BilmBlog500

Over the course of these royalty season posts, I have spoken a lot about the reserve against returns, and this entire post will deal with this. The idea of the reserve is rooted in reality.  The books the publisher sends out can be returned for full credit by booksellers.  The publisher has to ave some protection against paying royalties on copies that might be returned. But the reality of the reserve is that it is the publisher's cookie jar, a source of abuse, and like many things in the publishing industry a relic of a past age that doesn't want to come kicking and screaming into modernity. Once upon a time, the fate of a book really was a mystery.  It isn't any more. With Bookscan and other direct ties between major retail accounts and major publishers, the big publishers know the fate of a book.  Maybe not by June 30 for a book that came out in May, and I can understand a bit if the reserve against returns on that first royalty report is high.  Yet, I will o...

One of the reasons I have spoken a lot this week about royalties:  well, information is the mother's milk of literary representation, and along with the quality of the book itself, the three most important pieces of information we can use to sell an author are (1) the author's bibliography and biography (2) reviews (3) sales history.  Furthermore, if you want to gauge how much the market might pay for an established author you have to have a handle on actual expenses for printing books vs. actual revenue from selling them rather than royalties paid. And how do we figure out what an author's sales history is or how much revenue and expense the publisher has in printing and selling books, in both print and electronic forms?  Well, we gather that information from royalty statements. And I learned early in my career at Scott Meredith that sales information isn't well kept by stacking piles of paper in a filing cabinet.  Those Penguin statements I was telling you about, t...

Yesterday I told you what royalty statements looked like at the start of my career in the mid-to-late 1980s. As we progressed through the 1990s, publishers slowly started to provide "better" royalty statements.  As with the Random House portal , which has been around for two years now, I am always surprised when publishers make it easier for authors and agents to find information, though maybe I shouldn't always be because even publishers can sometimes recognize the cost of keeping secrets.   Unlike, let's say, the NSA .  That said, the additional information is often provided in a "watch what you wish for, you might get it" kind of a way.  It's sometimes so hard to find the information and so difficult to interpret it that the improvements are less significant than I would wish. Before continuing, this post's reminder that in major trade publishing that most of the books publishers send to bookstores can be returned to the publisher for full credit....

We are settling in after our move just in time for the arrival of royalty season.  In fact, some German royalties from Heyne, which were the first buds of the season or sprinkles of the monsoon or flakes of the blizzard arrived almost simultaneous with the move. And I realize in six years of having Brillig, I've never spoken much about royalty season. First, royalty season in the publishing industry doesn't arrive at the same time for everyone.  It isn't like spring or fall, but rather more like the last frost. When I was at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the early years of my career, royalty season arrived on February 1 and August 1.  Random House was due to send out reports the last day of January and last day of August, and they were very nice about it.  They didn't entrust their big checks to the Post Office in order to get another day or two of float, but rather would messenger them over, though late in the day so the check couldn't make it to the bank f...

For over 30 years, I have been a devout reader of Variety. Now, I hate the actual printed magazine.  It doesn't take long to read, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in a good week.  And this quick read comes in the form of an oversize magazine printed on heavy coated white paper.   Who wants to go around on the subway holding a heavy, oversized magazine that doesn't take very long to read and which requires lots and lots of page turns?  The magazine is as annoying as it is informative. However, the printed magazine is now only a small portion of the total content Variety offers.  Every week there are dozens of articles and reviews and columnists to be found on the magazine's website that aren't to be found in the weekly magazine. There is no paywall on the website.  The owner of Variety has made a business decision not to charge for its content. I prefer content like this in print. There are week-long stretches when I have plenty of time to sit at my computer...

So a quick report in on our move, a little less lavishly illustrated than it should be because I don't quite have the time... After a day of packing on Monday, the movers started loading our Queens office into the truck at around 9:10 on Tuesday morning. When that task was mostly complete, Eddie and I chaperoned the parade of the Eeyores, as they headed from our office to the new office over the 59th St. Bridge with stops along the way at places like the Magnolia Bakery, Serendipity 3, Bloomingdales, the site of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency offices in Joshua's early years in the business, etc.  I will gather many photos on this blog eventually, but for now if you go to twitter.com/awfulagent or twitter.com/eddieschneider you can find. Now, this was a little silly, but also a lot of fun, and ultimately, what else were Eddie and I going to do?  The computers were in boxes, the routers and the servers and the ethernet cables and the track pads and the keyboards were in boxe...

Kind of hard to believe, but not even two years after decamping from my one-time apartment in Sunnyside Queens to an actual offer a mile-and-some away, we're packed up and ready to move tomorrow to a new office in Manhattan, a very different JABberwocky than we were when we moved the first time. Scavenging parts of a year-in-review post that I worked on around the New Year and never got around to finishing and posting, let's look at how JABberwocky has changed... At the start of 2013, we were like an iPhone app running on an iPad.  We had grown, but we were fuzzy at the edges.  At the end of the year, and heading into our 20th anniversary year in 2014, we are an actual iPad app with the staff and capabilities that are right and comfortable for our size, or at least enough so that I don't look at my business and think it's all fuzzy-ish and not quite going all the way to the edges of the screen. A lot of that change and improvement is the result of having a much bigger s...

