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...

This is the week when the TV networks are announcing their fall schedules, and it's always interesting to see what does and doesn't get picked up. Like, over on Fox, the Simpsons gets 6.3 million viewers last week, 24 gets 8+ million. The Simpsons is coming back next year, and 24 is not. And you could find conundrums like that up and down the scheduling announcements. Well, it's a lot like that in book publishing sometimes. There are the numbers where nobody will want you and the numbers where everyone will want you, and then there are the numbers in between where life isn't fair. Where this author selling 12,000 copies in paperback gets dumped while that author who is selling 9,000 copies gets to return for another day. There's one big difference in publishing, which is that demographics aren't as important to we book people, while in TV it can be much nicer to have 3 million views of 8 that are those hard to find younger viewers than to have 1.2 million yo...

For the first time in a long time, much longer than I can remember and this is probably not a good thing, I took four days off where I did not once check e-mail and tried to minimize the amount of time I even spent thinking about the job. I did have around 100 e-mails waiting when I got back, but the world and JABberwocky seem to have survived. This was to Connecticut to visit with my family. My parents came up for a few days, and the entire family (less one niece in Israel) got together Saturday afternoon for a seven-week preemie celebration of my mother's 80th birthday. I got her the 40th birthday card I neglected to obtain for her the first time around; that's the kind of guy I am. My mode of transport to CT is usually Metro-North Commuter Railroad to New Haven then Amtrak to Hartford. I could take Amtrak from Penn Station in NY, but Penn Station is such a pit of existence while the New Haven train station is so nice that I'd rather have time to kill in New Haven if ...

I'd give the Kindle 3 slithy toads. This seems a good day to write about the Kindle. I boarded a crowded Amtrak train to head down for a Charlaine Harris signing in Newark, DE, and while I was reading my Kindle I noticed a man across the aisle reading a Sony Reader. Whatever is the world coming to? So first, why do I have a Kindle, and not a Sony Reader? Well, I am a Mac person. The Sony Reader requires you buy stuff at the Sony Store, and they haven't made it easy to sync purchases on a Mac. I tried once to see if I could go to Sony's web site and at least check out the offerings and didn't even find that very easy to do. The Kindle, you don't even need a computer since you can shop wirelessly from within the Kindle. It also offered a feature that I found very tempting, that you could email your .doc files to your Kindle and have them show up there wirelessly for a ten cent fee. Some people think it's silly to pay to send your own files to yourself, b...

So I just got back from seeing a ballgame at Nationals Park with a friend. Now, even in the height of the fluid rule stuff when flying, when you couldn't bring on any liquid of any sort at all, I was able to bring on an empty plastic bottle which I could ask the flight attendants to fill up for me the moment I got on so that I would have some water at my seat during the flight. Even once when I had to go thru the security check with my empty bottle and then one of the random checks they were doing when you boarded. Even today, I still bring an empty half-liter soda bottle with me so I can go to the drinking fountain and have water without having to buy a new bottle of bottled water all the time. So when I read up on the Washington Nationals web site about their security rules and saw this "one per person, a factory sealed water bottle of up to 1 liter," I decided to test it. Knowing I was doing evil, I had an empty 16 oz plastic bottle in my bag, which I hoped to fill ...

It's super-busy time at work right now. Ongoing con obligations, Novelists Inc., I-Con, London Book Fair, and Malice Domestic, on four out of five weekends, so there goes the reading time. We have more business with the kind folk at 375 Hudson St. than anyone else, and Penguin (Ace/Roc/Berkley Prime Crime) and DAW royalty statement have both come in the past week, which means dozens of statements to be reviewed and spreadsheeted and shared with clients. We're updating the IT, so it's not only entering on to the spreadsheets but bringing them all over from the old format to the new. For 21 years in the business I could hardly sell audio rights, and now all at once they're hot for sf/fantasy so there are conversations aplenty. This doesn't leave so much time for blog posts. In fact, it's been so busy I had to catch up on four days worth of funnies this morning. I sent this one to my friends in Green Bay. Peter V. Brett wrote large chunks of his fantastic...

So as we continue with the never-ending presidential election in the United States, the issue of tax cuts is certainly going to be one of those that's on the table. Do you soak the rich? Do you reduce taxes to increase revenue? An article in the NY Times on this subject a couple days ago , more to come I'm sure. Let us look at some of these questions through the prism of the profession of literary agent. Agents such as myself used to be called ten-percenters, because we took a 10% commission on the income we earned for our clients. That is no longer the case. In the book business, agents are now fifteen-percenters. The move toward a 15% commission started in the early 1990s. The move was not without its logic. It is safe to say that major bestselling authors are now paid far more than they were in the 1960s. Same in publishing as in movies or TV or sports or any profession. It is equally safe to say that the same cannot be said at the bottom end of the scale. Unlike...

So somehow or other Borders has managed to get itself into a deep cash crunch , is pursuing "strategic alternatives," which is Wall Street speak for praying for rescue, has seen its share price drop toward $5ish a share. It'll never happen until it's too late, but it's time for the board to admit it made a mistake in hiring George L. Jones to run the company, and to put him out on the street. I've been very ambivalent about George L. Jones for a long time. Big picture, he's seemed to have some good ideas. Chief among them: he stopped pouring money into wasteful store remodels; he did what needed to be done at Waldenbooks which had gone from being a cash generator 10 years ago to a cash drain; the new concept store idea was intriguing. Some ideas had potential but carried a lot of uncertainly, in particular the benefits of having your own web site instead of tying in with Amazon to allow better integration with the stores and the Borders Rewards progra...

Once upon a a time there were the Big Three: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. Andrew Wheeler, a much better blogger than I, offered some reflections on a look back in the NY Times Book Review at a week that saw two of them on the list. And now there are none. Those halcyon days of my youth when science fiction writers appeared on the list have been replaced by days in which fantasy writers appear. The sf writers that do, like William Gibson, often get that way with the help of a critical establishment that claims they no longer write sf, which was a very hard thing to do with the Big Three. Of the three, Clarke was the one I knew the least. I read lots of Asimov; the Foundation Trilogy was one of my first purchasers as a new member of the SF Book Club some 28 years ago. I read lots of Heinlein. Rather less, much less even, of Arthur C. Clarke. But his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey leaves me enough in his debt all by itself, and those 2001 royalties helped pay for my salary at the Sco...

Peter V. Brett linked me up with this . Robin Hobb makes a very good point, which is that you can lose many hours to doing different stuffs, blogging among them, on the internet from the comfort of your own home while other possible things you can do (working/writing/movie/stroll/visit-w-friends etc.) don't get done. But wasn't it always thus? You can watch Survivor and see people every season on some beach with nothing to do, and who still manage to find things to do other than the necessary nothing. That's the point which I think Robin Hobb is missing. Some people, Brandon Sanderson or John Scalzi or others might big-time, will talk about how blogging helps to knit a close community with them and their readers. Maybe it does. I have a day job; I haven't posted in a few days because the day job has kept me busy. There are other people in the world who would have let the day job slide so they could post and comment and monitor comments and whatever. I don'...