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.
Fascinating stuff. I mean, the more I know about this industry, the better I feel. At least there will be *math* behind my book not showing up on the new release table. This time around. :-D
I decided to change my process for getting queries as I prepared for heading from 2022 into 2023. And here's an updated/revised version of my earlier blog post about querying. THE GUIDELINES: 1. If you don’t follow the guidelines, your query will be deleted, unread and without a response. 2. I'm now using Query Manager, a system that's generally been proven helpful to both agents and authors, and all queries should be submitted via https://querymanager.com/JoshuaBilmes. 3. Once upon a time, I asked only for the query letter, but it's been a long time since queries were sent in #10 business envelopes with an SASE. At this point, I'm not longer accepting paper queries, and I'm asking you to send ten sample pages with your Query Manager query. This will help speed things along, since I can more easily give a "yes" or "no" on borderline queries where the pages themselves are serving as tie-breaker, and I'm less likely to ask for a full m...
2:22 AM Oppenheimer. And I am going to cut out pretty quickly because it almost 2:30 in the morning, and I have to get some sleep, and be at Hachette HQ for my first meeting of London Book Fair week in not much more than eight hours. This winner is deserving enough. I did see it twice. I didn’t like it more the second time, but I liked it well enough. 2:13 AM This was a tough category to predict, but no complaints about Emma Stone who gives a fearless performance that is sui generis in Poor Things. Look at that list of nominees, and this is the toughest category full of brilliant performances. But Emma’s - it’s the sui generis part that makes it worthwhile of winning over the others IMHO. 2:11 AM The whole dessert thing is challenged when I am in a temporary borrowed hotel room. However, Bryce, outside King Cross/St Pancras on Tue-Fri afternoon are some food stalls, and on Friday I went and got some brownies from the stall that has a dozen brownies all of w...
At this point, it's hard to see that Borders isn't on the verge of a bankruptcy filing, the best case scenario would be a Chapter 11 that would reorganize into a much smaller company that might have a go if focusing on stores that actually make money, but even that, I can't be real optimistic because same store sales are dropping so fast that a store which makes money today might not in two years. Though we live in a country that does allow companies to spend lots of time going bankrupt and doing it on multiple occasions, witness the airline industry. So what happened? OK, mid 1980s, Borders is one of the best stores around and starting to spread out in Michigan a little and lend out its inventory system. It's a good system. It lets stock sell down, then reorders. One day you might have 0 copies of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers on the shelf, the next day they'll get 3 in. So everytime you go to Borders, even if it's once a week, you might see a slightly di...
Fascinating stuff. I mean, the more I know about this industry, the better I feel. At least there will be *math* behind my book not showing up on the new release table. This time around. :-D
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