BilmBlog500

Once upon a time I used to take a free weekend afternoon and do a grand circuit of Manhattan bookstores, up 2nd Ave. maybe stopping at Black Orchid mystery store if it was open, two Barnes & Nobles on E. 86th St., thru Central Park, 2 B&Ns on Broadway on the Upper West Side, then the Borders on Columbus Circle and the Borders on Park Ave. That was a long time ago! Now, it's been months and months and months since I've been to the mega-B&N on E. 86th that replaced two smaller and inadequate locations.  But I needed to buy three books by a couple published authors who are talking to us, I decided to buy them the old-fashioned way, the B&N was supposed to have all three. So up 2nd Avenue I went, for the first time in ages. Sadly, the United Artists Gemini at 2nd Ave. and 64th St. closed quietly in the fall, there's a "for lease" sign touting the "unique footprint" for retail.  According to Cinema Treasures, the theatre opened as the Columbia...

So it's not all that long ago that we were told what a big mistake it was for Borders not to have invested more in the e-book reader business. Now, after a confused holiday season where Publishers Weekly was running articles right after Black Friday telling us how wonderful the indies were doing with the Kobo and now runs an article to say " oops never mind " and where Barnes & Noble was touting its Black Friday success with the Nook and now blaming a drop in holiday sales on a huge drop in sales for the Nook, can we still say that the problem at Borders was failure to invest in an e-reader?  Barnes & Noble doesn't have much to show yet but a lot of red ink or maybe saying that things would even be worse for the retail stores if it wasn't for the Nook, and it's hard to know if there's any way to monetize the business.  Maybe e-readers aren't dead, but tablets are so much better and are now available at prices comparable to the earliest e-reade...

One topic which I covered in my 2012 review which I think deserves a little more attention is that of the global market for English language books. As a quick primer, there are three basic kinds of publishing deals, most all deals fall into one or the three categories: North American.  You give the publisher the right to publish the book in English in the US and Canada.  You keep rights to the British Commonwealth (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, different definitions after that which can range from a couple dozen to several dozen countries).  The world outside of North America and the British Commonwealth is something called the "Open Market" where everyone can distribute a book on a non-exclusive basis, mostly countries where English isn't a first language, like continental Europe or Brazil or Russia. World English:  You give the publisher the right to sell the book everywhere throughout the world in English, the publisher can either license...

Some time back I did a blog post about the controversial and eventually overturned settlement between Google, the Authors Guild, the major publishers and others about the Google project to scan zillions of books and make them available. Read that post here.  http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-settlement.html This week, the major publishers settled their case with Google, you can read the Google press release about that settlement here. http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2012/10/publishers-and-google-reach-agreement.html Just to say, I called this one. The main part of the settlement here is that the publishers get Google's file for their use. Which is exactly what I said was missing from the larger agreement. If they had done that same thing three years ago for the broad settlement, our ebook program would have long ago had a lot more books, our clients would have been making a lot more money all along the way.  Instead, the Authors Guikd is still spending how...

I should be reading a manuscript but it's late and I'm tired and it's not the right conditions for work reading. So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale. And it still sucks. To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year. But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all m...

So what do e-books mean for John Taylor and his bride, Suzie? Penguin is selling an e-book of The Bride Wore Black Leather for $12.99, and the hardcover cover price is $25.95. These prices are not unusual. The typical royalty rate from a major publisher on an e-book is 25% of net receipts, and the typical publisher share of the e-book price is 70%. So 70% of $12.99 means around $9 going to the publisher, and around $2.25 going to the author. The typical author royalty rate for a hardcover with a big publisher is between 10 and 15%, we take the middle tier on that at 12.5%, and the author gets around $3.25. Hence, every time somebody trades from buying a hardcover of Bride Wore Black Leather to buying an e-book, the income to Simon Green drops from $3.25 to $2.25. This isn't good news, if you are Simon Green! HOWEVER... For A Hard Day's Knight, now in mass market, both the e-book and the paperback are $7.99. Let's do some more more math. Typical royalty of 8% on the paperb...

