BilmBlog500

Watching the premiere of 24: Live Another Day earlier in the week gets me to thinking where it is that I have heard the name of William Devane before... Once Upon a Time, 24 years ago strangely enough, in September 1990, a client of mine named Barbara Paul called to say that there was a TV movie on NBC by the name of Murder COD being previewed in TV Guide that sounded a lot like her book Kill Fee. The TV movie and a perfectly respectable cast.  Patrick Duffy, still on Dallas, starred as a police detective, and one William Devane was the bad guy.  Devane was on Knots Landing. And if it sounded a lot like Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee -- well, that's because it was. The book had been under option for a while.  The option had, if memory serves, expired on September 10, which was now a few days in the past.  The producers of the TV movie had not quite forgotten to pay the purchase price for the TV movie, which they should have done months before when the started filming ...

Usually I try and refrain from posts that will ruffle too many feathers, but I can't tell everyone else we should be talking about the dissolution of Night Shade in public and then not do so myself. For those of you who don't know, Night Shade Books is a highly regarded -- well, artistically highly regarded -- publishing company specializing in sf, fantasy and horror.  It has published many excellent authors, with beautifully packaged books, published with great love.  It was a company that I wanted to be in business with very, very much. Unfortunately, the company was poorly run. In 2010, this became public knowledge.  There were issues with late royalties, and with e-books being published by Night Shade when their contracts did not give them e-book rights.  We were aware of those issues already, and we had stopped submitting to Night Shade.  It wasn't just that they were so often late, but that we never felt entirely comfortable with the excuses or forthrigh...

Way back toward the dawn of Brillig, in fact it's hard for me to believe it's close to five years I've had the blog, I did a post called Audio Rules !, where I discussed how, in 2007, Audible essentially decreed that there should be science fiction and fantasy on audio, where previously there had been very little.  Looking back on it, this was just a few months before Amazon announced it was purchasing Audible, it's interesting to speculate on if the imminent purchase was a factor in that decision, or if it was an all-Audible thing.  Doesn't really matter, doesn't make the speculation less interesting. Since then, we've sold a ton of audio rights, whatever it was we were selling when I did that blog post in 2008 was kind of the tip of the iceberg.  As with all things like this in the content business, it's been interesting to see it play out. As an example, the Lost Fleet books have performed on audio well beyond any reasonable expectation.  I spoke in t...

Once upon a not so very long time ago, it was virtually impossible to sell audio rights to anything in the way of science fiction and fantasy. This, to me, was not a good thing. Why was this? I do think sf/fantasy is an acquired taste, so much so maybe it's in the genes, and for some reason it's been an acquired taste that is looked down upon. To the rest of the world, the entire sf convention is going around in Star Trek costumes and taking Klingonese lessons from Lawrence Schoen . Why do indie bookstores have better mystery sections than sf if they deign to have an sf section at all, why do libraries have better mystery sections. Do sf readers avoid libraries because they don't have sf, or do the libraries avoid because sf readers have an allergy. That's clearly part of it. In order for them to buy sf/fantasy they first had to be educated about it. There were also these rules. Fixed cost in audio can be high because of recording costs. You need to have some p...