BilmBlog500

One topic which I covered in my 2012 review which I think deserves a little more attention is that of the global market for English language books. As a quick primer, there are three basic kinds of publishing deals, most all deals fall into one or the three categories: North American.  You give the publisher the right to publish the book in English in the US and Canada.  You keep rights to the British Commonwealth (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, different definitions after that which can range from a couple dozen to several dozen countries).  The world outside of North America and the British Commonwealth is something called the "Open Market" where everyone can distribute a book on a non-exclusive basis, mostly countries where English isn't a first language, like continental Europe or Brazil or Russia. World English:  You give the publisher the right to sell the book everywhere throughout the world in English, the publisher can either license...

I guess it's that time of year when we talk about the year that was... On the business end of things: When you're a literary agent, your work often comes ahead of the reward.  With the time lag between a book selling and the royalty reports coming along, a book that sells in January might not bring a royalty until November or with reserves against returns until the following May.  So in 2009 and 2010, we were getting paid for when there were 8 or 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the bestseller lists in 2008 and 2009.  We were getting paid a lot.  It was also a bit like a one-legged stool, a bit unstable because so much of the income was coming in just a couple checks each year. In the years since, the business has become more stable.  The Charlaine Harris business is still huge, not as big as when there were 9 books on the bestseller list but still big.  Other authors have gotten bigger in the past few years, Brandon Sanderson or Peter Brett or Jack Campbell. ...

I don't have the tech savvy of E C Myers, who did this nifty little Acknowledgment Video for his debut novel Fair Coin, recently out from Pyr SF as part of their new YA line and well worth reading -- you can meet Mr. Myers at various events in the coming days as well. But after a busy and wonderful day of actually finally housewarming my apartment, I thought I should put a few thank you things out into the world... The biggest thanks in many ways have to go to my clients. Charlaine Harris, Sookie Stackhouse, and the True Blood folk kind of paid for the place, but I think it's a mistake to be too narrow in viewing the JABberwocky family. Because Charlaine wouldn't be a client today if it weren't for the general belief amongst authors in general that we do a good job for all of our clients, or maybe not a client today if back fifteen years ago when Charlaine Harris wasn't Charlaine Harris yet, but Arkham House and Elizabeth Moon and Simon Green were some of the ke...

Today's the day, the official on sale for Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole, first in a three book deal with Ace. Today's the day, the official on sale for the mass market edition of Kings of the North by Elizabeth Moon, the 2nd book in a 5 book Paks World arc. It's safe to say that these two authors represent very different paths to writing and selling a first novel. Elizabeth Moon sat down some thirty years ago to write a short story. She wrote, the short story grew, grew into the three book series known as The Deed of Paksenarrion that is one of the most enduring fantasy series of the 1980s. How many fantasies published between 1985 and 1990 have been continuously in print since? I don't know, but it's likely not more than in the dozens. She didn't have to look for an agent, I liked her early stories in Analog and wrote a letter asking if she had a novel, and if it wasn't the sf novel I was expecting we can stipulate that it was good. It wasn...

So here are some of the things seen at Day #1 of Book Expo America, the biggest trade show for e book publishing industry in the United States... The Rebellion/Solaris booth gave first look at a finished book copy of Dead of Veridon by Tim Akers, which goes on sale next week. Sometimes a book cover looks different on an actual book than in the steps along the way. This one looks nicer than I might have expected. The Macmillan Audio catalog has a special "Just Announced" insert page for Mistborn: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson . Because they hadn't planned to offer a retail consumer product, but I persuaded them to give it a think and they decided that they in fact should. Me happy. Next, trying to persuade them to provide physical consumer product for the original Mistborn trilogy. If you would like to see that, let me know. Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner doing a joint book signing at the MWA booth. Hard to believe, but this is Charlaine's first ...

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...

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...

