BilmBlog500

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...

Military sf has been part of my existence as a literary agent for most of my career. My first author in the genre was Bill Baldwin. Bill was a very, very successful author for Warner at a time when it didn't have a particularly successful sf program. There was Warner, then there was Questar, then there was Aspect, then there wasn't much, and eventually when the French publishing conglomerate Hachette came along and purchased Warner Books, they imported Tim Holman, who had done a great job building the Orbit UK list, moved the sf program from Warner to Little Brown/Grand Central, and have since had much better results. Not so back then, the Warner program wasn't much, and Bill and his Helmsman books were rare projects that would be displayed at the front of the bookstores. The Helmsman series was classic in its appeal, the lead character Wilf Brim a man's man of a space captain with a life full of women and adventure. Working with Bill was one of the experiences that...

OK, so the first time going to London Book Fair in 1999 wasn't a perfect experience, but there was little doubt that I was going back. I might not have known it in the earliest months of 2000, but that was the year when I finally moved my commission needle from the low 30Ks into the middle 30Ks and started the upwards trend after five long years of investing in the business for returns not all that much more than break-even. I did feel comfortable enough to upgrade to a snazzier looking Hilton that I walked jealously past in 1999 on my way to and from the Fair. I had a few more appointments that year than the year before, and a higher percentage of those were appointments worth having, and you could say the same for each year thereafter. I got a new computer which allowed me to migrate the catalog to AppleWorks, which was slightly more advanced and did away with the cut-and-paste of images into the catalog, which slowly grew more pages and which went from Staples and me stapling...

In the earliest years of JABberwocky I was not making much money, but I was making a little teeny tiny bit each year. My break even for my first year was somewhere at maybe $24-25K in gross commission and I ended up doing something like $30-32K. And I did that for my first year, and my second and third and fourth and fifth years as well. Sometimes I'm not sure I'd have started the business if I'd known it would take so long to start growing it. Nonetheless, it was still a tiny bit more each year than the bare minimum necessary, and as the years progressed I never wavered in the belief that if I was making enough each year and building a backlist and creeping toward having royalty income as well as advance income that I could let out the belt and spend an extra dollar or two. So when a piece of direct mail showed up in the box talking about London Book Fair in March of 1999, I started to ponder if maybe I shouldn't finally see London. There were some things to do fir...

For part two of my Elizabeth Moon musings, this is a good occasion to talk about the benefit of doing collaborative work. There are two approaches here. One is where you put an author on to a Star Wars or Halo novel, expecting to get the Star Wars or Halo audience to rub off. This NEVER works, in my opinion or experience. People who buy media novels, they might be readers but they're media readers. For the rare thing like when Tim Zahn launched the original Star Wars fiction line 18 years ago, it can be SO big that even a small percentage of carry over is SO big that it can make a visible small dent in the base of sales for a much smaller regular novel. But for the most part, an author should do these things for the money or for the love of the media product, and nothing else. There's no umbra or penumbra or coattail or other benefit to be had, maybe that you're making the publisher happy because the publishers keep seeming to think this kind of thing is so wonderful ...

With Elizabeth Moon's newest book KINGS OF THE NORTH now on sale and (knock wood) headed somewhere on the NY Times extended bestseller list, seems like a good time to send an anniversary musing this direction. Elizabeth was just starting to publish in Analog at around the same time I was starting at the Scott Meredith Agency. At Baen Books, where I'd done freelance work during college, publishing books by Analog authors was a kind of major sub-niche. And I was enjoying some of Elizabeth's early stories like "ABCs in Zero G" very much. And reading magazines and finding wonderful things and reaching out to authors was the kind of thing agents were supposed to do. So I asked the higher-ups at SMLA if it would be OK to reach out to Elizabeth Moon and ask if she had a novel. Did she ever! Rather to my surprise, since I was experiencing Elizabeth through excellent hard sf stories in the magazine full of hard sf stories, she had a completed fantasy trilogy around ...

Since we've just gone live with our own e-book editions of several of the books, a good subject for my next anniversary musing would be the Hot Blood anthologies and their siblings, edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett . I can't take credit for starting the series. That goes to Kurt Busiek , a noted comic book writer who made a brief stop at the Scott Meredith agency in the late 1980s. He sold the first book in the series to Claire Zion at Pocket Books, and I picked up after Kurt left. The history of the series is a good prism through which to view a lot of different aspects of the publishing business. 1. The importance of relationships. When I picked up the series and was selling my first books to Claire, I was thinking the books were doing well enough that the authors should get a little bit bigger advance. Claire, whom I hadn't done business with previously, automatically assumed that my request for a raise meant that I wanted to make a big splash with my first d...

A couple years ago I did some postings on technology and the agenting business, in the first one I talked about how the Scott Meredith Agency kept a lot of records on green index cards, called not very creatively "green cards." Alas, those were gotten rid of in the mid 1990s when the agency moved, doing some of these anniversary posts I think how wonderful it might be to look over some of the detailed histories on some of them. But they ain't around, we must move forward! One of my other earliest clients was a horror writer by the name of Ronald Kelly. I remember being held rapt by his "first" novel on the Shortline bus ride into Manhattan. It was then called "The Tobacco Barn." It ended up being published right around New Years, 1989 into '90, as Hindsight. It took rather a long time to sell, longer I would still think than it should have, before being taken by Wendy McCurdy, then at Kensington/Zebra, so even though Ronald was one of my ver...

  It was 25 years ago today that I started at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and here's a glimpse at the hardcover cover of the very first book I sold, Mary's Grave by Malcolm McClintick. Scott Meredith had a reading fee service, and this novel was what was called a "send-up," a book that a fee reader liked enough to suggest it be taken on. The author had a story or two published in Hitchcock's, and this was the first in a series of novels featuring the George Kelso character who also appeared in some of the AHMM stories. The book was published quickly, in the first half of 1987, and subsequently appeared in paperback from Avon. The acquiring editor at Doubleday was Michelle Tempesta, the long-time editor of the Doubleday Crime Club, and at Avon the editor who took the first three Kelso books was Nancy Yost. When the Doubleday family sold Doubleday to Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate which had owned Bantam Books and which now owns the entire Random...