Brillig

Pirates!

2012-01-18T23:59:00.002-05:00

This might disappoint some of my clients who've been tweeting about the on-line petitions against, but I find myself sympathizing more with the content providers than the internet providers on the SOPA/PIPA question.

Why?

Well, this weekend somebody e-mails me with a listing on eBay for a seller hawking complete sets of Sookie Stackhouse audios for £3.99. These are not legal. These are the copyrighted works of my client Charlaine Harris, and the sound recordings themselves are (p) Recorded Books, Inc., and the rights to sell these in the UK belong to the Orion Publishing Group. I don't believe for a single solitary second that the person who's putting up these listings thinks it's legal to run his/her own duplicating operation and to sell them on eBay for £3.99. And for that matter, I don't think the people buying these if they have half a brain or have ever been taught the "if it's too good to be true" think it's legal, either. And no, the seller isn't selling their one copy of the audios at whatever price they can get, they're selling multiple sets on this listing, and when this listing goes down they put up a new one with another batch.

You can't take the most basic step of reporting the seller by clicking the "report" link without being a registered eBay user. I have never been and have no desire ever to be a registered user of eBay, get along just fine without, thank you. And you can search high and low and up and down and left and right on eBay for an awfully long time without finding any depository e-mail for sending DCMA notices, there is no such thing, they just don't want to hear it.

Let me be blunt: eBay simply doesn't give a shit that it is aiding and abetting in the violation of copyright law.

So I don't want to hear eBay telling me about how I should oppose the cruelties of SOPA.

And of course, eBay is one of the good guys, a major corporation that theoretically has a reputation to care about.

What about the bad guys? As an example, a site that I was told about two weeks ago that has a raft of pirated A. Bertram Chandler e-books. This site is allegedly to help readers buy textbooks, what a generous kind group of people to help students. Oddly enough, their #1 category is science fiction and fantasy. The site doesn't have any depository e-mail for DCMA notices, or any contact information at all, for that matter. A request to their hosts, based in France, reveals that the registry is with group based in Poland. I decide I don't even want to try and complain, why not just draw a target on my back for Eastern Europan hackers to take their revenge. This site exists for no other purpose than to help in the infringement of copyrights, and the people who set up the site know it, and they're hiding behind their offshore addresses.

And guess what, I don't need eBay to run about running interference for these pirates. Or Yahoo, or Facebook, or Google, or whomever.

None of these major internet companies are our friends, they aren't my friends or your friends or your friends friends. There are big corporations, making huge sums of money, just like the big music companies and the big motion picture studios that have been trying to get SOPA passed.

I want to go after these people. I want the government to assist me in this. I want that copyright violators like this can at least be protested the same way that I can file a report about an illegal telemarking call to the FTC, maybe my one complaint won't do anything but if enough people complain, at least there's this sense that you can do something to fight people who are going around happily and knowingly breaking the law.

Now that I've vented, let me say that SOPA does go over the top. I don't like the idea of censoring search results. I don't think you should get zapped because you have one link somewhere to one person doing bad things.

So in that regard, it's good to have an opposition that might help to shave some of the rough edges off of the legislation.

But we need to make the criminals work a little harder.

I don't think, by the by, that these pirates are going to kill book publishing the way they killed Big Music. If for no other reason, than that people want whole books more than short stories, and the industry sells whole books at very reasonable prices. This is the exact opposite of the music industry, which thrived on selling whole books at high prices to people who really just wanted the short stories.

But even though I don't feel this person on eBay selling illegal copies of Charlaine Harris audios is going to kill the livelihood of Charlaine Harris or her agent, I don't think it's a good idea to treat laws like they are disposable, or things for us to ignore. I can't have a reader who's kind enough to tell me about the eBay listing and just shrug my shoulders and say, no, not worth worrying about. eBay shouldn't make it a challenge to report a crime in progress. It's a matter of principle to me.

And that's the kind of guy I am. I'm the kind of guy who called the NYFD to complain that a gym had a huge hamper of towels parked directly in front of the main fire exit. No, I didn't really expect there was going to be a fire, but fires do happen, and dozens of people die when those fires happen in places that have the fire exits blocked or locked.

So even though I don't think the pirates threaten me in a serious or urgent or immediate way, I want to have the might of law a little more on my side when it's necessary to go after them.

A lot of people disagree with me, some of my own clients. It happens, especially in these sorts of situations where we are trying to muddle through the fast-changing publishing industry. I had respectful disagreements with some of my clients on the proposed Google Books settlement, interestingly on that one I was siding with the Google Empire, on this one it's the clients siding with Google and the other big internet companies.

This is my personal opinion, it isn't an official opinion of the agency.

The JABberwocky CES

2012-01-09T17:22:00.004-05:00

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 selling more copies week in and week out than our most successful author in the UK in 2008. And, in relationship to Charlaine Harris, Sanderson and Campbell are closer in percentage terms to our market leader than is the case in the US.

In Germany, Peter Brett is outselling Charlaine Harris, with a big enough lead that I doubt he'll be passed, and even though both have now made the Der Speigel bestseller lists. Brandon Sanderson is starting to sell big-time as well. with an excellent chance he will become our 3rd Der Speigel bestseller.

In Japan, Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet books are selling far and away better than anything else we've previously had going in that market.

In Taiwan, Simon Green, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett have all had books hitting the charts for Eslite, the country's biggest brick-and-mortar book retailer.

And, yes, in markets across the globe, Charlaine Harris is afire.

This is all quite wonderful, except that it means that our foreign business is now bigger than our entire business was just a few short years ago. We're consistently doing 100 deals overseas every year, and for way more books than that when multi-book deals are taken into account.

Which means, alas, that our tracking mechanisms were getting a bit creaky...

2008 was also the year when we first got Filemaker and started to create our databases for keeping track of pretty much everything worth keeping track of, but as mentioned above that was when our entire business was smaller than our foreign desk in 2008. And when most of the royalty payments and such were coming from a small number of territories with really good on-the-ball sub-agents whose excellent IT we could coast on. Not so now, when royalties are coming in, sometimes in significant amounts, from twelve or twenty territories over the course of a year.

So off we go into our Deals database, to set up new tables and portals to allow us to quickly look in a nice and pretty way at all of our advances and royalties due by sub-agent in each overseas territory. Eureka moment, finally figuring out that something having to do with the relational graph for a relational database meant that the portals were only working for the existing author sorts if the author had some kind of listing in the royalty chart as well as a listing in the advances chart.

Then it's off to the database we were using to schedule our London Book Fair appointments and, as of 2011, Eddie's Bologna appointments. We probably could have built on the existing database, but it made more sense to start afresh. Now we have a database that will better allow us to check if we have a meeting with one editor at a particular publishing company instead of with some other editor, we have prettier layouts to track all of the people we maybe want to meet with by country so that we can more easily work with our sub-agents to keep those things up to date. We'll have a better place to track which sub-agents want printed catalogs, electronic catalogs or both, and if we've actually mailed them out. We'll have better places to keep track of which things we've sold to which publishers so that we know what we're supposed to talk about when we get to our appointments. It will work so that we can have a consolidated database for both Bologna and London. Not that we couldn't do all of those things a year ago, but that now we'll be able to do all of them better.

Today's eureka moment, getting out the Filemaker book and studying up on the "Send Email" scripting, so that now we can send e-mails to take care of scheduling from within the database, instead of having to copy and paste addresses into the e-mail program. And now that we've done that, it means that we can more easily target all kinds of other e-mails. The e-mails we send out when an author hits the bestseller lists, or gets an award nomination, we can now set up a way that an e-mail about Simon Green hitting the bestseller lists can go not only to our sub-agents, but also to publishers who are publishing Simon Green.