I ended up going on a bit about Animal Kingdom, let's so some quick takes. Sunday August 22 I saw Eat Pray Love at Clearview's Ziegfeld and then The Other Guys at the AMC Lincoln Square, Aud #4/Olympia. Other Guys had higher highs and lower lows and Eat Pray Love was more consistently mediocre, so I'd give a slight nod to seeing The Other Guys. The best parts of Other Guys are in the first half hour and are often genuinely good and genuinely funny. There's good chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. But as many of the reviews I read quite accurately point out, in the last half hour the movie becomes too much that which it is supposed to be spoofing, and I tuned out totally and completely. It was good to see Michael Keaton with a decent role in a mainstream movie. Where did he go? Eat Pray Love isn't without its pleasures. Julia Roberts, exotic settings, lush feel, eye candy in some ways. But it's flat. The script is kind of flat. I don't...

OK, I'm going to respond to some of the comments on my post of a few days ago where I referenced the Jim Hines survey, and its insights into how people got their starts... First, Maria: When you say "writing a few doesn't hurt," I have to disagree a little. Basically, writing short stories is an art form that overlaps with but is still separate and distinct from writing novels. There are some authors, lots of them in fact, who can do both. But there are authors like Michael Burstein who are much better at writing short fiction that novels. There are clients of mine like Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson who didn't write short fiction until many years into their careers. Simon Green wrote some short fiction, then turned almost exclusively to novels for many years, and it's only in the past two or three years that he's started to come into his own as a short story writer. If a writer doesn't have the knack for writing short fiction and spend...

In the past six months, we've had three movies full of debris-ridden interstates, broken pavement, downed bridges, overturned shopping carts as symbol of dead nomadic humans. The first of those was Zombieland (seen in October 2009 at the Regal/UA Kaufman Astoria 14), which arrived during my blogging interregnum, and which I consider to be a thoroughgoing delight. If it wasn't written with its two leads in mind, it was certainly impeccaby cast with two actors who took full advantage of every opportunity the script had to give them. Woody Harrelson has had a very strong year ranging from his excellent deadpan laconic zombie killer here to the equally laconic but totally different soldier he plays in The Messenger . I'm not sure Jesse Eisenberg is yet capable of bringing life to an inert script; he certainly doesn'tmake Adventureland sing. But this young actor wasn't even 20 when he made Roger Dodger sing, barely old enough to drink when he delivered a performa...

I went to see Avatar on Saturday with Myke Cole , Peter V. Brett and Laura Anne Gilman . (At the AMC Loews Lincoln Square Aud #9 (Majestic). I liked it least. To get one thing out of the way, right away: the 3D is amazing. We saw in RealD digital 3D. This is the third movie I've seen recently in 3D, after Bolt a year ago and then Up, and this was the first one where the movie just seemed made for 3D, where it was an integral thing making the movie something more than it was, and not just doing it for the visceral thrill of having stuff come at you. It's still not exactly comfortable to wear the RealD glasses over my real glasses, but it wasn't a huge bothersome thing, either. We were in one of the mid-sized screens at the theatre and not one of the much larger and bigger, but the glasses still provided some sense of panorama instead of making it too much like watching TV, which was something I hated very much about Imax 3D circa mid 1990s. But... For all the exotic a...

As I mentioned a few posts ago , doing the blog thing is one of the things that takes a back seat when work gets really busy and work has been really busy.  But I'll try and do some quick takes on my recent film-going... Harry Potter and the Whatever's Whatever.  Seen Wednesday July 29 at Clearview's Ziegfeld.    1.5 slithy toads.  This was nice because it was a guy's night out with Peter V. Brett , who was eager to see the movie again, and I don't often have company for my movies, and we had a nice dinner after, and I saw it at the remaining big single screen movie theatre in NYC.  But I just didn't like it very much.  One of the problems early on in this series of movies was that the films had no screen life independent of the books themselves.  I felt this slowly improved over the first three or four films, but now the series has regressed.  This movie introduces you to characters of absolutely no importance to anyone who hasn't read the books, involved i...