Publishers Lunch Daily has a list of Barnes & Noble locations that have quietly closed at the end of 2011. The demise of their big and busy store in the University Village mall just down the hill from the University of Washington and its University Bookstore had been known to me earlier. But also of interest is that their store in Washington DC's Georgetown neighborhood has also shuttered. Going back fifteen years ago in the earliest days of B&N's nationwide superstore expansion, they would take out ads in places like The New Republic to ballyhoo their wonderful selection, including of academic, scholarly U Press type books. Those two stores, University Village and Georgetown, were two of the half dozen or so locations that would be specifically included in those posts. So to see those two stores closing at pretty much the same time kind of brings down the curtain on a small part of the book superstore era. The University Village store is one that I'll certainly ...

I often tell people that the publishing industry has been dying for as long as I’ve been in the industry, on toward 25 years now.  Hence, the fact that it isn’t yet dead suggests that the impressions on any given day are not in fact correct. Today, lots of people are saying that the industry is dying on account of the e-book.  My own impression as we are most of the way through “royalty season,” is that the industry is clearly changing, and almost certainly not dying of e-book. There are incredible amounts of e-books selling right now, incredible. The growth over just a few short years is truly stunning. Simon Green’s Nightside books are now selling about as many copies in e-book as in print. Charlaine Harris’ Harper Connelly books are selling more in e-book. E-books now represent around 10% of her lifetime US sales of 20 million units even though they’ve only been around for a few years in her 30 year career. This is a good business to be in. For both authors and publishers. Aut...

Wrote this email to someone I know who worked at a Florida Borders... Sorry didn't return your call, at a weekend long wedding with two days in office and to catch up on sleep before heading to St. Louis for Bouchercon where I am now. Very sad. My last Borders visit last Sunday to Middletown NY between the wedding and the town I grew up in. I really wanted to be the last customer St a Borders as I was at 1003, but no way for it to happen,  Four of the StL stores already closed, two were going to close on Thursday but one shut a day early and the other as I kind of expected said "we may close in 15 minutes, we may close in 45," and i couldn't hire a car to take me ten miles into Illinois, wait around for who knows how long and in the process blow off the stuff I and to do at the convention. Even though there was nothing to be done about it, I will feel like a loved one passed away without me getting to the bedside. Then I go to the downtown Left Bank Books, it has one ...

So on the tennis-related front, the #6 seed Robin Soderling withdrew from the US Open with an undisclosed illness, and his spot in the draw was taken as a "lucky loser" by Rogerio Dutra Da Silva. This would appear to be good news for Soderling's opponent, qualifer Louk Sorensen from Ireland, who goes from playing a top 10 player in his first round match to playing essentially another qualifying round match. However, Sorensen lost the first set 6-0 and has just taken a game to start the 2nd set, he couldn't be doing any worse against Soderling. Sorensen looked pleasant enough in the qualifying, but Da Silva is clearly the better player of these two. That said, I would expect the match will tighten up a little. It's a great opportunity for either player since the second round match will be winnable at least. The 3rd round match with Isner or Baghdatis less so, but one of these players has a good shot to be in the 3rd round of the Open. And Vasek Pospisil is j...

So it's possible you've heard from different places, a blog somewhere or your editor trying to explain why your new offer is so low, that Barnes & Noble has cut back their orders. Boy, are they! B&N has long had a fixture called the New Mass Market Tower. It's the square thing that usually sits in the central aisle of the stores that's around six feet tall, four rows across and maybe eight or so down, with new mass market books. A publisher pays to put your new mass market on the new mass market tower, of course B&N also has to agree they'd like it there because there are only so many books that can go on it over the course of the month and way more to choose from than that. But your publisher has to want it there. And for all those years, it used to be that being on this fixture meant that pretty much every Barnes & Noble was going to get 8 copies of your new sf/fantasy book, other than for the really most awful stores for sf/fantasy where they wo...

There just isn't much in my life so far that's leaving a hole in my existence the way the Borders bankruptcy is. Several years ago it would have been exciting on so many levels to see that Bouchercon is in Cleveland in 2012, and Albany in 2013. Never been to Cleveland, could have added at least a few Borders to my count, now I'm just looking at the date in early October and realizing I'd be going to Cleveland without even the chance of seeing a game at Jacobs Field, or whatever it is they're calling it these days. I need a new hobby, or something. And I can't see myself delighting in conquesting new art museums, or new Starbucks. I wish B&N were any kind of a substitute, but it's not. And B&N is just getting more boring, less interesting, to me with each passing day. I've never liked their basic Front of Store fixturing as much, I hate those damned octagons. And they're reducing orders, reducing title counts. Their strength against Bor...