At this point, some of you might be rolling your eyes in disbelief that we haven't been doing all of that kind of stuff routinely for years now. Well, maybe you're right, except that my gut instinct tells me that our overall IT process for keeping track of different things was probably better than for a lot of other agencies before we made all of these improvements, and that now it's just that much better. Most literary agencies are rather small, 12 employees or fewer, often way fewer, not a huge IT budget. Most of them have probably gotten basic management software of some sort off the shelf to track deals and handle basic payments, but I doubt they go too much further than that.

I feel as if the hard work is done, it's always an experience to me when I'm getting out the MIssing Manual for Filemaker and playing around with it like I have half an idea what it is that I'm doing. Phew! But now that we have the capability to keep track of all the data, it also means a little more to do day-in day-out for every deal. We can keep track of royalties due by sub-agent, but now we have to start adding sub-agents to the royalties due table. Small things like that will take only a few extra seconds for each deal, but when you multiply each step with a few extra seconds by 130 deals, it's not an invisible amount of time.

And it means using the information, going at it with out sub-agents more often on payments that should have come in, on checking if a publisher purchased books #1-3 in a five-book series when/if they plan to get around to buying those last two. I like it when I occasionally have an author asking about a particular advance or royalty or something, because it's good to know that some authors are out there keeping on top of these things, which reminds us to keep on top of them for all of our clients. At the same time, if every author for every one of those hundreds of foreign deals is wondering monthly about when a payment comes in or when a book is scheduled to appear in Portugal, you can spend too much time dealing with that instead of actually selling books in Portugal, it's no different for the agents we work with overseas.

Still and all, on the whole I'm pretty happy. I've worked very hard on foreign rights over the entire 17 year history of JABberwocky, and it's exciting to see that our business is more global than it's ever been before, and likely only to become moreso, And I think we've done what we needed to do to keep on top of all of it. Still, thinking of all those new fields in new tables and new layouts that need to be populated -- well, that's not the fun side of the business, not where the glamour is.

And if we can just be sure not to use that e-mail script step to do one of those NY Times things and actually send 8 million people and e-mail that was intended for 362. What's that thing Spider Man says, about awesome power and awesome responsibility.

Barnes & Borders

2012-01-03T11:09:00.002-05:00

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 miss as a literary agent for sf/fantasy. Not so much the one in Georgetown, which sold very little in the genre though it was overall still considered a kind of flagship store for the company and had a depth of inventory that went beyond what was justified by its sales. That store gave me "Evanston moments."

Because it was visiting Evanston, IL, I'd guess when I was over for WorldCon in 2000, that I first came across a Borders with a really really godawful surprisingly bad sf/fantasy section, which theretofore I'd never known such a thing existed, and then popped across the street to the B&N which had a much better selection, but you could tell by looking at the yellowed books and how they would have the 5th printing of a Deathstalker novel that was several months into a 6th printing that they weren't actually selling sf/fantasy but at least deserved credit for having the selection.

That was a strength of B&N for many years, to have a more consistent core title selection across their entire range of stores, and that was the Georgetown store, to go in and be grateful they were carrying a lot of JABberwocky titles but to be deeply depressed by the deeply yellowed tops of the books.

But to get to the actual two points of the post...

1. B&N is getting very Borders like in their selection now. They're no longer bothering with a core stock across the full range of their stores. It used to be, and I felt this lack of brand identity was a very big problem for Borders that did not serve them well, that I could go to the Borders in Commack and find half the selection of the Stony Brook store a few miles away, while the B&N gap was more like 2/3 or 3/4 of the title count in a bad store vs. a good one. Now, the Tribeca B&N carries fewer than half the titles in Union Square. The B&N in Bayside Queens carries only two of the six "Lost Fleet" paperbacks, and these are up there with the Nightside books as the top-selling JABberwocky titles after Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett.

Now, B&N doesn't have to worry about physical competition the way Borders had to worry about competition from B&N. But there is competition from Amazon. There's a school of thought that says it doesn't make any sense for B&N to compete with the long tail of Amazon because there's no way to do it so why even try, as a B&N you're selling something other than whether the store carries two Lost Fleet paperbacks or six. I'm not there. Cost of inventory in mass market is not a huge factor in the success or failure of your business, I still think if you're a B&N and you want to give people an excuse to get in their car and visit your store that you can't nickle and dime. B&N knew this once, and it saddens me that they no longer do. That said, times have changed, and maybe it doesn't matter the way it did six or eight years ago that your stores had full runs of the key series while the other guys did not.

2. I used to visit DC for a four day weekend in no small part because I loved to take the temperature of a very big bookselling market. I could easily visit 6 B&N, 8 Borders, a handful of Waldenbooks, a few Daltons, a handful of Olsson's, some Books a Million. I could easily visit a very very impressive 30-35 bookstores over a long weekend. Now there's nothing left to visit. The mall stores slowly disappeared. Then Olsson's went bankrupt. Then Borders started to close the underperformers before now closing entirely. And the Books a Million in Old Town Alexandria is gone as well.

So let's see, now on a DC visit I can go around and visit the Dalton/now B&N in Union Station, B&N on E St., Clarendon, Rockville, Springfield, Potomac Yard and Bethesda. KramerBooks and Books a Million in Dupont Circle. Politics & Prose. Whatever's before security at National Airport. So that trip's gone from 32 bookstores to 10. And really, not even that. Traipsing out to Rockville or Springfield made sense when I could visit both a Borders and B&N, not just to visit another B&N. Potomac Yard is a pain to get to without a car, I'm not up for that any more. Politics & Prose is a pain to get to and doesn't really have much of an sf/f section so what's the point. I used to think about dragging in some of these just to make the list of stores visited look very very impressive for claiming the trips as business. Now, I can go to DC and actually justify visiting all of seven bookstores that might offer a reasonable return on the schlepping.

Am I right to find this depressing?

Because that's one way to look at it, with each new bookstore that closes more and more of us can now choose to drive several more miles than before to visit a boring B&N that maybe doesn't even bother to carry the entire Lost Fleet series in mass market. [Another of the B&N that's said to have closed is their Westside Pavilion store just south of Westwood in LA; with the Borders having closed a year prior to the bankruptcy, this introduces yet another urban book-buying desert, with the closest stores now requiring a schlep several miles west to Santa Monica or east to the Grove.]

Intellectually, I know that we can also all now sit in our easy chairs and buy pretty much whatever book we want in a minute or two on our iPads or our Nooks, our Kindles or our phones.

But you know, even that kind of depresses me in a way.

Ken Russell

2011-11-28T12:50:00.002-05:00

I don't think Ken Russell was a particularly good director, but I'm nonetheless quite saddened to hear that he has passed. The one film of his that I did like, Altered States from 1980, was a good film indeed, and perhaps one of the most influential experiences in setting me on the path of being a real film buff.

It was Christmas vacation in 1980 when my sister, younger brother and I took the Shortline bus into Manhattan to do a double feature of Simon at the Cinema 1, followed by Altered States at the Loews Astor Plaza. I hadn't to that point had a lot of big screen 70mm experiences at the movies, a few including The Empire Strikes Back that summer, but there was something about Altered States that effected me in an entirely different way. It didn't just use 70mm sound to make spaceships and light sabers woosh by. It used 70mm and six-track sound to heighten everything, to make the low points in the movie a little bit lower and the high points a little bit higher. Even more than with Empire, it used makeup and music and sound effects and just about everything to really really show me everything that a movie could do. Ultimately, if there's any one moviegoing experience that I have to say did it for me, that made me fall in love with going to the movies, it was seeing Altered States at the Astor Plaza on that December day in 1980.

