BilmBlog500

I'm super excited to be going to Norwescon this year.  It's my first time going to this convention, and my first time in Seattle in almost ten years, which is way too long to be away from such a beautiful city.  I'll have some great company.  My long-time client Tanya Huff is a Guest of Honor at this year's Norwescon, and my more recent discovery Adam Rakunas is a finalist for this year's Philip K. Dick Award for his excellent debut novel WINDSWEPT .  DAW Books, which publishes Tanya Huff and many of our other authors, is the publisher honoree.  There will be lots of other JABberwocky clients around,  and I'll be joined by my JABberwocky colleague Sam Morgan . I'm going to be on two panels on Saturday, March 26: Sat 1:00pm - 2:00pm - Cascade 9 First Page Idol Phoebe Kitanidis (M), Frog Jones, Nicole Dieker, Paul Constant, Joshua Bilmes Sat 3:00pm - 4:00pm - Evergreen 3&4 Comic Book Movies Rafeal Richardson (M), Paul Constant, J. Rachel Edidin, John L...

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...

So once upon a time, and not that long ago really, I could look at my Nielsen Bookscan numbers and know that I was really and truly getting my weekly report card. Now, it's hard to be sure if I'm even getting an incomplete. And it's all because of those darned e-books. With Tanya Huff's permission, let us look at her excellent series of "Valor" military sf novels. Two years ago when Valor's Trial came out in hardcover, I could very easily look at those numbers and look at the numbers for the hardcover of The Heart of Valor from the year before, and I could see that it was good. Over the first few weeks, hardcover sales of the 2008 release were up something like 40% from the year-before book. And now I'm looking at the release of The Truth of Valor, and that's up by 25% from what The Heart of Valor did in 2007, but it's down 15% from what Valor's Trial did in its first few weeks in 2008. Down 15%!! Panic time? Well, no... Let's ...

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, I visited Borders #40 in Bohemia, Long Island. Well, no, that would be crazy. Really, I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by travelling out to Long Island for the Grand Opening of the Whole Foods Market in Lake Grove, NY. Not as crazy, right! And the Borders was on the way. Like, go to a totally different line on the Long Island Rail Road and have a two-mile walk to the Borders but then the Suffolk County bus goes from directly in front of the Borders pretty much right to the Whole Foods along the way, not crazy at all. I took this picture as I approached the Borders because you're looking at a little piece of American corporate history that I don't think you can see too many other places right now. In fact, this may be just about the only place in the country where you can see it. For in the early 1990s, K-Mart decided that the future was in diversification. It acquired Sports Authority, it acquired Office Max, it acquired Borders to pa...