BilmBlog500

TCM had Titanic on Saturday night, and I watched large chunks of it. It's so much nicer to watch this three hour plus movie when it isn't interrupted with on toward an hour of commercials. So if Avatar wins Best Picture a week from when this post goes live... Well, not only will it be wrong on its own terms, but it will demean Titanic. Which is really everything that Avatar was not. Three hours, but oh, does it move. None of the toe-tapping of Avatar. When I turned to Titanic at around 12:28 AM, I was utterly rapt for the next 40 minutes; couldn't go for the dental floss until the movie was over at 1:32. Serious minded, but with a constant twinkle in its eye. Oh, the bad husband character played by Billy Zane is a bit of an unwanted buffoon, but there's a subtle pleasure to David Warner's performance as the valet that gives compensation. Kathy Bates is a joy, Gloria Stuart is a wonder, the music by James Horner is such a delight. No, the special effects are...

I mentioned here that I had gone to DC to see some theatre, and I'm overdue to talk about what I saw. Why do I go to DC to see theatre when there's so much in New York? Well, it's hard for me to make time for it when I'm home because there's so much else calling on my time, and then when some show I really regret not seeing makes its way to DC, I see it as my little last chance theatre and try and see if I can force myself to take advantage of the opportunity Before It's Too Late. So this trip was a BITL for The Four Of Us, a show about writers and writing that had played off Broadway and of course has some professional relevance. And then I decided to add in a well-reviewed show called In the Red and Brown Water at the Studio Theatre, which is my favorite DC venue, and then added in a second show at the Studio that was just opening called That Face, about which I knew very little, but in for a dime in for a dollar. In the natural way of things I liked most ...

The Damned United is now out on video. I saw this in London during last year's London Book Fair, it had a brief run in the US, not surprising considering the Britishness of it. I liked it quite a bit, and I felt I should give it another quick shout out now that you can buy or queue .

So as I expected when I did my post on the Oscar nominations , Inglorious Basterds did find it back into a movie theatre in New York City, so the studio could show off its wares nicely to the Oscar voters. This is definitely one of the nice things about living in New York, one of the reasons why I live here and not elsewhere. And to my happy surprise, when I got to the Landmark Sunshine on Tuesday night Feb. 23 to see, not only was it there, but it was on the bigger downstairs theatre the Variety Screening Series rents out and not one of the smaller theatres upstairs. So if any of the 20ish people at the 7:15 showing were Oscar voters, the studio was indeed putting its best foot forward. Well, the movie was such a delight on so many levels that I was pretty much kicking myself not to have seen it when it first opened, maybe even on a bigger screen. First and foremost, I now have my rooting interest for Best Supporting Actor. Christoph Waltz is a German actor not much known on thes...

I like the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire very very much. I can still see the feet of the runners pounding along the surf while this wonderful Vangelis music swells up, still remember the day I saw it, driving down with my younger brother to the RKO Stanley Warner Rt. 4 in Paramus, NJ in the upstairs auditorium, and driving back very happily in a light snow. Hearing said music on a TV ad for the forthcoming movie The Bounty Hunter? That is very very strange.

I was in the Posman Books location in Grand Central Terminal last night, and if you wonder why I often don't shed tears for the demise of the beloved independent bookstore... They have two copies of books by Scott Mackay on the shelf, including his book Phytosphere, which is out of print for long enough that we have a reversion of rights. They don't have and never have had a copy of a Lost Fleet book by Jack Campbell. These books are not only in print, but have made the NY Times bestseller list. And there's no sign that they will be getting any copies of the Warbreaker mass market by Brandon Sanderson, or the Warded Man mass market by Peter Brett, as two examples of March releases that I would expect will enjoy strong sales. So they clearly don't have anyone buying the sf and fantasy who knows anything about sf and fantasy. They don't have very good inventory management, because their relatively small sf/f section has plenty of books that just aren't very like...

I keep seeing more and more and more people with e-book readers. Sunday night on the Acela back from DC, last night on the #5 train from Grand Central to Union Square, it's gone from being a special sighting to being a regular occurence. Barnes & Noble spends so much time touting their wondrous results and the immense huge hitted-ness of their Nook on their earnings conference call this week that it wouldn't surprise me if the executives on the call shit in their pants from the excitement of what they were saying. As is the case when Amazon shits in its pants in excitement talking about the Kindle, there are all kinds of buzz words and not a lot of specifics. When they sales sales "exploded" beyond expectations does that mean they were expecting to sell 4 and actually sold 6, or they were shooting for 82,900 and sold 126,800? Their market share on e-books on some books is now above their 18% market share of physical bookstore sales. Which e-books? Bestselle...