I think it's also important to mention that the film holds up for me. Altered States got some good reviews, has a cult following, but screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky divorced himself from the film, the reviews weren't all raves by any measure. But when I saw it as an adult many years later in 70mm on the much smaller screen or the Riklis theatre at the pre-expansion Museum of the Moving Image, the film still worked its magic. If I could see it again on the big screen tomorrow, I happily would.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't until I was reading about the movie many years later and saw somehow or other that it had opened at the UA Gemini and Loews Astor Plaza that I actually realized it was the Astor Plaza where I'd seen the movie, and this was my introductory experience with what became my favorite movie theatre. I didn't live in NYC then, I didn't go back to the Astor Plaza for another couple of years.

Au Revoir, Ken Russell. And thank you.

movie go round

2011-11-19T23:17:00.002-05:00

As a member of the Museum of the Moving Image, I get a chance to see screenings. The museum has a great new theatre, and again this year the Museum has also gotten some seats at the Variety Screening Series. And with awards season going, it's screening after screening after Q&A after Q&A as the studios try and attract attention of Oscar voters and other Guild members in NYC. And I've been finding time for some other films as well.

I'm just back from seeing Like Crazy, an interesting romance with Anton Yelchin, who played in the Star Trek reboot as the young Chekov. Good, not perfect. It's a little too quiet in that amerindie kind of way, and I never quite felt the heated passion between the two leads that I was supposed to. Which is more the fault of the script than of the direction, because Yelchin and the female lead Felicity Jones get more out of their roles with charm and bonhomie and Yelchin especially with youthful good lucks than I think is there in the script. In fact, script-wise, I was rooting for the girl to pick the other guy, that was the relationship that seemed more real to me. And then the movie ends on one of those notes of indecision. Good enough, but I think the critics have overpraised. Prior reference point: Green Card. Which this kind of updates a bit in a post-9/11 kind of a way. At the AMC Empire 25, #24. Playing now.

Maybe I'd have dozed off in Like Crazy if I hadn't gotten a little napping in earlier in the day, during Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This new version of the John LeCarre classic cold war spy thriller, earlier a British TV mini-series with Alec Guiness, comes from the directorial hand of Tomas Alfredson, who previously directed the intriguing Let The Right One In, a Scandi vampire movie that was remade as the inferior US film Let Me In. Tinker Tailor is awfully well made, beautifully photographed and edited and good music cues and all kinds of good British actors, but it's also so cerebral and so back and forth in time and so true to the intricacies of the original novel that it's rather a dreary chore to actually watch and keep track of. I don't mind going to and even enjoying a good movie that might be a little depressing. But I don't really go the movies to do work, and this was a little too much work for me. While I can recognize what's good about the film, which is an awful lot, I think the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its excellent parts. At the DGA Theatre, Manhattan. Opening in December.

Last night it was The Descendants. This is the new film from Alexander Payne, 7 years after his Sideways, and his earlier films include About Schmidt, Election and Citizen Ruth. The Descendants has gotten some rave reviews, I wasn't sure what I'd think because Sideways was a movie everyone loved, which I happily and contentedly ended up sleeping through. Tinker Tailor, I hated that I was having trouble staying awake, Sideways was one of those movies when I'd wake up, and then decide I really needed the nap more. But why dump on Sideways, when the simple fact is that The Descendants is indeed one of the best movies you'll see this year. George Clooney gives a stellar performance. The script and direction are perfectly attuned to the real world reality that people are often kind of textured, and we keep finding layers peeled back on the characters, the annoying in-law and loving father all in one, the surf dude annoying boyfriend who has a lot more going on than just that. There are just a lot of things that come together in the best scenes in the movie, starting with a uniformly excellent cast but including how the scenes are lit, how they're framed, how they're scored, how they're edited. I could go on and on diagramming everything in the hospital scene with George Clooney and his in-law. I won't. I'll just say this is the real thing, that rare critic's darling that deserves every bit of praise, every accolade, every kind word. It's in limited release now, coming soon to many more theaters, and so totally worth seeing. I'd be surprised to find a better performance than Clooney's for Best Actor this year. Moving Image theatre.

Thursday night was The Muppets. The Museum of the Moving Image has been running a Jim Henson exhibit that's been at other museums across the country, probably not so often with such an extensive program of weekend events including the family, long-time co-workers, more. Doesn't hurt that the home base for Muppet manufacture is just a few blocks away from the Museum. This screening of the new Muppet movie was attended by Henson's wife and daughter. Talk about awkward! One can't say enough about Jim Henson's legacy, and my greatest fear has been that this attempt to reboot the franchise after so many years of creative uncertainty and ever-changing ownership would totally suck. Which, yes, is really awkward if you've got Henson's wife and daughter sitting in the theatre with 200 people who aren't liking what they see. Well, that totally isn't what happened. The Muppets is good, maybe even better than good, not Jim, nothing can really be Jim Henson at his best, but good. There's a new Muppet in town facing an identity crisis, he doesn't quite know he's a Muppet but he knows he loves them, and he has to get the old gang back together to save the old Muppet Studio and Muppet Theatre from an oil tycoon. The plot is a little unoriginal, though of course the original Muppet Movie was a "let's put on a show" variant so we can't fault The Muppets for being the same. It's maybe too self referential. There are some nice new songs and good production numbers here which owe something to Enchanted, but there's also a reprise of Rainbow Connection -- two of them, actually, one an ad for a seedy Reno hotel which might alone be worth going to the movie to enjoy. But couldn't we have tried for another new song to rival the perfection of Rainbow Connection, instead of going at it twice? Star Jason Segel co-wrote and got the film going by sheer force of will, at least according to the press notes, so it's a little disappointing that he seems ill at ease acting opposite the Muppet, the best humans in The Muppet Movie or on The Muppet Show always seemed perfectly at ease, Segel doesn't. I'm focusing on the things that didn't quite work, but that isn't the message I should be giving, which is that this is an entertaining film that is 100% certain to satisfy all of us baby boomers carrying fond memories of growing up with Jim Henson and The Muppet Show. It's harder to say how today's children will react, this was the big concern expressed by my guest for the screening, author Myke Cole, I'm less worried about that than he is but it's a legitimate worry. I may end up going to see this again with my brother and 13-year-old nephew over the holiday weekend. If I do, it won't be reluctantly. Which is the main thing, this may not be a movie that I'll cherish seeing every few years the way I do The Muppet Movie, but it's a movie I'll happily see at least once more. Oh -- it is preceded by a delightful Toy Story short. Moving Image Theatre.

Let me also circle back to Being Elmo, a documentary about Kevin Clash, the puppetteer behind Sesame Street's Elmo. This delightful film is still playing here and there around the country and worth seeking out. Clash grew up idolizing the Sesame Street muppets, and took to making his own creations. Which led to a job on local TV, then to a job on Captain Kangaroo, eventually to Sesame Street where he took an anonymous puppet that wasn't quite working and made of it the Elmo that launched the Tickle Me phenomenon. It's a heartwarming story, of course. Clash was at the screening I saw and seemed as genuine and heartwarming in person as the version of him presented in the film. In his life story, in his journey, in his enjoyment at what he does, there's this temptation to say he's the next coming of Jim Henson. Except of course that Being Elmo also reminds that Jim Henson was so much more than most mere mortals, not just as a puppeteer but as businessman, as a writer, as a visionary, as technician, so much in so very very many ways. Being Elmo does a great job of telling us how special and wonderful it is to have one or two of Henson's gifts, and at the same time reminds us of how sad it is that someone with all of Henson's gifts died so young.

