BilmBlog500

Two interesting developments in the e-book marketplace in recent days.  One of which shall be used as a springboard today, this being the announcement that Richard Curtis has sold his e-Reads business to Open Road.  Like myself and several other leading agents in sf/f, Richard is an alumnus of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, around twenty years prior to my time there.  He started e-Reads in 1999 when the e-book business was barely in existence, and interestingly, I've traveled in some familiar circles with agents with an interest in the e-book business.  My boss for 15 months at Scott Meredith after Scott died was Arthur Klebanoff, who founded Rosetta Books a couple years after Richard founded e-Reads. The reason Richard Curtis gave in the press about the sale was that there was a perceived need to do more marketing of the e-Reads list, which would have meant stepping up the investment in the business, and that it seemed better to find a company that could ...

I've had a generally good relationship with Penguin over my 28 year career, but right now I am not feeling very charitable toward the folks on 375 Hudson Street. Sometime in 2012 or 2013, it's hard to know exactly when because they don't really announce these things, they started a Print on Demand program. Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.  POD has come a long way since its early days, and you can do very attractive POD books, especially trade paperbacks, that are hard to tell from the standard offset edition. But that's not what Penguin is doing.  They are doing mass market POD editions, and they are awful and crappy and markedly inferior to the regular offset editions in pretty much every way imaginable. Today's example, a copy of Simon R. Green's Hell to Pay, the 7th Nightside novel, spotted at a Barnes & Noble in CT. I knew it was POD the second I opened the book.  That's kind of bad sign #1.  You shouldn't be able to tell a POD book f...

I don't have the tech savvy of E C Myers, who did this nifty little Acknowledgment Video for his debut novel Fair Coin, recently out from Pyr SF as part of their new YA line and well worth reading -- you can meet Mr. Myers at various events in the coming days as well. But after a busy and wonderful day of actually finally housewarming my apartment, I thought I should put a few thank you things out into the world... The biggest thanks in many ways have to go to my clients. Charlaine Harris, Sookie Stackhouse, and the True Blood folk kind of paid for the place, but I think it's a mistake to be too narrow in viewing the JABberwocky family. Because Charlaine wouldn't be a client today if it weren't for the general belief amongst authors in general that we do a good job for all of our clients, or maybe not a client today if back fifteen years ago when Charlaine Harris wasn't Charlaine Harris yet, but Arkham House and Elizabeth Moon and Simon Green were some of the ke...

While the electronics world gets ready to gather in Las Vegas, we've been spending time over the holidays upgrading the JABberwocky IT. 2008 was a good year for JABberwocky, it was the year that True Blood arrived, but on our bottom line it was the last year to pre-date. And in that perfectly pleasant last year before the True Blood storm, our foreign commissions represented just under 18% of our total commissions for the year, which was about typical in percentage terms for the entire history of JABberwocky. Well, we get to 2011, and our foreign commission income alone is bigger than the entirety of our commission income in 2008. And, foreign commissions are approximately 25% of our total. Most of this is a direct result of the success of Charlaine Harris and the Sookie Stackhouse novels following on the success of True Blood, but nowhere near all of it. No, nowhere near all of it., In the UK, Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson and Jack Campbell and Peter Brett are all se...

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...

Well, on balance, 2010 was a pretty danged amazing year for Brillig, and the Business of Being Brillig. On the dollar-and-cents scorecard, I've told people I think 2010 was the best year I had, and ever will have, and then I have to listen to all of these people saying "oh, you can't know that." Maybe I am selling myself short, but... 2010 was the year we were getting royalties for the second half of 2009, which was when there were 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the NY Times list at once (8 on paperback list linked, 9th on hardcover), a feat for an author that is unprecedented in the annals of publishing. I'd prefer to be pleasantly surprised if that can ever be equalled or surpassed by some other event or combination of events. Charlaine returned to Earth in the US in 2010, she was "just" an incredibly successful author, and the hardcover sales first week for DEAD IN THE FAMILY were "only" twice the first week sales of DEAD AND GONE the yea...

At this point, it's hard to see that Borders isn't on the verge of a bankruptcy filing, the best case scenario would be a Chapter 11 that would reorganize into a much smaller company that might have a go if focusing on stores that actually make money, but even that, I can't be real optimistic because same store sales are dropping so fast that a store which makes money today might not in two years. Though we live in a country that does allow companies to spend lots of time going bankrupt and doing it on multiple occasions, witness the airline industry. So what happened? OK, mid 1980s, Borders is one of the best stores around and starting to spread out in Michigan a little and lend out its inventory system. It's a good system. It lets stock sell down, then reorders. One day you might have 0 copies of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers on the shelf, the next day they'll get 3 in. So everytime you go to Borders, even if it's once a week, you might see a slightly di...

We at JABberwocky put up our first e-book this week, for Simon Green's Beyond the Blue Moon, which is now available for the Kindle . Why when I knock the Kindle early and often is this first? Well, Amazon has had a one-time NYC editor Dan Slater working in their digital department for many years, Dan has always been available to us and pushing and prodding on getting content for Amazon, first for their Amazon shorts program and then later for Kindle. He's there to meet with us, he's there to put us in touch with people if we need help, or even if we really don't need the help but it's nice to have the person there at the other end (kind of like the security of having the music in front of you even when you know the song by heart). Barnes & Noble, emails vanish into the mists and there's nobody to talk to without writing a certified letter to the head of the company to get some attention. Some other places even worse. We'll have more books up soon i...

Publishers Marketplace reports that long-time NAL publisher Elaine Koster passed away earlier this week at the age of 69. Elaine was kind of the go-to person during the early years of my career when I was selling Simon Green and Rick Shelley to the NAL list, the person editors like John Silbersack and Chris Schelling and later on Laura Anne Gilman would need to go to for the thumbs-up on an acquisition. I'm told by many of these people that she could be hell to work for, but was at the same time one of those people that a lot of good people would all learn a lot from working with. After she left NAL, she became an agent. John and Chris did eventually as well, actually. But we'll forgive her for that. And remember her support of the genre.

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, I visited Borders #40 in Bohemia, Long Island. Well, no, that would be crazy. Really, I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by travelling out to Long Island for the Grand Opening of the Whole Foods Market in Lake Grove, NY. Not as crazy, right! And the Borders was on the way. Like, go to a totally different line on the Long Island Rail Road and have a two-mile walk to the Borders but then the Suffolk County bus goes from directly in front of the Borders pretty much right to the Whole Foods along the way, not crazy at all. I took this picture as I approached the Borders because you're looking at a little piece of American corporate history that I don't think you can see too many other places right now. In fact, this may be just about the only place in the country where you can see it. For in the early 1990s, K-Mart decided that the future was in diversification. It acquired Sports Authority, it acquired Office Max, it acquired Borders to pa...

As publishers gain more control over pricing of their e-book product via the new "agency model," how creative will they get in figuring out how to maximize revenue? A real world example: Simon Green's Hawk & Fisher books are available for Kindle in a $9.99 3-in-1 omnibus edition, price is $3.33 per book. An individual Nightside book sells for as little as $5.20, as much as $6.40. The Hawk & Fisher books sell fewer Kindle copies by far than the Nightside books. Which on the one hand, makes sense because the Nightside books are newer and ongoing while the Hawk & Fisher books are backlist items, published a while ago and not ongoing. But on the other hand, the books themselves are very similar, and my instinct is that there's a bigger gap in sales than there should be considering the unit price per book. Is it possible that there are price-sensitive people who are so focused on price that they refuse to buy the Hawk & Fisher omnibus at $9.99, because...