Maybe I need to get out of town more. In around 33 hours actually in the Washington DC area over the weekend, I managed to see 3 plays, visit 1 B. Dalton, 4 B&Ns, 4 Borders, chow down at 2 Whole Foods and a Pizzeria Uno, do the Saturday NY Times puzzle, two from Sunday, a regular and a cryptic, read 70% of the new Violette Malan book and get started on Tanya Huff's next. I'll talk more about the plays later, but just a few idle observations. I've sung the praises of Georgetown Cupcake before, no doubt I'll do so again, they're some of the only overpriced cupcakes that at least taste really, really, really good. But what is the world coming to when I pop by their new expanded flagship location in Georgetown and see over 30 people curled around in the store waiting to buy cupcakes. It's just a cupcake. It's not worth waiting, sorry, no possible way unless it's your child's bar mitzvah and the caterer's truck with the viennese table pastries...

For whatever reason, the Dupont Circle (Washington DC) Books a Million has a rare-to-find in stores copy of the first edition hardcover of SHAKESPEARE'S TROLLOP by Charlaine Harris. I you're in the DC area, why not buy if you like Charlaine? There are some used copies on sale on Amazon for less than what Books a Million will charge, but you don't get to look at the book before you buy it.

One other thing about my trip to Boston. In his review of Edge of Darkness , Boston-born NY Times critic A.O. Scott thinks the Boston accents were overdone. Well, maybe Tony Scott needs to go back to his old home-town. The accents in the real Boston are every bit as abundant as they are in the movie. There are no Boston accents to be found in The Last Station. I saw this at the Landmark Kendall Square, Aud. #1, a movie theatre which clearly has no desire to be found. It's around two-thirds of a mile from the Kendall stop on the Red Line. The newspaper ads give its location as 1 Kendall Square, but 1 Kendall Square turns out to be a complex with Building 200 and 300 and 400 and 800 and 1400, and the movie theatre is kind of way in the back hidden away in a dark dusty corner. Not a bad place to see a movie, kind of '80s sloped-floor multiplex but the rake is OK, and the screens are at least decent even in the smaller theatres. I'm talking about the theatre because I...

Or as Maxwell Smart would say "would you believe 7?" I'm taking a quick +1 week Bookscan peek at the Macmillan titles that would have been hurt the week before from the Battle of the Buy Button on Amazon, and what we're seeing is a lot of healthy ticks upward. Warbreaker up 15%, the Mistborn boxed set, the Wheel of Time boxed set, the Terry Goodkind boxed sets, all up by 25% or more. The Gathering Storm up 16%. Michael Schiefelbein's Vampire Maker up a good chunk, The Cole Protocol up 7% mass market and 15% trade. So we know that sales were lost on these books a week ago, it's hard to know how many were just delayed into this week, how many went to other channels, how many lost for good. I do know that I worry a little about things that are just a transient blip, and a lot more about the decline in sales after the September 2008 economic plunge in the US where you didn't see a bounce back up. It's clear that publishers and retailers can play their ...

In many ways, Boston is where it all began for me. February 1979, my parents and my younger brother are staying at the Sheraton Boston the same weekend as Boskone, we're allowed into the dealer's room even though we don't have a membership, somebody's pimping free samples of Omni Magazine, before you know it I'm reading stories by Orson Scott Card and George R. R. Martin, getting hooked on the stuff, and some 31 years later I'm one of the leading literary agents for sf/fantasy. There's also the six weeks I spent at Harvard in the summer of 1981 overshooting my allowance on movies, comic books and fantasy and sf novels. So whenever I go to an sf-y something in Boston, it always has a nice extra bit of resonance for me. With not too much lead time, I decided to take a break from NYC and head up to Boskone this year. So what's up in Beantown? Since my last visit a few years ago, the good news is that Pandemonium Books in Cambridge survived a scare a f...

I really liked today's Lio .

Edge of Darkness, seen Tuesday evening Feb. 9 2010 at the AMC Loews W. 34th St., aud. #4, was a pleasant surprise. It's one of those films that could, from the credits, go either way. Do you encounter the director Martin Campbell who did Vertical Limit, or the one who did Casino Royale? Mel Gibson? Is that the Lethal Weapon guy, the Lethal Weapon 4 guy, the Mrs. Soffel guy? It turns out to be a movie co-written by William Monahan, whose screenplay for The Departed was an excellent adaptation of the very good Korean movie Infernal Affairs. It turns out to be a movie edited by Stuart Baird. Now, who pays attention to who edited a movie? But Stuart Baird is the long-time go-to guy for Richard Donner, starting with The Omen and Superman, and with Mel Gibson dating back to Lethal Weapon, Maverick, one of those editors who works with people forever the way Thelma Schoonmaker has edited Martin Scorcese since forever or Michael Kahn has edited Spielberg for over 30 years dating bac...