Other movies I've seen recently, but I'll have to call it quits here. It's nice to find some time to do at least a few quick takes, and wipe a cobweb or two from the blog.

Concluding message: The Muppets is the family film to see this Thanksgiving, and The Descendants is the one for the adults to enjoy.

52 Books Later

2011-11-09T00:23:00.003-05:00

Cautiously, but clearly, I'll give a "Mission Accomplished" to DC's New 52 project.

Earlier Posts on the New 52:
Here
and Here
and Here
and Here

Prior to the New 52, I was reading a handful of DC superhero books, tops, and that might be a generous assessment. I might try this one, or dip into one for a few issues and then dip out, but all told a handful over the course of a month.

For the second month of the New 52, I took upwards of 20 #2s.

And of the 20 #2s I purchased, there are only a couple that have me bailing out of an issue #3, Savage Hawkman the most noticeable disappointment. All of the others, there were some that were picking up steam (the back-up feature in Men of War is growing on me, as an example) and a few that I'm maybe a little doubtful about over the long run (Green Lanterns: New Guardians and Aquaman had iffy moments along the way in their #2s, but ended up leaving me with a good impression and lingering doubts), but overall the quality was holding up. There are even six or eight books from the first week of the New 52 which came out last week with #3s, and I'd say on all accounts that if I picked up those #3s, I would be back to buy the #4s.

If I had concerns along the lines of "well, so I'll buy all of these in September, how many will I still be buying in January" it looks like it will be at least 15, maybe even more. The New 52 will have tripled or quadrupled my monthly purchases of DCU titles.

It isn't just the New 52. There's a new Huntress series by Paul Levitz and Marcus To that came out in the 2nd month of the New 52, and issue #1 (of 6) was terrific.

Which points to another oddity, that there are writers who are doing one book that I'm finding really interesting and then turning around and doing another that is leaving me absolutely cold. Levitz, with the disappointing Legion of Superheroes #1, and then sneaking in with the wonderful Huntress mini-series. Scott Lobdell, with Teen Titans on the credit side and Red Hood and the Outlaws on the debit. That really does surprise me, I'd have expected to find good writers always being good writers and bad writers bad, that's how it works in my day job, but clearly there's a lot more going on in terms of the characters, the overall series conception, the mix with the artwork, where overall the writer is in control but not quite in the unitary single-handed control that we find over the course of working with 40 novels by Simon Green, 25 by a Tanya Huff, Elizabeth Moon or Charlaine Harris.

So yes, it was a Good Thing.

Flat Tax

2011-11-06T23:21:00.002-05:00

So here's the thing with a flat tax, it doesn't actually make filing taxes all that much simpler.

Most people already have a pretty simply tax situation. They earn money from their job, which gets reported to the IRS. In fact, for a lot of people, your state and the IRS could just send you a bill based on the information that's given to them on your W2 and 1099 forms. Some states have even tried doing this. Of course, companies like H&R Block spend considerable lobbying dollars to stop this from happening broadly.

The complexity in the tax code, lots of it is someplace where it can't be so easily eliminated, which is in defining what income actually is for businesses or for people with more investments and wrinkles in their earning picture.

I have a relatively simple business to keep track of, I take money, I send most of it on to clients, but then there are still a lot of rules and will always be a lot of rules for just what amount of the rest of it is an expense. As an example, the government has decided that entertainment costs are only 50% deductible so that there is a disincentive to business owners to have the government subsidizing those famous three martinis at a three martini lunch. Health insurance is a fully deductible business expense, some people think it shouldn't be. If you spend a gazillion dollars buying assets that will last a gazillion years we have depreciation schedules and exceptions thereto. There isn't a great way for flat tax to just do away with all of these rules that we use to determine what the word "profit" means. For a lot of my clients, who are self-employed writers, a flat tax isn't going to be an easier tax, there will still need to be some form of Schedule C, you'll still need to save those receipts, deal with a home office deduction, maybe. And very few people who benefit from various of those things like a home office deduction will be eager to see those things eliminated in the interest of simplicity. Even if you might end up with less tax being paid in the end, all you'll see is that your little special deduction is going away, and you'll be opposed.

The first Sookie Stackhouse novel DEAD UNTIL DARK was published in 2001. The cover price was, I think $5.99 or $6.50. It's currently $7.99. Let us say hypothetically that Barnes & Noble ordered 2000 copies of the book in 2001, and that over the ten years since B&N has never had fewer than 500 copies sittling on its shelf. So which 500 copies are sitting on the shelf? Copies that were ordered in 2001 at $6.50, or copies ordered in 2011 at $7.99?

That's a complication in the tax code. If B&N can say for tax purposes that it has always had 500 copies purchased ten years ago for $6.50 sitting on its shelves, which is known as "last-in first-out" or "lifo" inventory, it gets to reduce its profit for tax purposes, because its cost for the books that are selling is based on a $7.99 price instead of a $6.50 price. That's approximately $.75 for each of those 500 books, or around $350, that B&N has made in the real world (there are not many or any first printing copies of Dead Until Dark sitting on bookstore shelves) that it hasn't made for tax purposes.

Tax complexity! Can you use "lifo," or do you use "fifo" where the goods you sell are always the goods purchased or made first, or do you use "dollar cost averaging" where you use the average price?

There are all kinds of decisions that businesses have to make that are like this, where you can do or say one thing or another and end up with a different tax bill.

The $375 profit B&N might be deferring on Dead Until Dark doesn't seem like much, but pretend you are an oil company with big tank farms that can hold huge amounts of gas, and you can say those are filled with old gas that you purchased for $23 a barrel or new gas that you purchased for $86 a barrel. I have no idea how big a huge gas tank in a tank farm is, but if you're talking 100,000 barrels with a $63 price difference, that's an awful lot of swing to your taxable income.

This is where the loopholes lurk in the tax code, where the unfairness comes in, not in the fact that it's too darned complicated to figure out how much tax you owe because you're paying 15% on the first few thousand dollars in income and 28% on the last few thousand.

Favor a flat tax, don't favor it, just don't do either because you think it's going to make the tax system simpler. A simpler tax system wouldn't come about from a flat tax, it would come about from the wholesale closing of tax loopholes. And if you like your mortgage interest deduction or college tuition credit, are you any more eager to give up that credit, than Exxon would be to give up the ability to let it decide that all the gas sitting in all its gas tanks today is gas it obtained for $23 a barrel at some point in the past?

Change

2011-10-25T17:35:00.002-04:00

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. Authors make more money from e-books. I’m making this bold unqualified assertion to make up for all of the people making the other assertion, that authors lose money on every e-book. In truth, you can make both. Authors can lose $2 every time somebody buys an e-book instead of a hardcover, but they can just as easily make $2 for every four mass market paperback sales that turn into e-books. Charlaine Harris has huge-selling hardcovers, there’s a hit to her income as those sales move to e-book. Jack Campbell has six Lost Fleet books never published in mass market, there’s a gain every time those sales move to e-book. So I shouldn’t say that authors make more money from e-books, but nor should anyone claim the opposite, that the e-book is the end of authors, of writing, of culture as we know it.

[You can look at 2010 hardbacks reported sold in PW. Pick any reasonable guess for how many of those sales migrated to e-book from 2010 to 2011, multiply by $2, and you're looking at a big chunk of change in lost royalties. Actually, I have no idea in the macro sense if the much larger # of authors who don't have those hardcover sales and are gaining on the mass market end. But what fun is a blog if you can't make blanket statements that can't be substantiated as firm hard fact that everyone should quote on the internet for sixteen years to come.]

To sum up: royalty statements come in, huge amounts of e-book sales, publishers doing well and many though by now means all authors doing better, too.

