BilmBlog500

I saw the last preview before tonight's opening of Between Riverside and Crazy, a new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, a highly regarded playwright whose The Motherf**ker with the Hat was nominated for six Tony Awards.  I'd seen that play, somewhat flawed by tremendously well acted, at the Studio Theater in DC last year. What should I say about Between Riverside and Crazy? Bedecked with references to Game of Thrones and Whole Foods, it's a play very much of its time and moment.  It has some tremendous scenes in it.  It has lots and lots of laugh lines, and the audience was clearly having a very good time. I expect it will be popular and get some good reviews. But honestly, it's not a very good play. It takes around 40 minutes of a play that's around 2:10 with intermission to get to its point, to the extent that it has one. The lead character, name of Walter "Pops" Washington, is a former NYPD officer, who was shot six times by a white rookie officer eight yea...

Haven't done a blog post in way too long… On the subject of Hachette vs. Amazon of which too much has been written, let me make a few points: When Amazon says that e-book sales will grow if only they are priced cheaper , I consider this to be bullshit. John Scalzi is much more polite .  He disagrees by saying that he thinks it might well be a true statement for Amazon, but that it might not be true for everyone else, or for the broad publishing ecosystem in general, but that he has no reason to think Amazon is making up the numbers for Amazon. I don't feel like being that polite. Amazon's argument is essentially an updated variation of the famous "Laffer Curve" which Ronald Reagan used to justify the argument that lower taxes meant higher revenues.  Which if it is true at all is true only at certain high extremes of tax rates, because after a point you just can't keep getting more by charging less, whether it's e-books or government or chewing gum.   It a...

I have a nice schedule at Balticon this year, with seven panels, all looking interesting, and I hope I'll have a chance to meet some of you this year.  And if you don't see me at a panel -- hey, I'll be around the bar or the dealers room or looking for a game of something in the games room. Balticon 48 is a four-day extravaganza that takes place from Friday May 23, 2014 thru Monday May 26, 2014 at the Hunt Valley Inn, in Hunt Valley, MD.  Of the long-time conventions in the Northeast, I think it's done the best job of integrating games, anime, podcasting, and all sorts of other things of interest to the newer generations of sf fandom with the classic elements of regional sf conventions as they came together in the years after World War II.  I always have a blast, and this looks like one of the best personal schedules I've had at the convention.  Though they do seem to have a lot of the publishing panels in the early hours. All times are Eastern, and all room assign...

Watching the premiere of 24: Live Another Day earlier in the week gets me to thinking where it is that I have heard the name of William Devane before... Once Upon a Time, 24 years ago strangely enough, in September 1990, a client of mine named Barbara Paul called to say that there was a TV movie on NBC by the name of Murder COD being previewed in TV Guide that sounded a lot like her book Kill Fee. The TV movie and a perfectly respectable cast.  Patrick Duffy, still on Dallas, starred as a police detective, and one William Devane was the bad guy.  Devane was on Knots Landing. And if it sounded a lot like Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee -- well, that's because it was. The book had been under option for a while.  The option had, if memory serves, expired on September 10, which was now a few days in the past.  The producers of the TV movie had not quite forgotten to pay the purchase price for the TV movie, which they should have done months before when the started filming ...

Not sure I would have seen Noah otherwise, but there was a preview screening at the Museum of the Moving Image. It's an interesting movie, in a better way than when your spouse is saying your banana bread is interesting, but I'm still not sure it's actually a good movie. But interesting. The first interesting thing is the complete lack of sugar coating.  We can spend so much time with bible stories growing up, the idealized kinds of stories suitable for children of all ages, that we can forget that most of the people in those stories are kind of crazy.  Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Noah certainly.  And the director Darren Aronofsky doesn't let us forget that about Noah.  Nor does the portrayal by Russell Crowe.  There isn't a thing about the movie that lets us forget that you have to be a certain kind of crazy to build an ark because God tells you to, and to do most of the things that Noah goes around doing in the classic bible story of Noah.  It's an intere...

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...