One of my blog readers sent an e-mail to ask why we don't accept electronic queries at JABberwocky, which is actually a pretty good question that seemed worth answering. Part of it -- the most important part for me -- is just the generation I'm from. I spent many years reading queries on pieces of paper, and I'm still very comfortable doing it that way. There are a lot of things that can be determined about the quality of a query just by looking at that piece of paper. First and foremost, is the query letter one page or two? It's much harder to get that sense from looking at an e-mail query, and I still think this is one of the most important tests. Even for a one-page letter, I can take that out of an envelope and see before I even start reading if there's a good balance of information about both the author and the manuscript, or if the bulk of the letter is an over-long description of the book. There are words of that letter that jump off the printed page -- ...

Ian Randall Strock, the high poobah of the excellent SF news site SFScope , which anyone interested in the genre should bookmark or RSS, gives us all something else to be depressed about. As he points out here , the e-book age makes record-keeping and auditing a little more challenging. We don't as yet have a tracking system for e-books like Nielsen Bookscan does for printed books. And with printed books, the publisher and maybe its distributor are responsible pretty much on their own for shipping books and processing when they come back, and these things can be tracked and checked in different ways if the need arises. But for e-book sales, the publishers are almost entirely dependent on third parties, who can decide to play games in their reports to the publisher. And if the author goes to check on the publisher, that third party piece of paper is the only thing to look at. Hmmmm. Can we force the publisher to audit an e-book retailer if we think the retailer is playing gam...

So what did it mean to have Amazon's "buy" buttons removed for certain Macmillan titles? I could do a really thorough Nielsen Bookscan research project and check 62 things, but I do have a day job so I'm limiting the investigation to books by my clients which I'd be checking anyway, though drilling down a little further into the numbers than I might do for just my ordinary Wednesday report card check. When we looked over the Bookscan #s for Week #4 ending January 31, all of us at JABberwocky cried, because it was a kind of depressing week all the way around. Numbers on most things were down. And that had really nothing to do with the Macmillan/Amazon dispute. That started at the very end of the week, and since Bookscan gets the figures based on when books shipped, pretty much the entire effect of the disput would be seen in Week #5. And overall, Week #5 was a stronger week for the JABberwocky list than week #4 was. So for the week when the full impact would h...

There's supposedly some kind of big game today. I'm guessing it's a hockey game, cuz it's winter time. Is there a ball game of some sort today? ------------------------------------------------------------ Male fantasy writers represented by JABberwocky Twitter about the Super Bowl. Can you guess which Tweet goes with which writer?

In the past six months, we've had three movies full of debris-ridden interstates, broken pavement, downed bridges, overturned shopping carts as symbol of dead nomadic humans. The first of those was Zombieland (seen in October 2009 at the Regal/UA Kaufman Astoria 14), which arrived during my blogging interregnum, and which I consider to be a thoroughgoing delight. If it wasn't written with its two leads in mind, it was certainly impeccaby cast with two actors who took full advantage of every opportunity the script had to give them. Woody Harrelson has had a very strong year ranging from his excellent deadpan laconic zombie killer here to the equally laconic but totally different soldier he plays in The Messenger . I'm not sure Jesse Eisenberg is yet capable of bringing life to an inert script; he certainly doesn'tmake Adventureland sing. But this young actor wasn't even 20 when he made Roger Dodger sing, barely old enough to drink when he delivered a performa...

A few quick idle links on the whole e-book thing... Timothy Egan is an excellent writer who worked for the NY Times for many many years as a reporter and now does an on-line opinion column for the Times. If I had more time for pleasure reading I'd love to read one of his books, but I settle for now to read his column for gems like this on the iPad: "it's a big iPhone, allowing people to carry all their movies, tunes, books, magazines, newspapers and the Web itself in something that still won't fit into a coat pocket, and will not withstand beach sand." Well, for the record, a Kindle could fit in some sufficiently big pockets if it wasn't covered, like the ones on my cargo pants. But please do read his whole column here . My client Peter Brett has an interesting back-and-forth with a reader who's wondering how the e-book wars fit into the reader's own book-buying habits. It's a good question, and a good answer, and you'll find it here . The...

