BilmBlog500

The Wall St. Journal had an article this week about the slow return of guns to the shelves at Wal-Mart. (no link, since hides behind their pay wall.) Ordinarily an article like this would meet with my scorn and approbation. I am not a gun person. But there was a sentence in the article that I enjoyed very much reading. It said that Wal-Mart -- and for all its power Wal-Mart has struggled a bit in the US in recent years, trying to broaden its appear without particular success and then struggling along with its customers during the economic difficulties of the last two years -- was starting to return things like guns and sewing cloth to its stores because it came to realize that these slow-moving items were more important to generating customer traffic with its core customers than they had appreciated. And this made me feel better about one of my passionately held beliefs about Borders, that the major blow to the chain came in spring 2008 when the company reduced title counts at its st...

One of my clients anxiously sent me a link to a recent Business Rusch post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch regarding royalty statements. "Is this something I need to worry about?" Well, let me give some perspective from my end... In some ways, yes, because e-book royalty reports are particularly susceptible to problems right now. E-book sales may be somewhat more receptive to problems because (a) the publishers are reliant on third party royalty reports which are of varying qualitfy. As an example, Amazon's Kindle platform for the general public won't as yet generate an author-sorted royalty report. Why should they, because it's for authors who are putting up their books so they're by that author. Well, not quite. We use this platform, other smaller agents and publishers use this platform. Lack of author sort means we have extra steps as we get more things on Kindle to sort everything by the correct author. Extra work means a temptation to shortcut. What ...

Even as the success of JABberwocky in recent years has expanded the horizons of what I can afford to do, my world seems to be shrinking. The multiple Borders bankruptcies fill me with a deep sadness not entirely because of the lost places to buy books. The entire business can become electronic but people will still want to read a good yarn and I will still have some role in that business. No, as much or more is the knowledge that these closures will make it harder to fight back against this shrinking world of mine.  It was 1993, I think, when I first headed out to Long Island on my birthday to visit Borders stores. And over the years, they've been my excuse to see the world. Lots of people went to WorldCon in San Jose. I saw the entire Bay Area from Los Gatos in the South to Fremont to Dublin to Berkley to Emeryville to Sunnyville to Milpitas. It came to be that way in areas around the country.  I know the usual thing is to go and never leave the convention hotel or to leave and vi...

OK, so the first time going to London Book Fair in 1999 wasn't a perfect experience, but there was little doubt that I was going back. I might not have known it in the earliest months of 2000, but that was the year when I finally moved my commission needle from the low 30Ks into the middle 30Ks and started the upwards trend after five long years of investing in the business for returns not all that much more than break-even. I did feel comfortable enough to upgrade to a snazzier looking Hilton that I walked jealously past in 1999 on my way to and from the Fair. I had a few more appointments that year than the year before, and a higher percentage of those were appointments worth having, and you could say the same for each year thereafter. I got a new computer which allowed me to migrate the catalog to AppleWorks, which was slightly more advanced and did away with the cut-and-paste of images into the catalog, which slowly grew more pages and which went from Staples and me stapling...

In the earliest years of JABberwocky I was not making much money, but I was making a little teeny tiny bit each year. My break even for my first year was somewhere at maybe $24-25K in gross commission and I ended up doing something like $30-32K. And I did that for my first year, and my second and third and fourth and fifth years as well. Sometimes I'm not sure I'd have started the business if I'd known it would take so long to start growing it. Nonetheless, it was still a tiny bit more each year than the bare minimum necessary, and as the years progressed I never wavered in the belief that if I was making enough each year and building a backlist and creeping toward having royalty income as well as advance income that I could let out the belt and spend an extra dollar or two. So when a piece of direct mail showed up in the box talking about London Book Fair in March of 1999, I started to ponder if maybe I shouldn't finally see London. There were some things to do fir...

One of the problems with modern agriculture is that of monoculture. A particular type of corn or banana or tomato might be wonderful but if everyone grows only that one wonderful thing and that one wonderful thing meets but one determined enemy then there goes your entire crop.  Sitting back after London Book Fair, I worry that the biggest threat from the ebook isn't so much that it in and of itself will wipe out the print book but rather that it will lead to a monoculture for the retailing of the print book, and that it will be the monoculture that kills.  And the UK may be leading the way. Waterstones is the print book retailer in the UK. There are supermarkets with a couple of hundred titles or HMVs or WH Smiths that have book departments of varying size.  But if you want to find a few thousand books to choose from instead of a few hundred, there is only Waterstones.  So at this point in time, virtually the only books selling at bookstores in the UK are the ones being carried at...

A wise man recently was asking me about that old canard of how his first novel would be doing nicely if it earned back it's advance. It took me more time than I thought to explain to wise man why this is not correct.  Let me try here in the best way I can think of.  Imagine that there are two books that are in every way identical. Each has a $7500 advance. The publisher spends the exact same amount of money on each, ships the exact same number of copies, absolutely everything the same. The book is a $7.99 mass market paperback and sells the exact same 15,000 copies.  Only difference is that one author has a 6% royalty in his contract, the other author has an 8% royalty. Both rates are common. Now do the math.  7.99x15000x.06=$7200 and the book has an unearned advance of $300.   7.99x15000x.08=$9600 and the publisher writes out a royalty check above the advance for $2100.  If you believe that your book becomes profitable only when you get royalty checks you are forced to believe tha...

So having seen this as part of a group outing with Peter V. Brett , Myke Cole and a friend of Peter's let me not add it to the list of movies I've seen that I want to review and never do. Peter's friend hated the movie. The rest of us were debating the fine points of its aspirations to mediocrity. For those of you who can't figure it out from the title, if from nothing else, the movie is about a battle. Set in Los Angeles. Well, most of it is actually set in Santa Monica, which is worth setting foot in now pretty much just for the excellent rugelach you can get here since both the Borders and B&N on the Third Street Promenade have closed in recent years. So if aliens want to destroy Santa Monica, just so long as they leave that one block on Montana Ave. with the good rugelach untouched they can really do as they please. So the thing is that the movie kind of delivers pretty much what it wants to deliver, which is just unadulterated war porn military action. Th...

UPDATE 6 April: This is one time where some good came from complaining. The webmaster for the Nebula event was told to add the fine print on the deposit to some of the pages (though I don't see those changes put in as yet). I was able to explain to Hilton why their disclosure isn't as good as they think. I will admit there is a decent chance someone filling in their credit card info manually in the guarantee area might notice that the deposit is being taken right away, but for an HHonors member signed in with the info pre-filled "we will charge $145 one night's room and tax right away" doesn't look much different than "we will charge $145 on night's room and tax if you don't cancel" if you quickly check over things on a 3-page reservation screen en route to the final "accept" button. That needs to be better. The payment of the deposit needs to be indicated in the reservation confirmation. There should be a receipt-like substa...