There's a custom in Jewish prayer to recite something called the "Mourner's Kaddish" at the end of every worship service. When I'm leading a service, there's an introductory reading I do to this. It's the last paragraph of John Crowley's Little, Big; my favorite non-client fantasy and in part because it leads up to this wonderful passage of loss, of feeling for better days and different times. And there aren't better words to provide as I begin what will perhaps be my final post about the Borders business, for today all of us who love books have to be in mourning: From LITTLE BIG by John Crowley One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house, made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer; but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know ...

In the evolving world of publishing, the roles of the author, agent and publisher are all having to evolve. What should our role as agents be? There's one school of thought I know I don't agree with, which says that an agent should never be a publisher. One statement of that position from a British agent can be found here , and in the US one prominent agent who's expressed his firm opposition to melding the roles is Robert Gottlieb, the head of the prestigious Trident Media Group. That's some of what he discusses in this guest blog post on the Publishers Weekly site. My VP, Eddie Schneider, reacted very strongly to a news article in Publishers Lunch Daily this week (also the source for the above link) about a literary agency that wants to go into e-book packaging. I thought I'd invite him to guest on my blog, and italicized are his comments below: I'm sure many of you involved in book publishing in some fashion (agent, editor, aspiring author) heard the news...

So as Borders makes its way through the bankruptcy process, they've gotten the OK to terminate their relationship with Starbucks to have Seattle's Best Cafes. The filings to get out from under say how the royalty rates are too high and make it difficult for Borders to make money on the cafe operations, so it would be better for Borders to take back the operation. Hmmm. If you substituted the Borders website and Amazon for cafes and Seattle's Best, you'd be getting a strong sense of deja vu. Borders went with Seattle's Best because they had, over time, a very big problem that they just weren't running their cafes very well. B&N had that relationship selling Starbucks coffee and desserts from Cheesecake Factory from cafes with attractive menus and bright fixtures with everyone in their very nice and consistent uniforms. Borders kind of slowly scraped over time toward having some vague degree of consistency in their wares, but overall the cafes just never ...

So I think it's safe to say that the main beneficiary of the ongoing disappearing act at Borders has been Amazon or other internet outlets for buying books (and probably not borders.com as one of those!). Nielsen Bookscan gives breakdowns on sales in retail/brick and mortar channels as against sales in discount & other which includes primarily Amazon and bn.com. (Target and K-Mart are also in that line but for the typical new release sf/f hardcover these outlets aren't a factor.) So we can look at the breakdown on launch week for those two lines and see where books are being sold. This also separates out e-book sales. Whatever people are doing there, wherever they're buying e-books, we are able from this to look solely at market share for new books in print format. January 2010, launch week for Simon Green's Good, Bad & The Uncanny Retail market share 54% March 2010, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Fealty: Retail market share 44% April 2010, laun...

The Wall St. Journal had an article this week about the slow return of guns to the shelves at Wal-Mart. (no link, since hides behind their pay wall.) Ordinarily an article like this would meet with my scorn and approbation. I am not a gun person. But there was a sentence in the article that I enjoyed very much reading. It said that Wal-Mart -- and for all its power Wal-Mart has struggled a bit in the US in recent years, trying to broaden its appear without particular success and then struggling along with its customers during the economic difficulties of the last two years -- was starting to return things like guns and sewing cloth to its stores because it came to realize that these slow-moving items were more important to generating customer traffic with its core customers than they had appreciated. And this made me feel better about one of my passionately held beliefs about Borders, that the major blow to the chain came in spring 2008 when the company reduced title counts at its st...

One of the problems with modern agriculture is that of monoculture. A particular type of corn or banana or tomato might be wonderful but if everyone grows only that one wonderful thing and that one wonderful thing meets but one determined enemy then there goes your entire crop.  Sitting back after London Book Fair, I worry that the biggest threat from the ebook isn't so much that it in and of itself will wipe out the print book but rather that it will lead to a monoculture for the retailing of the print book, and that it will be the monoculture that kills.  And the UK may be leading the way. Waterstones is the print book retailer in the UK. There are supermarkets with a couple of hundred titles or HMVs or WH Smiths that have book departments of varying size.  But if you want to find a few thousand books to choose from instead of a few hundred, there is only Waterstones.  So at this point in time, virtually the only books selling at bookstores in the UK are the ones being carried at...