BilmBlog500

So sneaking out the news on a Sunday night, Borders put out an official press release to say it's not paying publishers for January, and now starting to skip rent payments as well. This follows a press release last week to say that they had a contingency-riddled commitment to new financing. It's going from sad to worse. Borders is so poorly managed right now that it can't even go bankrupt right. As I mentioned on New Year's Eve day, you have to pay your landlord before you pay anyone else, because your landlord is the one person who can change the locks and keep you from accessing your inventory. And if things are so bad you aren't paying your landlord, then you should have just gone into Chapter 11 long before, but as I suggest here that poses ego issues and money issues to some very rich people who've made some bad bets on Borders. Because of those rich person egos, Borders has engaged in a long drawn-out process that has pissed off employees, publish...

Even though Barnes & Noble likes to brag about how wonderfully they're doing, the cost-cutting bug hasn't skipped over. Here Publishers Weekly discusses the impact on small presses of B&N's recent layoff of some four dozen staffers, including several long-time buyers and merchandisers which include the company's director of small press and vendor relationships. Holding to the truism that companies don't like to mayke announcements of bad news, there is no B&N release on the layoffs, their latest is to wax enthusiastic about periodical sales for the Nook. The news from Borders is that publishers are supposed to indicate next week if they will trade their accounts receivable for a promissory note. And there were more layoffs at HQ. They raised some cash by selling their Day by Day calendar kiosk business to Calendar Club. Can't be much, though, because the kiosks are a seasonal business, and the business can't be much more than selling the r...

I'm starting to feel like one of those people who needs to check the obituaries first thing each morning. Susannah York. She played Lara, Superman's Kryptonian mother (Marlon Brandon's wife) in Superman: The Movie, which is one ofd my favorite movies of all time. She was also in Images, which is one of the more interesting efforts by Robert Altman. The prof who taught my intro film survey in college was a big Altman fan, and in this film she played a possibly crazy housewife maybe or maybe not seeing images of men maybe or maybe not threatening her. It's a weird movie, hard to follow. Blessed with stunning musical score by John Williams and beautiful photography by Vilmos Zsigmond. And then a few days before that, Peter Yates. When I finally caught up with Bullitt, with its famous San Francisco chase scene, a few years ago, I wasn't impressed. I thought the movie was on the long and slow side and a little implausible. There's that chase scene, but there...

I found my way to an Atlantic blog post by Peter Osnos, the person who founded Public Affairs Books, which is now part of Perseus, with his take on why Borders has declined so. It overlaps with but is somewhat different from my own . You can read his here . According to Jim Milliot in this week's Publishers Weekly, Borders accounted for 8.5% of dollars spent on books in the third quarter, which was just under half the dollar share for B&N, and still for most people their third largest account. So you can understand the dilemma, that everyone wants Borders to keep going but at the same time it's hard to know what the good path forward is. A quick update on the JABberwocky e-book efforts. We love Amazon more and more with each passing day because they made it so easy for us to go up with titles for Kindle. We will soon be up at Kobo, waiting to get a countersigned contract back. They were very nice, because we were actually able to negotiate a couple of points in the c...

I'm just not a Coen Brothers fan. Haven't been a big Coen Brothers fan for some 25 years now, their first overrated movie was their very first Blood Simple, which I saw and didn't think was all that great at the old State Theatre in Ann Arbor during my college days. For trivia buffs, the State is just a few doors down from the original Borders location, and they still show movies in the two theatres that were twinned out of the old balcony, the street level is retail. Now, True Grit is better than a lot of other movies, let's be sure to say that. Not without its virtues. But like even the best Coen Brothers movies, I just don't think it's as good as everyone's running around saying it is. Most of you probably know what it's about, but since I can summarize it quickly enough... 14-year old hires a US Marshall to find the man who shot down her father, and she accompanies him on the journey. So one of the virtues in chief here is that of Hailee Stei...

