once known as ABA, and was the official annual show for American Booksellers Association.  The Book Expo America thing was intended to broaden the event.  It still has ABA involvement but is run by the same Reed Exhibitions people that do London Book Fair and many other non-publishing shows.  It was intended as the big opportunity for booksellers and librarians to connect with publishers, find out about their fall lists specifically, meet authors and one another, place orders, etc. I've never seen BEA as entire essential myself.  In large part because I can probably do 90% of what I'd like to do in a single day, so if it's in NYC and you can go for a day you can go for a day, but it's not something really worth traveling very far to attend.  DC, quick train ride, maybe.  Chicago enh.  LA not.  But the show would move around to these va...