This is not the death of publishing.

With two caveats.

1. A situation where an Amazon can set the price level for e-books as a loss leader, they have the ability to bring the entire publishing industry to its heels. They can kill publishing in the blink of an eye no matter how much of it they decide to do for themselves. So, for that matter, could a court decision that declares the agency model an illegal restraint of trade.

2. People will lose places to buy print books faster than their actual desire to buy them. One thing’s for sure, the migration to e-book sales isn’t good for businesses that revolve around the sale of printed books. I think I worry more than anything about this. We could look back five years from now and view 2011 as the final flowering of a dual print/e-book marketplace that will dry up like a three-week-old bouquet into a shriveled e-only marketplace in which vastly fewer total numbers of books are being sold.

Putting aside those worst case scenarios, if the publishing industry isn’t dying of e-book, it’s certainly changing, and changing by the day. Tobias Buckell just kickstarted his 4th Xenowealth novel. Jim Hines has self-published electronically an earlier novel and some short story collections. Things like this leave a reduced role JABberwocky.

I worry and publishers worry about how we remain relevant in this changing marketplace. It’s one reason why we have a limited but growing e-book program at JABberwocky, helping our clients monetize their work in ways that weren’t possible a few years ago. But it isn’t “dying” that I use as the adjective there, it’s “changing.”

the 4th week of the New 52

2011-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

The 4th week of DC's New 52 was the one week when I was interested enough of the 13 issues to buy a full bundle at a 25% discount being offers by Midtown Comics. This meant I was getting some comics i had no particular interest in, but I wasn't paying any more for them

So I guess it's no surprise that there are foru books that I just didn't like very much at all, and won't discuss at any length. Those are Blackhawks #1, Justice League Dark #1, and Batman: The Dark Knight. And I Vampire, which I don't remember if I'd actually wanted or not.

I don't know what to say about my relationship with Jonah Hex. I read this book for a good long time in my earlier comics days, maybe when Gerry Conway was writing it, but I bowed out of the new series that started several years back by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti. I didn't dislike it, per se, but there was something missing that kept me from ever exactly warming to it. Still, I wanted to see what they were up to with All Star Western #1, art by Moritat, which put Jonah Hex into an urban Gotham City environment. Nice idea, but same result. I can't point to anything that's exactly wrong with the issue, but it's very wordy, it reads like work, there's just something about it where I'm admiring it but not really getting any entertainment value out of it. These writers must be doing something right, their last run on Hex was running well beyond any over/under I would have put on a revival of the character in the current day and age. This is an interesting idea on putting Hex into the thick of the DCU. This will do well, my hat's off, but I won't be part of the crowd.

I'm not sure I'd have purchased Green Lantern: New Guardians outside of the bundle, I didn't get any of the other GL books in the New 52, so it was a pleasant surprise. I've always kind of liked the Kyle Rayner character as much or more than any of the non-Hal Jordan GLs (the DC Retroactive with Jon Stewart was a good argument for him, though, I have to say). This story is probably, like a lot of these, a little attenuated, not exactly 20 pages, but it led to a fun place. Power rings from all over the galaxy are making their way to Kyle, and shortly after the rings their former bearers are looking to get their property back. I'm wanting to see how he deals with this. Written by Tony Bedard, art by Tyler Kirkham and Batt. The art isn't great storytelling, but it isn't pin-ups either. Even though it's not exactly what I look for, I would say it more added than subtracted to my enjoyment of the yarn.

The Savage Hawkman is a book I wouldn't at all have expected to want, I've never been a particularly big Hawkman fan, he's one of those DCU characters who's just kind of around and you put up with on occasion. But a quick browse at the store suggested I give it a try, and I was glad I did. Written by Tony Daniel, it introduces a Carter Hall who is kind of the reluctant Hawkman, trying without success to get rid of the get-up, soon facing supernatural baddie. The art by Philip Tan works well for this book. It's a little rough, shades over clean lines, and if the storytelling is a bit rough as well -- well, I'm always impressed when I find myself not minding the kinds of things I always mind. It works. Be back for more.

With all the New 52 excitement, I've forgotten to track down the Teen Titans graphic novel by Wolfman and Perez. But let's just say that the new Teen Titans, written by Scott Lobdell with art by Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund, won't be confused with Wolfman/Perez, and I mean that in a good way. There's an undercurrent of humor to the script and the art both, that isn't like anything we'd remember from the back then version of the Titans. But it's good stuff. There's some great art, pages 5-7 are complex but quite easily followed. The script has a nice take on the Titans, setting the series in a world where teen heroes are the source of agita and approbation. I'm not entirely thrilled to see the end of this issue tying into the new Superboy book, please no major crossovers, but at least here I am interested in the new Superboy book as well.

The Flash with story and art by Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato has been getting some good buzz and deservedly so. Great? No. Good? More than. There's a little too much Superman/Lois in the relationship between Barry Allen and Iris West, but it's an interesting and intriguing story overall, and I like how the art handles the speedstering part of the Flash persona.

Another book getting good buzz is the new Aquaman. Geoff Johns redeems his very disappointing (to me) work on the Justice League reboot with this new take on Aquaman. Some similarities to the "Superman on the road" thing that was going on over the last year in that book, Aquaman is on land, eating at a diner, being asked obnoxious questions while he tries to eat his chow. But it helps more than a bit that the art by Ivan Reis and Joe Prado suggests that we're playing that for laughs some. A bit of a high wire act, because it's clear that the menace in the book is supposed to be real. Where are the creators planning to go with this? Keep on the high wire and try and balance some humor with menace, or will they end up taking the more serious turn that Johns' extensive experience doing all of these major tie-in events suggests as his default? I'll be following along to see...

George Perez is writing and doing page breakdowns for art by Jesus Merino in the new Superman. I hear that Perez will be around only for six issues. But I'm quite likely to be reading those six. There's a complete separation between this and the Superman we find in Action, which is fine (and perhaps not forever, it will ultimately be a surprise not to have a story that follows the character along in the different Superman books...). This story has elements of all kinds of Supermans past, there's the Morgan Edge from two or three decades back as media mogul, the distinction between Clark and Superman is very much something from the Richard Donner Superman movies, etc. But definitely one to come back to.

Voodoo had such nice clean well-told art (by Sam Basri) that a casual glance said it had to be read, and it ended up being an unexpected treat. The script by Ron Marz was a tad predictable, you could see five pages before the end where the story was going to go, though that being said I'm not sure I'd have predicted the final panels, and the final panels not what I might have expected, perhaps I can find some more surprises in issue #2. On the other hand, this is another of the stories that seems to be taking 20 pages to tell a story that should really needs only 12 or 15. My tolerance for those isn't indefinite, and the final issues of DMZ are certainly straining my patience for books that feel padded. But I shouldn't quibble too much. Good script, clean art with excellent storytelling, fun to read. If it can keep with those virtues, I'll be able to look beyond some of the flaws.

I've been a fan of Firestorm from the first issue of the first run in the 1970s, so I saved the new Fury of Firestorm (written by Ethan Van Sciver and Gail Simone, art by Yildiray Cinar) for last. In this version Professor Martin Stein is still dead, as he was left in Flashpoint. Ronnie Raymond is still alive, and attending the same hgh school as the newer version of Firestorm, Jason Rausch. So far, so good, I really liked the set-up of the relationship between Raymond and Rausch, and the school scenes overall were for the 2010s what the 1970s origin from Gerry Conway and Al Milgrom was to its day. The terrorists that cause the arrival of Firestorm here are considerably, um, updated and upgraded from the 1970s versions, no problem there. And I'm fine with the new idea that Jason and Raymond can each become their own Firestorm. It's not the original idea, but as variations on the theme go this one is one I can live with. The one thing I really hate is the newly found idea that the "Fury" in Fury of Firestorm isn't an adjective, but a noun. The idea here is that the two Firestorms can merge to become Fury, when they say Fury of Firestorm they mean it in a very literal way. And Fury looks silly, the idea overbaked. Whatever, there's enough good here that I'm going to see where it all goes.