Regular blog-reader Maria made some good comments on my last post. Why don't publishers sell their own e-books directly? I haven't the foggiest idea, because it seems to me that this is something that should have been happening ages ago. One reason could be brush-back. Whenever publishers have gotten too aggresive about selling hard copies off of their own web sites, the established retail channels haven't been happy about it. In the dawn of the e-book age, before the Kindle, it might have been easier for the publishers to stake that turf for themselves. Now, for that same brush-back reason, it might be harder. This also depends on if the market leaders for e-books are the Kindle and the Nook, where they have to worry about people also vending print books, or if they're annoying retailers who can only hurt the publishers on the e-book side. Why are some books in series missing? Part of it is that publishers did not sit down ten years ago and start working in a pr...

As publishers had to establish royalty rates for e-book sales over the past ten or fifteen years, two basic models emerged, at least with agented contracts: 15% of cover price (because 15% matches the highest hardcover print royalty in traditional publishing contracts), or 25% of net receipts, which is the actual money the publisher receives, and a bigger portion of net proceeds than found for any actual print edition. In an indirect way, a client and I were discussing this week which of those royalty rates is better. Complete with very thorough spread sheets. Let us explore... Let us assume a $10 cover price; a $13 cover price changes the numbers but not the percentages, which are more intuitive with a $10 starting point. First we have the Kindle Classic model. A publisher says the e-book has a list price of $25, Amazon pays the publisher kind of like it's buying a hardcover at traditional retail discount, maybe $12.50, and then sells the book for $9.99. 25% of net could be ...

I'd linked a while back to a PW report that Simon & Schuster was downsizing its sales force. Now PW reports that the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, the regional group of indie booksellers, sent a stern letter of protest. The field reps are a crucial part of the book business, and without them our book culture will disappear. Well, good luck with that. It isn't that NAIBA isn't right to protest, for I believe that they are. Publishers as a rule under-invest in selling books, this move by S&S the latest little piece of it. It's just that solutions NAIBA offers aren't very helpful either. Among their alternate suggestions: Eliminate multiple ARC mailings. If this means NAIBA thinks publishers can consolidate and do fewer mailings with the same number of ARCs, good. But if they mean sending out fewer ARCs of fewer books, these are the same people who happily fill bags with galleys at BEA, and we send galley copies to get people readin...

I suspect I'll be pulling hard for The Hurt Locker at the Academy Awards this year. There are two films with a lot of nominations that I haven't seen. Inglorious Basterds is one I was kind of lukewarm about seeing, kind of leaned toward seeing, but as busy as things were most of last year, I wasn't making time for the lukewarm. There's a decent chance the studio will find a theatre in NYC for a movie with this many nominations, and I'll see if there or on video. Precious, from its Sundance reception a year ago I was rapturous to see it but the more I read about it the more "enh"-y I got about actually going to it. There's a good chance I'll cowboy up and do my duty. I will not see A Serious Man, but I do recommend A Single Man. The Last Station, I probably can see. If I catch the three of those four films that I'm willing to see, I'll have caught the lion's share of the nominees in all of the various categories. Big picture, the ...

On the lighter side from some other recent posts... we've all heard of the dreaded pulled hamstring and other pulled muscles, and now The Onion has its laugh-out-loud take on this subject. I wish I'd thought of this one, and I don't think you'll read another article about sports injury in the same way ever again.

For all the sturm and drung over Amazon's battle with Macmillan... Amazon has been paying most publishers for e-book content based on the publisher's list price for said content, while charging a price chosen by Amazon. If Macmillan sets the list price to match the print edition, and Amazon pays a 30% royalty, we might have a $25 list price, and Amazon pays the publisher $7.50 out of $9.99 Amazon Kindle price. That leaves $2.49 for Amazon to enjoy. And if Amazon is paying the biggest content providers a bigger royalty, maybe not even $2.49. Macmillan now establishes a $14.99 list price, and Amazon gets to keep 30% of that as Macmillan's agent for this sale. Suddenly, Amazon goes from getting $2.49 or less to getting $4.50. Places, everyone? Are you ready for your close-ups?? Lights, camera, action, and then a few days later "Cut!" Maybe from a very long term perspective Amazon would still prefer to sell the e-book for $9.99 so there's a bigger gap bet...

So, the iPad! While I type in one window, I'm watching the keynote speech on the Apple web site. Though I used the Kindle for over a year, I'm not the hugest fan of it. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do before, and I loved it for that. But it didn't allow me to do many of them very well. I could read a manuscript without carrying it around but not in cold weather and take notes on the same device but not easily and the relay to the author was cumbersome. I could read the Washington Post every day without schlepping into Manhattan to buy a hard copy, but the reading experience wasn't very good. I liked the Sony Reader less, because the note-taking interface was cumbersome and the glare on the screen distracting to me. And the Nook was surprisingly bad to me for how much learning curve should have been curved. I've never been a big laptop fan. They're portable, but not fun. When I live-blogged the Oscars last year, I had to sit at a desk inste...