BilmBlog500

My client Jeff Gelb is a longtime fan of all sorts of pop culture things, and was kind enough to put some thoughts to paper on the 50th anniversary of the first James Bond film Dr. No: Dr. No was released 50 years ago! Hard to believe! So  I was thinking about the tremendous effect  I an Fleming's creation has had on so many areas of popular culture (and my life) these past 50 years. I devoured all the Bond paperbacks in high school, and then read at least 100 Bond wanna-be spy novels (many of which I still own!). Spy novels are still immensely popular, from the works of Robert Ludlum to Daniel Silva (I'm a big Silva fan). Even Jack Reacher  arguably  could be called a distant cousin to James Bond. Comic books ran rampant with spies for awhile, including Nick Fury and SHIELD, now popular in the Avengers movie and coming soon to your TV set. Meanwhile, TV shows in the '60s gave us The Man from UNCLE, I Spy, Wild West, The Avengers, and so many others, continuing ...

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...