New 52, Roundup #3

2011-10-17T07:43:00.001-04:00

Finishing my assorted purchases from weeks 2 and 3...

Superboy #1
written by Scott Lobdell, art by R.B. Silva and Rob Lean
I rather liked the Connor Kent Superboy character, and quite liked the recent run by Jeff Lemire and Pier Gallo so having a new Superboy wasn't at the top of my wish list for the New 52. Perhaps just as well that this is a completely new take that can't be directly compared, and at least a mildly interest new take at that. As with Connor is a clone. There is a hint that as in the new Action the character might not be entirely saintly when he emerges into the real world. The art didn't do much for me, though I did like that the story takes full advantage of the art form with a visual cue that isn't commented upon at the time but which is picked up on a few pages later, requiring the reader to pay attention to both words and pictures. A modest success.

Deathstroke #1
written by Kyle Higgins, art by Joe Bennett and Art Thibert
Terminator this, if you please. I found this book to be outright dull. The character has been around at the margins of the DC Universe for some 30 years, and seems to have children with father issues in every city in the DC Universe, but never a great character. So this reboot starts out with an instant fatal flaw that nobody wants the guy around any more and the first issue is a setup to get him out of the way. What this guy needs is a good new reason to care about him, not an excuse for me to say "but I DO want the character out of the way.

Suicide Squad #1
written by Adam Glass, art by Federico Dallocchio and Ransom Getty
The first three pages are great, and then all downhill from there. Two page spread on the Suicide Squad that has me poring over each image with curiosity about who the characters are, what is happening to them. But over the 15 pages following we find out very little about the characters, names or personalities or etc. We get a footnote to refer to Detective #1, which is not good for the second week of the New 52. The art following is meh, pictures and panels but very little in the way of storytelling. This is a very definite one and out.

DC Universe Presents #1
Deadman story and art by Paul Jenkins and Bernard Chang
I think DC Universe Presents is intended as the try-out title like the old Showcase to test something for a few issues. Based on this I do not see Deadman graduating to his own book. Deadman is one of the more interesting of the second tier characters in the DCU, but this presentation doesn't even do much to take best advantage of that, let alone move him higher in the rankings. The book was so intent on being atmospheric that it didn't do
a good job of presenting the concept of the series, and the mystery wasn't so intriguing either. The art didn't do much for me either. With a character like this you should either find major talent wanting to do it or some really fresh approach, this middling redo is neither.

Batwoman #1
written by JH Williams III and W. Haden Blackman, art by Williams
interesting but maybe not interesting enough. I felt as if I was coming in on the middle of something instead of at the start. As a rule if one of the New 52 books is making me feel like I needed to have read something else, I think mission unaccomplished. I loved some of the pages of artwork immensely, the ones that required good realist storytelling had in spades, and were just a joy to admire the flow. But the mysterious or nonlinear pages seemed unpurposefully unclear instead of purposefully so. With more time on my hands maybe I would see how it all played out.

Nightwing #1
written by Kyle Higgins, art by Eddy Barrows and J.P. Mayer
Since Higgins' Deathstroke wasn't to my liking, it's interesting to find myself liking his work here. Nightwing is Dick Grayson, the original Robin, and ettign back to being Nightwing after subbing for Batman for an extended period ore New 52. That is mentioned here, but it needs only a mention, no sense that you need to have actually read all of those books in order to enjoy this. After visiting old friends at the Circus which Dick worked for lo those many years ago, he has an extended fight with a villain, a very nasty one, fresh off the bus into Gotham. I liked the setup, the hints of involvement with the old circus crowd to add some supporting cast, the mysteries to whom this very bad guy villain is. I like Eddy Barrows, he has done other work in the limited menu of DCU titles I have read ore New 52. Good storytelling, young characters that are nice to look at. Will be back for more.

Batman and Robin #1
written by Peter J. Tomassi, art by Patrick Gleason and Mick Gray
Much less successful Batman family reboot. I like the dynamic between Batman/Robin Bruce/Damian, but not much else.

Legion of Superheroes #1
written by Paul Levitz, art by Francis Portella
I do think of Levitz as the quintessential Legion writer, his classic zdarkseid battles from my youth are just that -- classic. But in the context of the anew 52, this series seems to be playing more toward the core Legion fans than to potential new readers. Doesn't start small, introducing us to a few Legionnaires with the ability to build out. A lots of Legion members, lots of story lines. I yearn for this to be more of a fresh start than it is.

Resurrection Man #1
written by Dan Abnett, art by Andy Lanning and Fernando Dagnino
A pleasant surprise, either a good companion to or way too much like Grifter, to the point where you could mix and swap scenes and pages between the two books and have the mashups make sense. Both have guys with weird hair and weird powers with powerfully weird airplane trips and mysterious other people chasing after. All kinds of weird and unknown reasons and motives at both ends. This has some swell artwork that goes really nicely from the "out there" pages to the more naturalistic, though the lines are always a bit rough, the faces a bit out of focus, which works very well for a book like this.

Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #1
written by Jeff Lemire, art by Alberto Ponticelli
With weeks 2 and 3 as with week #1, I saved the Lemire for last. When I initially did my week 2 shopping I left this out then went back to add when an enthusiastic review in AV Club reminded me it was Lemire. Think of any superhero group. Change sleek HQ for twisted-looking orbital, well-muscled tights-wearing heroes for, errr, ummm, how would you describe them. Just turn it all by 137 degrees. Add in art that channels some of the best panels from Frank Miller's Ronin, odd shapes and odd lines that often compel a second or third look to soak it all in. Definitely in for more!!

The week 2/3 batting average is lower than for week 1, but still a few enthusiastic finds. Just luck, taste, or front loading?

More from the New 52

2011-10-14T13:00:00.001-04:00

Comments on half a dozen mixed titles from the 2nd and 3rd weeks, I think I want to carry the blogging project through in part to help me remember which books I want to buy second issues of, otherwise without writing it down I am an old man and forget things.

Red Hood and the Outlaws #1
written by Scott Lobdell, art by Kenneth Rocafort
one and out here. This has a lot of the same ingredients as the relaunches I like, a little action and a little back story and a little "ooooh" cliffhanger menace stuff. But when the characters are talking about the All Caste, they may as well be talking about KAOS or SPECTRE for all I care. The depiction of Starfire/Koriander exemplifies the cheesiest pinup mentality that DC is taking some hits on. As a big fan of the 80s Titans reboot by Wolfman and Perez, I found it painful to watch this version slinking around like a centerfold. And Roy Harper and Jason Todd are not drawn with any eroticism. This was a "the ingredients are there" read for me, I want them stirred better.

Catwoman #1
written by Judd Winick, art by Guillem March
I found this as deplorable and loathsome and reprehensible as I enjoyed Winick's Batwing. Unless you've been spending the past 45 years wishing Lee Meriweather and Adam West had done a three way with Burt Ward and then vivisected Aunt Harriet for kicks after, not that there's anything wrong with that, there isn't much else going on. We see Catwoman take out somebody's heart with her bare hands. She goes casual wearing dominatrix clothing which just on practical grounds doesn't seem like the best approach toward keeping a secret identity. She has torrid sex with Batman. Next issue promises "The Morning After." Which I would rather spend watching The Poseidon Adventure. For all that, the art isn't bad, pretty good in fact. What the art shows, not for me, but I would keep an eye out for Guillem's name on another project. Winick? Well, I still look forward to the second issue of Batwing.

