BilmBlog500

I'll do more posting later, but let's just say quickly that the London Book Fair trip was interesting. I made it, we were on some of the last planes to Heathrow that weren't turned around, but we got to go to Paris/Charles De Gaulle instead and when we were able to book Eurostar didn't take advantage of the 7-hour bus ride the airline was offering. And the cloud lifted in time for us to go back to NYC on our originally scheduled flight. But 2/3 of our appointments cancelled because they could not make it to London.

London Book Fair beckons in just a bit, and I can't have less time to do a post from London than I've had the last week to do a post from the US! I spent 48 hours doing intensive touring of bookstores all over the Dallas/Ft. Worth area thanks to the generosity and hospitality of oft-times blog commenter Kyle White, who was my escort for the DFW Writers Conference and really went above and beyond the call. My Borders count is now up over 220! Also a few Whole Foods added to the list. Friday night, Saturday and Sunday to mid-afternoon were devoted to the writer's conference. And since getting back Monday, it's been one of those weeks. The phone line has been busted and Verizon seemed to think waiting until the 19th to fix was just a peachy-keen thing to do. Two billing problems with different people. The photocopier is getting cranky on longer jobs. There's a small drip at the valve for the washing machine. All sorts of little things. But ready or not, in a hal...

If you click along to here you can find a very nice photographic voyage into the Sunday Times of London for 4 April 2010, wherein we find Peter V. Brett's The Desert Spear nicely perched on the hardcover fiction bestseller list. This list is derived from the Nielsen Bookscan UK data, and those numbers at the end of the listing line for each book are the quantity UK Bookscan reports sold during the week and then the total to date. This is a good way to explore the size difference in the US and UK markets. You will notice that the top book on the Sunday Times list sold 17,690. That number of copies would have been good for #3 on the US Bookscan list for the same week. And at 10,425, the UK/Sunday Times of London #2 would have been the US #7. Those numbers are not totally without correlation. But -- and with Charlaine Harris and Peter V. Brett over the past year giving me my first UK bestsellers I've been looking at this lots to see how Charlaine's doing and predict wit...

So I'm listening to the year-end earnings and financing report from Borders. They've paid off a big loan that was due April 1 and gotten a new round of financing thru 2014, so they can at least focus on managing the business a little bit more for a little while instead of managing the debt load. That is very good news. They want to improve the in-store experience. Who doesn't! The average Borders store had 10%+ more inventory this past holiday season than the year before, and to me, that is the most important thing. There are 33 million Borders Reward members, and they want to leverage them more. They want to personalize it more and get it away from a discount-of-the-week mentality. Because nobody shops at Borders.com, this is a significant area of potential growth, and they are going to hire an Executive Vice President level person to run Borders.com. They have high hopes for the Kobo.com e-book web site they are partnering on. They also plan to sell as many as 10 di...

Every year, Publishers Weekly does a year-end sales wrap up for which publishers provide sales information for their top sellers so that PW can give very nice year-end bestseller lists. A few publishers provide the information to be kept in confidence for placing the books on the list, but not to actually be published. Most, the copies reported are given, and that means you can at least tell that this Random House book sold between the 289,382 copies of the book above it and the 258,298 of the book below. This year, the March 22 issue of PW listed all of the little paperbacks over 500K sold, the big ones over 100K, and the hardcovers over 100K. It's worth noting that the numbers aren't 100% accurate because more copies can sell after Dec. 31, and more important more copies can be returned. The earlier in 2009 a book was published, the more accurately reflective of actual sales that PW number is likely to be. Last year, DEAD UNTIL DARK by Charlaine Harris was the first ti...