BilmBlog500

My second WorldCon in San Jose, and it's starting next week. Here are some things I remember from ConJose in 2002: John Hemry/Jack Campbell and I went looking for lunch, and we walked and walked and walked on a kind of hot day, and we never exactly found the restaurant.  John still holds this against me.  And I kind of can't blame him.  But, like -- there was barely MapQuest in 2002, let alone the wonder of Google Maps. Tobias Buckell isn't a client of mine any longer, but I had the honor of representing him at the start of his career, and we had a pretty long chat at the Starbucks in downtown, around the corner from the Waldenbooks now long since gone, about the wonderful novel that became Crystal Rain.  The Starbucks is still there, and I'll think fond thoughts of Toby and Crystal Rain every time I pass by. It was an adventure getting to the party floors at the Fairmont, finding the secret stairs to walk up and up and up because the elevator service wasn't up to i...

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. ...

My client Tim Akers took some time away from his work on Dead of Veridon to give us his thoughts on the Nook he got for Christmas. Click here and enjoy. And then you should enjoy Akers' debut novel The Heart of Veridon, which Library Journal has rightly hailed as a key title in the modern steampunk movement, and then reserve his forthcoming The Horns of Ruin . We've heard of sword and sorcery, or s&s, and now we add the third s of steampunk to create a fully-realized s&s&s fantasy which people are giong to be talking about come November. He mentions an article in the NY Times today by Randall Stross, an author on hi tech topics. I, like Stross, don't see the dedicated ebook reader as a lasting technology, that being said a lot of people are betting a lot of money that Randall and I are wrong. And Randall gives a lot of attention in his article to Amazon's notorious tendency to say lots without saying anything. The only problem here is that Amazon has ac...

So what did it mean to have Amazon's "buy" buttons removed for certain Macmillan titles? I could do a really thorough Nielsen Bookscan research project and check 62 things, but I do have a day job so I'm limiting the investigation to books by my clients which I'd be checking anyway, though drilling down a little further into the numbers than I might do for just my ordinary Wednesday report card check. When we looked over the Bookscan #s for Week #4 ending January 31, all of us at JABberwocky cried, because it was a kind of depressing week all the way around. Numbers on most things were down. And that had really nothing to do with the Macmillan/Amazon dispute. That started at the very end of the week, and since Bookscan gets the figures based on when books shipped, pretty much the entire effect of the disput would be seen in Week #5. And overall, Week #5 was a stronger week for the JABberwocky list than week #4 was. So for the week when the full impact would h...

OK, so it's been 4 weeks since my last post, and I'm not happy about that, but... B usiness comes first, and November kind of got to be one of those months. Shortly after my last post I headed down to DC to spend some quality time with Brandon Sanderson .  Brandon and I have spent fall quality time in DC for each of the last 3 years, and I've got to say it's pretty amazing to see how things have been coming along for Brandon over that time.  In years past we pretty much spent our time doing drive-by visits to bookstores to sign shelf stock and say "hello."  This was somewhat helpful in 2006, and it was possible to see Brandon's market share in DC increase in 2007 for the ELANTRIS and MISTBORN paperbacks, almost certainly as a direct result of those efforts.  In 2007, we visited just after the announcement of Brandon's work on the Wheel of Time series, and we had press releases to hand out.  We handed out enough that we had to stop at the Fed Ex Kinko...