Mister Terrific #1
written by Eric Wallace, art by Gianluca Gugliotta and Wayne Faucher
a little overstuffed. the origins goes all over the place, and none of the places interest me or are more interesting elsewhere. the art is clean,but didn't make an impression either way. At least with Catwoman, I had passion, hated with but passion. This just makes me go " next."

Grifter #1
written by Nathan Edmondson, art by Cafu and Gorder
Hmmmm. This one was surprisingly interesting. I didn't warm to it in the opening sequence quite the way I should have, it was confusing more in the confusing way than the intriguing one. But as we flashed back, the co. grifting was interesting to me, and then whom is it that grabs the guy and what are they doing, and when we got back to where we were at the beginning... Well, I still dont think i know or that anyone can know what happens on the plane, but still Grifter has questions and yes, I think I would like to know the answers to some of them. Nice art, the storytelling is crisp when it needs to be and crisply confusing when that's intended, when the art wasn't helping I don't think it was supposed to.

Batman #1
written by Scott Snyder, art by Greg Capullo and Jonathan Clapion
This is a bit of a mood piece, with a script that seems just the tad bit long, but I liked the mood it was setting, of a classic noir Gotham. Did a good job of putting the whole family of former Robins into the picture. Good enough to keep going. But the art is a murky mess, and it is intended to be because in recent years that seems to be the never-ending way of Batman books to be dark and murky. In which case of course Scott Snyder is the perfect writer. The DC Retroactive with the new Len Weinberg story reminded me that Batman stories could be darker without drowning in it, though. So while I think I may stick with this for a bit because I have been feeling a little queasy that I haven't been reading Batman for years and want a finger in, I will still keep wishing for a different approach somewhere in the Batman line that can keep the dark in the Dark Knight without being quite so glum about it.

Birds of Prey #1
written by Duane Swierczynski, art by Jesus Saiz
Never wanted to even go near a Birds of Prey, so that I even tried as part of the New 52 is a point to DC. That I may buy the second issue even more so. There are attractive women here that I think pre-pubescent boys can enjoy without having it objectified in the manner of Catwoman or Red Hood and the Outlaws. There is an interesting, twisty story that doesn't require a complicated story structure in order to twist. The ending has some bang to it. Like Green Arrow, I don't think this is the best of the lot by a lot of measures, but it is attractive, fun, nicely done storytelling which I am happy to gave a little more of.

Observation: 30-40 years ago did an origin story require a looping story structure? Were readers more patient then so you could show Ron Raymond at school and expect readers to wait 12 or 16 pages before you found Firestorm? Could readers suffer through some opening pages of Barry Allen, police scientist, before the lightning and the chemicals? And is it that readers are less patient, or that comic creators lack confidence in their abilities to tide a reader over without a now/then flashback that has the costume or at least some serious action on the first page, or lack confidence in the readers? Whatever it is, the need to have so much now/then in these New 52 is very noticeable.

Also, bad things seem to be happening at airport security and on planes these days. There seems to be more social commentary on the whole state of navigating an airport in the first month of the New 52 than in the entire mainstream media. Or maybe I am just wishfully over putting things in to the books that aren't intended.

The New 52 at DC, my week #1

2011-10-13T16:29:00.000-04:00

When I started reading my selections from the first week of the New 52 at DC, with the earliest f these reviews done within days of the books appearing, before life started to get in the way, I had no idea just how many people would be doing series of posts on the subject. Having started in on week 1, I shall finish, too ,ate to even help guide selections on whether to pick up issue #2...

#1, written by Paul Cornell,art by Miguel Sepulveda
Very doubtful I return for a second issue here. The stuff the story is made of is reasonably interesting. Mysterious group of superheroes, looking for reluctant nee member. Something super weird strange is going on on the moon. Mysterious bad guy taking over member of team and from there he will take over the all of it. But at least for me it failed to cohere. It jumped around a lot. It assumed more knowledge of the group and if the characters than I think appropriate for the first issue of a reboot. Any of the New 52 that I try, I did look thru the art first to be sure it wouldn't actively work against my enjoyment of the story. This didn't do that, but I will say over the course of the whole I found it a little too expressionistic, Goya doing superheroes.

Batgirl #1, written by Gail Simone, written by Gail Simone, pencils Ardian Sayf, inks by Vicente Cifuentes.
By modern standards this is very nicely drawn, not Dan Spiegle storytelling but there are pages like 1,2,12 that are outright good to watch,and overall there is a nice integration between the words and the pictures. I might have preferred for a reboot to just forget the whole wheelchair thing ever happened, to the choice made here of a "miracle cure," but there are arguments to be made on both sides of that. I know I don't like just jumping in with a Family Games villain plot, in part because it's so derivative. And the other villain doesn't excite me. And even though the front cover has a great first issue smiling superheroine pose, there isn't much of a sense of fun in reading this, no fun at all. I want some fun out of these. Liked this a bit more than Stormwatch, but still iffy.

Men of War #1 is one of the attempts in the New 52 to be doing something other than a superhero. It starts off with an origin story for a (not yet) Sgt .Rock. Very much in the reluctant hero mode. The usual cliche of a great father, now dead, he has to live up to. But it worked for me. The art was a little bit gauzy for my tastes, but not distractingly so. I will be back for more. I do wish they had left well enough alone, but there is an entirely disposable SEALs backup story which jacks up the price to $3.99. Find better, or dump the backup and hold the line at $2.99.

Batwing #1, written by Judd Winick, art by Ben Oliver
This is a keeper! Kind of like Al Qaeda, Batman has international affiliates. This one is a policeman in an African country whom at night is battling the corruption of the police and the society in other ways. The main character is somebody I'd like to see more of. The art is nice and clean. Script is full of surprises, check out the cliffhanging final pages and panels. The setting is fresh and different. Very very good.

Green Arrow #1, written by JT Krul, art by Dan Jurgens and George Perez.
This is exactly the kind of comic book I was hoping to see as part of the New 52. It is fun! It has some action. It has some supporting cast. It has a main character whom I find interesting. I love the art. It has hot guys, which I think is an underestimated virtue in comic books, and I am sure the gals aren't so bad to look at either. The last panel throws I some hot other kinds of things. I think I can understand why this isn't the best reviewed of the 52. I don't think this title has aspirations beyond entertaining. The characters have real life and fictional role models, Steve Jobs or Stark Industries or Wayne Industries. But I had fun with this one on so many levels, the kind of fun I loved having in the best of the DC Retroactive oneshots. Totally back for more.

Swamp Thing #1, written by Scott Snyder, art by Yanick Paquette
The Swamp Thing tie-in to Flashpoint was one of the only I wanted to pick up for one issue, let alone stay with for the duration. Scott Snyder has been a hot newish writer for American Vampire, I haven't been reading that but have enjoyed the spinoff series. This first issue is a little attenuated, not as bad as the first issue of JLA but probably could be a half dozen pages shorter. The concept here is that Alec Holland is not Swamp Thing but had a kind of symbiosis from which he has now been severed. Superman checks in to see how he is doing. In the end pages we see that there is some red kind of swamp thing like thing that is causing trouble. And then some Swamp Thing and Alec at the end. Enough script wise for me to be intrigued enough to come back but not totally on board. The art has good storytelling from panel to panel, but the panels themselves are often weird looking, Superman with his back arched back in he weirdest posture, or strange facial expressions. So good enough, at least.