It's been an eclectic and unusually fertile week of preview screenings at The Museum of the Moving Image.  After showing Bad Words earlier in the week, there was an unusual double feature today of Muppet Most Wanted and The Raid 2, both quite enjoyable in their own different ways. The best thing, and perhaps the only thing, that one needs to say about Muppet Most Wanted is that it's undoubtedly and undeniably a film Jim Henson could have made. I'm not sure any Muppet movie will ever equal the consistent delight of the memorable tunes from the original Muppet movie, but there's no denying the quality of work that Bret McKenzie is doing for the current Muppet films.  This movie starts with a production number where the Muppets celebrate the fact that they are getting to do a sequel (yes, Bunsen Honeydew does quite scientifically interrupt the song to point out that this is in fact the 7th Muppet movie), which features lots and lots of Muppets, happily breaks the third wal...

The Museum of the Moving Image hosted a preview screening of Bad Words, a film soon to open directed by and starring Jason Bateman, of Arrested Development and other such things.  Regrettably, the bad isn't good. Bateman plays a 40-something man who decides to participate in a spelling bee for children.  He never finished 8th grade, so under the rules (can't have finished 8th grade before a certain date) he gets to play. We're supposed to guess, I suppose, how a man who never finished 8th grade can spell so many obscure words so precisely.  According to the Q&A afterwards, cue cards were very important.  But that helps the actor, not the character. Just like we're supposed to guess why a reporter for a magazine is following the guy around for a story.  Really? No guessing on this:  Bateman's character isn't content to leave things to change.  While on stage, he'll talk to his fellow contestants and persuade one that he just slept with the kid's mot...

I did indeed manage to get to Omar in the week following the Oscars, if just barely, catching a 10:45 show on the Sunday morning a week following. This was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language movie.  It's a Palestinian film about the business relationship between a young man named Omar (would you believe!  in a movie called Omar!!) played quite fetchingly by Adam Bakri, and his Israeli handler, equally fetchingly played by Waleed F. Zuaiter.  It's tempting to look at every film that comes out of the Israeli conflict as a political statement of some or another sort, but this well made film by writer/director Hany Abu-Assad manages to make its points without every becoming polemical.  If we see the routine humiliations that Omar endures as a young Palestinian man, it's only what we do or don't bring from our other experiences that allows us to understand or not his involvement in a shooting of an Israeli soldier at a garrison, and the film can be en...

So while the rest of the world is having this Carl Sagan moment with the debut of the new Cosmos TV series, inspired by Sagan's original series from 35 years ago, let me tell you what Carl taught me.  It's something different from what everyone else is saying... When I started work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in February 1986, I got to be Carl's literary agent.  Well, not really, or not exactly, but each desk at the agency had certain clients assigned to it, and Carl was assigned to my desk.  For Carl, this didn't mean very much. It meant that I was the person in the office who got to type out a transmittal letter for each check.  Yes, this was the 1980s.  This was done by hand on a typewriter, that we had gotten $568.76 for French royalties to Cosmos, and after our commission and 2% to Alan Lomax and some percent to the ex, here is your check for $352.32. This was a pain in the neck, but it was still a thrill to be even that close to someone like Carl...

So having completed the live blogging for the Oscars, this is my Baker's Dozen best of 2013, in no particular order: World War Z: This is grading on a curve.  But basically, there are so many really shitty special effects spectaculars around these days that I feel an urge to give some recognition to a movie that's just a little bit different.  Also, since I keep asking authors to revise their manuscripts, it's nice to see something in the popular culture where revision works.  In particular, the ending of this major CGI-ridden summer spectacular release is quiet.  One setting, one main character, a place where small little things count, where the tension is real.  A place where the violence is earned, justified by the movie being what the movie is, and now entirely thrown in just because someone thinks it's fun to plow a starship into a building, or to destroy Manhattan for the 18th time and pretend like it isn't, like Superman didn't save Manhattan in Superman ...

12:02 am --   tight as the race might have been, the big awards ended up going pretty much as the consensus said they would.  Lots of tech to Gravity, as well as the Best Director prize.  The acting awards kind of as the buzz said.  And the biggest Oscar of all to 12 Years a Slave. 11:49 pm -- I don't comment as much on the women's fashions, but the Cate Blanchett dress is a stand-out. 11:41 pm -- Samsung should talk more about the multi-tasking screens and less about being connected to my heart.  The inability to multi-task on an iPad, having to go back and forth for doing a lot of things, is it's one biggest problem as a real office replacement device. 11:40 pm -- this year's biggest awards considered to be a tight race, hard to know if there's any significance to Cuaron winning the Director award, over Steve McQueen.  As with Life of Pi, there are some movies that clearly don't direct themselves.  Cuaron was clearly full of emotion and overtaken som...

Even by the standards of early year movies, the start of 2014 has been full of a stunning array of must skip movies. I will include in that list the surprise sensation of February, the Lego Movie,  Surprisingly good reviews, robust box office indicative of strong word of mouth, and if I hadn't been attending with a friend I would have walked out after ten minutes, or retreated to a quiet corner to read on my iPad while the film played,  Thus was just another boring superhero movie with overlong fight scenes, only with Legos. Even at the end, the movie didn't have any charm for me.  Everything is not awesome. Non-Stop on the other hand was a nice action movie.  Liam Neeson lends gravitas and depth to the role of an air marshall being framed for a remarkably clever feat of airplane crime.  The movie is never terribly believable but is always just plausible enough that I was willing to buy in.  I have no idea how the bad guys got at the pilot, or now they fond...