Here's a blog post on Edward Champion's blog that was re-tweeted by Tobias Buckell last night, regarding event cancellations at Borders. This isn't exactly news, who's going to rush to send 200 copies to a bookstore for an event when the bookstore has already announced you won't be paid. Here's a link to a NY Times Media Decoder blog post with a few small items, that Borders suggested publishers obtain joint legal counsel to represent in discussions over their bills, and that some publishers weren't thrilled with the turnaround plan being discussed at this week's meetings. Again, not entirely news. I want to remember the Borders that was. It was 1981 or 1982 that I first stepped into the original and then only Borders on State Street in Ann Arbor. My memory says it had to have been '81, but the first book I purchased at Borders was The Exiles Trilogy by Ben Bova which did not come out until '82, maybe we went there in '81 but I didn...

According to this article on publishersweekly.com there is a bank willing to refinance Borders debt but with several strings attached, and one of those strings is for publishers to accept a note or bond for their delayed payments. The only problem with this is, it may not be legal or kosher for the publishers to agree to this outside of having a court force it upon them, because it's then selling books to Borders on terms way different than the established discount schedule and terms of sale. Quoting from a B&N statement on the subject: "We think the playing field should be even. We expect publishers to offer same terms to all other booksellers, including Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers. We fully expect publisher’s will require Borders to pay their bills on the same basis upon which all other booksellers pay theirs. Any changes in publishers terms should be made available to all." And who can blame them. I'd sue, if I were some other bookstor...

Rabbit Hole is based on the 2007 play of the same name by David Lindsay-Abaire which I managed to miss both in NYC and in DC. It's a very well-acted but not entirely convincing domestic drama about a couple trying to deal with the death of their 4-year old son eight months before, the couple played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart and her mother played by Dianne Wiest. It's hard in some ways to judge a movie with subject matter like this. Both my parents are in their '80s and aren't going to be around forever. Their five children all got virtually identical upbringings and especially insofar as religion is concerned have managed to end up at all different kinds of places as adults. I am looking forward with a certain dread fascination to seeing how this all plays out when we have to deal with a loss in the family, as someday we are certainly going to have to do. For one, I don't currently anticipate that I'll want to do everything the handbook of Jewish m...

The next stop on my quest to catch up with the January closings on Broadway that I'd really miss seeing was In The Heights, which opened almost three years ago after a successful run off Broadway, and won some Tony Awards in 2008. Alas, the things it's best at are things I don't appreciate in a musical as much as some other people, and the things I do appreciate, this one isn't so good at. It's one of the very few musicals to make it to Broadway at least so far that's heavily influence by latino culture, with a bit of african-american mixed in. The eponymous heights are the latino areas of Washington Heights, the part of Manhattan near to the George Washington Bridge which looms over the street scene, which centers on a bodega and a car service. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, just that if you took away the latino rhythms and characters you'd be left with a story that could as easily have been done and probably was for that matter with a Jewish tailor s...

So Saturday night I decided to try and catch one more of the January closings on Broadway. In The Heights sold out as I was heading in to the TKTS line, so I opted for A Little Night Music. A Little Night Music is a Sondheim show from 1973, with book by Hugh Wheeler and directed originally by Hal Prince. The same group would collaborate on the masterpiece Sweeney Todd a half dozen years after, and had done Company three years previous. It's probably best known as the show which includes Send In The Clowns. I'd seen once before, in a NY City Opera production at least 15 maybe even 20 years ago. I do not consider it his best show or score. Send In The Clowns is a classic kind of because it became a classic. After that you've got the occasional line or two that's hummable and memorable, but Company or Sweeney Todd or Assassins all have more. It's three hours inspired by Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, which is longer than that movie, way longer than W...

Well, on balance, 2010 was a pretty danged amazing year for Brillig, and the Business of Being Brillig. On the dollar-and-cents scorecard, I've told people I think 2010 was the best year I had, and ever will have, and then I have to listen to all of these people saying "oh, you can't know that." Maybe I am selling myself short, but... 2010 was the year we were getting royalties for the second half of 2009, which was when there were 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the NY Times list at once (8 on paperback list linked, 9th on hardcover), a feat for an author that is unprecedented in the annals of publishing. I'd prefer to be pleasantly surprised if that can ever be equalled or surpassed by some other event or combination of events. Charlaine returned to Earth in the US in 2010, she was "just" an incredibly successful author, and the hardcover sales first week for DEAD IN THE FAMILY were "only" twice the first week sales of DEAD AND GONE the yea...