BilmBlog500

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 spent this past weekend at the bar mitzvah of nephew #4, who is named after my uncle, Matthew Suffness .   It was a bittersweet occasion for me.  My only niece is named for my maternal grandmother, whom we loved very much but who passed when I was only a child, not so young as to have no memories of her at all but certainly when I was young enough that the memories are just childhood ones.  My uncle Matt, on the other hand, died when I was an adult, and died far too early in life at the age of 52.  He and his wife Rita didn't have a family of their own, but he loved his nieces and nephews very very much, and we were all so happy when he was able to join us for a family occasion.  He was so much fun to be around that it's almost embarrassing to say it was really only after he passed that I came to realize how accomplished he was professionally, to the extent that the American Society of Pharmacognosy came to name one of their awards after him.  He was known particularly for ...