BilmBlog500

Over the course of these royalty season posts, I have spoken a lot about the reserve against returns, and this entire post will deal with this. The idea of the reserve is rooted in reality.  The books the publisher sends out can be returned for full credit by booksellers.  The publisher has to ave some protection against paying royalties on copies that might be returned. But the reality of the reserve is that it is the publisher's cookie jar, a source of abuse, and like many things in the publishing industry a relic of a past age that doesn't want to come kicking and screaming into modernity. Once upon a time, the fate of a book really was a mystery.  It isn't any more. With Bookscan and other direct ties between major retail accounts and major publishers, the big publishers know the fate of a book.  Maybe not by June 30 for a book that came out in May, and I can understand a bit if the reserve against returns on that first royalty report is high.  Yet, I will o...

One of the reasons I have spoken a lot this week about royalties:  well, information is the mother's milk of literary representation, and along with the quality of the book itself, the three most important pieces of information we can use to sell an author are (1) the author's bibliography and biography (2) reviews (3) sales history.  Furthermore, if you want to gauge how much the market might pay for an established author you have to have a handle on actual expenses for printing books vs. actual revenue from selling them rather than royalties paid. And how do we figure out what an author's sales history is or how much revenue and expense the publisher has in printing and selling books, in both print and electronic forms?  Well, we gather that information from royalty statements. And I learned early in my career at Scott Meredith that sales information isn't well kept by stacking piles of paper in a filing cabinet.  Those Penguin statements I was telling you about, t...

Yesterday I told you what royalty statements looked like at the start of my career in the mid-to-late 1980s. As we progressed through the 1990s, publishers slowly started to provide "better" royalty statements.  As with the Random House portal , which has been around for two years now, I am always surprised when publishers make it easier for authors and agents to find information, though maybe I shouldn't always be because even publishers can sometimes recognize the cost of keeping secrets.   Unlike, let's say, the NSA .  That said, the additional information is often provided in a "watch what you wish for, you might get it" kind of a way.  It's sometimes so hard to find the information and so difficult to interpret it that the improvements are less significant than I would wish. Before continuing, this post's reminder that in major trade publishing that most of the books publishers send to bookstores can be returned to the publisher for full credit....

We are settling in after our move just in time for the arrival of royalty season.  In fact, some German royalties from Heyne, which were the first buds of the season or sprinkles of the monsoon or flakes of the blizzard arrived almost simultaneous with the move. And I realize in six years of having Brillig, I've never spoken much about royalty season. First, royalty season in the publishing industry doesn't arrive at the same time for everyone.  It isn't like spring or fall, but rather more like the last frost. When I was at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the early years of my career, royalty season arrived on February 1 and August 1.  Random House was due to send out reports the last day of January and last day of August, and they were very nice about it.  They didn't entrust their big checks to the Post Office in order to get another day or two of float, but rather would messenger them over, though late in the day so the check couldn't make it to the bank f...

Haven't done a business post in a while.  I keep thinking my work must be interesting, but I'm not sure what to talk about.  Part of it is probably ennui, I've been doing this thing for almost 27 years.  Part of it, maybe that I get to watch while other people have the fun, a lot of my own job has changed to being the mastermind of a business that isn't as small as it used to be.  Eddie takes on new clients and sells first novels, Brady gets to talk to our global partners and sell foreign rights, I get to be their boss. My current fun task is overseeing an upgrade of our databases. I don't know if this is something we, like, need-need to do.  The current databases have kept the business running for five years. But I don't like to settle.  One of the reasons JABberwocky and its clients do well is that we don't let ourselves, try not to let ourselves, get complacent, sit back and be happy with some good news when the right thing to do is ask how that bit of g...

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...

When I started my dialogue with Dean Wesley Smith, the starting point was a post he did, which you can find here , that was kind of on the question of whether your money should go to your agent before it came to you, though it did go off in a lot of different tangents and take on a lot more than that one question. But let's look at that question, as an example of why I think Dean's posts have kernels of truth but are not, as a whole, totally to my liking. Kernel of truth: Once upon a time, the marginal cost to a publisher of cutting each additional check was extremely high. No computers, royalty statements done by hand, checks cut by hand, do you want to have 820 or 8298 payees you have to send checks to every six months? In that context, I think it reasonable that a standard practice developed whereby publishers paid agents, and agents paid authors. The agents did need to get paid, the agents did need to see the paperwork, you can agree or disagree on the practice being es...

Weight: With its case the iPad weighs 1.5ish pounds. I am youngish if not youthful and do modest lifting but mostly the weight doesn't bother me. A bit when I was reading a novel on it while walking around the DC area for a good chunk of a day. A big hardcover fantasy can weigh more than an iPad. So it is true that the dedicated eReaders weigh more like a modest paperback while the iPad is compared to an epic fantasy in hardcover, but the weight issue can be put into perspective. Typing: I have survived typing on an iPod Touch, this keyboard is bigger! My biggest problem is that my finger will hit a bottom letter key instead of the space bar resultingminmsomethingblikenthis. And the autocorrect doesn't do a good job of recognizing run-on words that result from this unfortunate habit of mine. Maybe with time I will train myself to hit the space bar. Less often I hit the space bar instead of an m or n. I did also mate the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the new home Mac to...

