BilmBlog500

In the final of my current series of posts about the e-book business, we're going to talk about the food chain a little bit. The average run-of-the-mill self-published e-book author is kind of at the bottom of the food chain.  This person goes on-line, accepts the terms of service, the KDP or Nook Press contract, and away they go. We at JABberwocky, I must admit though I hate to do so, are not that much further up.  We get to be in something called the Kindle White Glove program for agents.  We represent many authors, we have the ability to put up books by multiple published authors, we have people we can talk to. Above us, I'd probably put small publishers that may be able to provide a few thousand titles, that may have dedicated legal teams to negotiate with Amazon, that may have have a few core titles in a particular category that would be important for Amazon to sell. Then you've got Open Road or Rosetta Books, dedicated e-book publishers with lots and lots of ti...

Two interesting developments in the e-book marketplace in recent days.  One of which shall be used as a springboard today, this being the announcement that Richard Curtis has sold his e-Reads business to Open Road.  Like myself and several other leading agents in sf/f, Richard is an alumnus of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, around twenty years prior to my time there.  He started e-Reads in 1999 when the e-book business was barely in existence, and interestingly, I've traveled in some familiar circles with agents with an interest in the e-book business.  My boss for 15 months at Scott Meredith after Scott died was Arthur Klebanoff, who founded Rosetta Books a couple years after Richard founded e-Reads. The reason Richard Curtis gave in the press about the sale was that there was a perceived need to do more marketing of the e-Reads list, which would have meant stepping up the investment in the business, and that it seemed better to find a company that could ...

So if all of the people who are so committed to the idea that the whole wide world of writers should be self-publishing their books on Amazon would devote just a wee bit of their energy to getting some more of the developers near our current office to shovel the sidewalks of their development sites so my employees don't slip and fall on ice sheets, I'd be very happy. Where does one begin to dissect this incredible piece of self-publishing "science" by Hugh Howey ... First, the science doesn't rest on actual figures of how much anyone is making.  Rather, the starting point is to look at a list of Amazon bestsellers, and to determine the future from this list, and this list alone.  Ugh!  I had my first experience with bestseller list quackery in 1990, when a book that I knew wasn't selling very well in hardcover somehow managed to appear on the Locus bestseller list for multiple months.  More recently, Myke Cole has been aiming for the #1 bestseller in the Space...

So the first 2014 movie I saw in 2014 was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Took me a while.  Even by the standards of January/February movies, this year has been off to a pretty shabby start.  Not many movies I wanted to see, not many new movies coming out that I was anticipating seeing, so I could keep shoving this aside in favor of other things. I enjoyed it. For one, I like Chris Pine very much.  He has "it," that special movie star quality.  He radiates charisma and likability, much like Denzel Washington over the course of his entire career (the two of them together in Unstoppable is a casting coup central to an excellent movie), or Tom Cruise twenty or thirty years ago, or Ryan Gosling when he doesn't do bad indie movies.  He is very Chris Pine here! I have a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh.  Oh, he's not one of the great directors of the past thirty years, but his Dead Again was a movie I liked enough to see twice, he's done some good Shakespeare movies, he...