I got meself an iPad three weeks ago this evening. I am quite happy with it so far. First and most important for me is its utility as a tool for reading, and it's quite winning for that. With reading, as with many other things, one of the things I like about the iPad is that it gives you a lot of different ways to do something. So for reading, option #1 might be to just open up an e-mail with a manucript and read the manuscript within Mail. Option #2 might be to open the file in Pages, Apple's word processing app for the iPad. Option #3 might be to put the manuscript on using shared wireless network with Stanza , which is what I'd been using on my iPod Touch, and which is owned by Amazon. Option #4 might be Apple's own iBook store. And then you've got the Kindle app for the iPad and the Nook app and the Borders app. Or you've got other word proccessing apps like Documents 2 Go. I've read one novel and reviewed a contract which I had opened in Pages, ...

So as I've mentioned in my posts this week, I've been taking on new clients very selectively.  And things have been going well enough for most of my long-time clients that I've usually been doing new contracts with current publishers.  I think it's possible that my last major multiple submission was over three years ago when I sent out Adam-Troy Castro 's Emissaries from the Dead . My, but the world has changed a lot since then. Most major publishers have now given staff Sony Readers or other such things to do their reading on.  Pretty much everyone takes submissions electronically.  An entire big multiple submission was done without a single piece of paper.   And I read multiple drafts of the manuscript on my Kindle and the final little tweaks just looking for the track changes on my computer.  Once upon a time, everything was on paper.  In the early years of JABberwocky, I would even do my own deliveries.  It saved an awful lot on postage.  It saved even more beca...

A week or so ago, another agent I know, Andrew Zack, blogged about a negative experience he had with Bookscan .  A book he had on submission was rejected by at least one house because the author's prior sales on Bookscan were not very good.  This frustrated Andrew because the actual sales were much better than what the Bookscan numbers were saying.  There is nothing more frustrating to an agent than to have a book you like rejected for a not very good reason.  Here at JABberwocky we had a manuscript by Fred Durbin rejected by one house because marketing vetoed it even though everyone on the editorial side was enthusiastic, and I found this rather an odd thing to do because a chunk of the book had just been serialized in Cricket Magazine, which to me you'd think maybe the marketing people would think was a nice hook. I've known Andrew for a very long time.  He was one of the last young publishing up-and-comers to cut his teeth working for Donald I. Fine , and for some cat...

This can be considered as the next post in the series I began way too long ago with My Life in Technology Pt. 1. There are a couple of movies that have extra resonance to me because of my job.  One is definitely Vampire's Kiss , in which Nicolas Cage plays a literary agent who thinks he is becoming  a vampire.  It's one of Cage's classically manic performances, this one good Cage manic instead of the bad Cage manic from the very dawn of Cage's career.  Hard to believe it's 21 years now since this opened.  One of the classic scenes for a literary agent is when he's tasked to locate some old short story contract for one of the agency's most important clients, and the task -- well, shall we say it gets to him! This is not an atypical problem.  The longer a literary agency is in business, the more the contract files should grow, and the more the number of actual important active contracts should grow as well because you sure hope in this business that your back...

The world is full of so many marvels that we sometimes lose sight of just how amazing some of them are, and I've been wanting for a while to talk some about how my business has changed over the 20-25 years I've been in it. It's 25 years ago this summer that I started my summer sojourn at Baen Books.  Honestly, I can't recall too much about the technology at Baen.  There must have been some computers somewhere because Baen was one of the first publishers to do a kind of fancy-pants royalty statement that told you how many copies were shipped and returned instead of just making up a number after a mysterious reserve against returns.  I think that was done very early on in Baen history, though I can't recall if it was done that way from the very start.  Most of my Baen work was old-fashioned scutwork.  I do know they had a very nice photocopier for back then.  & writing this just got me to thinking that we're just a few months away from the 25th anniversary of ...

Can anyone explain why there seems to be such a big gap in the use of computer technology between US and UK businesses, even when they're owned by the same conglomerate? In my business, this is most notable with regard to royalty statements. For many years now, most US publishers have been producing royalty statements that are quite detailed. Almost everyone gives you the important information: how many copies the publisher shipped, how many copies were returned by bookstores, and how many of the copies that are left "in the field" are being held as a reserve against possible future returns. In some instances, the publishers almost seem to have this gleeful "you want information, you've got information" approach, and manage to provide this information over three or five pages of stunningly incomprehensible statements. It's a dozen years or more with some publishers that this information has been provided. And somehow, the British publishers are st...