Action #1, script by Grant Morrison and art by Rags Morales
This has had some controversy because Superman has lots of attitude, boy does he have attitude. But why not. The ongoing problem with Superman is that perfection is boring. Most of the best Superman arcs I can think of in a long history reading comics are origin arcs, John Byrnes or Geoff Johns or the Kurt Busiek take, because they can be away just a tad from the iconic Superman, which worked so well in Richard Donner's first movie more than as a rule in the comics. So why not go for an origin approach here, with a young and lively whippersnapper of a Superman.

Animal Man #1, written by Jeff Lemire and art by Travel Foreman and Dan Green.
I saved this for last because I was a big fan of Lemire's run on Superboy as well as what he had done with his recent Atom scripts. This ultimately wasn't the superlatively wonderful experience I had hoped for, but more than good enough to come back for a second helping. The art is all over the place, it starts out in a kind of realistic vein and then gets a little weird. This works at the very end when we are given a taste of some of the weirdness Animal Man will be contending with as the series progresses, but it doesn't work as well n the action centerpiece where I found the art to be a bit of a distraction, one strike here vs the brilliant art partner in Superboy. The story is classic origin fare. The placid domesticity of the home life seen in the opening pages is maybe too clearly like any horror movie not going to stay that way. Followed by action sequence to show off powers followed by ending designed to ,eave us wanting more. The Superboy run, with it's obligatory crossover diversions and then abbreviated run on account of the reboot didn't fully cohere with the odd stuff Lemire was mixing in, will this be more fully successful, or ultimately less so.

All told, got 9 of 13, and inclined to be back for a second issue of six of them. Which already makes the project a success for DC.

Now, do I have the time to read the other stacks from the next three weeks, or to post about them? The blog has been undernourished for posting in recent weeks, but is this what the world needs me to post about?

the mournful dirge

2011-09-16T08:53:00.004-04:00

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 non-Charlaine JABberwocky book on shelves, typically indie it isn't Way of Kings or Warded Man or some other book someone may want to read but an obscure book that will be selling 7 copies a week on Bookscan if that once the liquidations are over. There is no other trade bookstore for some four miles, the closest with any selection, i.e., a big BN, is further away than that. Walked by Subterranean Books, the other major StL indie last night after it had closed, looked in and realized it wouldn't be worth another special trip to that neighborhood to actually walk into the store because it would be depressingly similar to the Left Bank experience downtown.

And speaking of Barnes & Noble, I can barely bring myself to walk in to one any longer. I go in, the first thing I see are the Nook covers. The boring BN corporateness, their strangely curated selection where they have long had the poorer selection of books/authors of mine not being carried by both chains, their ugly octagons with books buried on a shelf eight inches up from the floor, all of these things I could happily endure when I knew there was something better somewhere and that the BN I was just passing through.

But I will have a job, you leave the Dolphin with an uncertain destination, and I hope there will be some better next step ahead. For you, for the other people gutting it out to the end for the hourly paycheck, while the bankruptcy court OKs $125K bonuses for Mike and the gang.

My stock certificate is being framed, I overpaid for the store directory from base of escalator at #582, and purchased for $15 a "borders is 150k books, magazines, CDs, videos" framed poster with a big B on it from #592. Once upon a time it was what the poster said, in another day or two it will be a memory. If you find your way to NYC someday, we will have a cold something or other and reflect in front of my shrine.

Will give a ring when I am back home, and in the meantime you know my thoughts and wishes are with you.

oh, the entire sf/ f section at the downtown Left Bank is 96-ish titles n

Shame No More

2011-09-12T15:47:00.001-04:00

Well, most of the obituaries I've read have neglected to mention Cliff Robertson's finest role, as Shame on the Batman TV show in the 1960s. I loved this show, it always saddens me when a Special Guest Villain passes the scene.

Mandatory Lawbreaking

2011-09-10T00:43:00.001-04:00

So I am at a hotel in Matamoras, PA, off of I-84, in a shopping area on a multi-lane shopping strip, around a half mile from the old downtown where the same road is an old-fashioned two-lane main street. I want to walk downtown to buy a newspaper. Now, in the tradition of bad car-centered development, the sidewalk ends at the edge of the old downtown. The extension of the highway has a nice wide shoulder and isn't unsafe to walk on, per se, but it is clear nobody thought anyone might ever want to walk from downtown to shop at the K-Mart. No sidewalk, no crosswalk, no walk signals, not a single thing about the road is designed with a second of thought for the pedestrian. In fact, at the stoplights there are signs going all four ways that forbid pedestrian crossings in any direction. (Or would, except that the red cross-hatch has faded off many of the signs) Unless there is some secret unmarked back way, there is no legal way for a pedestrian to get from here to there. This isn't about pedestrian safety. This is about city officials realizing they are idiots who are going to have people die on their streets because they haven't done a single thing to make them walkable, and hoping that by forbidding all pedestrian crossings at any intersection that they can get out of liability in the inevitable lawsuits. Shameful

9/11 plus 10

2011-09-08T22:22:00.000-04:00

There is an adage that says "just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.". For most of the past ten years my general belief is that this is something that Osama bin Laden should have heeded.

I think Al Qaeda could've done serious damage to the US military and to US interests, the death of a thousand cuts with dozens of operations like the USS Cole or the Dar es Salaam embassy bombing, and people in the US just wouldn't have cared very much or for very long. Militarily, 9/11 was a mistake. Bin Laden became a marked man. His organization was tossed from it's safe haven in Afghanistan. Countless leaders of the organization have been killed. Neither 9/11 nor 7/7 nor 3/11 have led to the death of NYC or London or Madrid. People still work in tall buildings and ride the Tube and commute to work.

However, part of bin Laden's calculus was different, and while I believe 9/11 was a military mistake NY Al Qaeda, the organization has had immense success.

Many of you may not believe this, but there was a time not too long ago when you could just walk into an office building without having to wait on line, show ID, pose for a picture, wait for your visitor pass to print out. There was a time when you could comfortably get to the airport 45 minutes or even a half hour before your flight. There was a time when you could breeze in to a baseball game without wondering why the Mets allow an iPad but the Yankees do not, why the Yankees allow a factory sealed one liter water bottle but the Mets only 20 oz, and why some teams won't allow your completely empty bottle in for filling at a water fountain when it is exactly the same as the 20 oz factory sealed bottle that is emptied out just the other side of the turnstile. And in all of those instances we are giving up our liberty and hours of our lives, little bits and little infringements at a time.

There was a time when torture was torture.

And all of these things cost not only time but money. The TSA costs money, the guards that check your bags at the ballpark and your IDs in the office lobby cost money.

And that is just in the private sector. The government has spent a huge amount of money building a counterterrorism security infrastructure.

And getting us to do all of this was part of the bin Laden calculus.

So in one sense, the terrorists have won, they've gotten us to spend so much of our treasure taxing ourselves in time and dollars to attempt to win a war that can never entirely be run.

And still, 9/11 was a mistake.

If the western world collapses as a result of the erosion of our values and bank accounts since 9/11, it isn't a caliphate that will come next to pick up the pieces. China, maybe; caliphate, no.

And a lot of what's happened might have happened with a stream of Dar es Salaams. US embassies would have become fortified and closed to the world, and other damage done to our standing and reputation. Was the extra damage from the sheer enormity of 9/11 worth that so few of its planners might be around to enjoy when the Chinese can finally conquer a depleted and degraded American empire?

Oh -- we manage to be so resilient in the face of every gun massacre of which the US had many. Why have we been so unresilient to the Richard Reids of the world?

And a confession -- deep down I am kind of happy circumstances have me away from NYC for most of 9-11-11.

Ten Years Later

2011-09-05T09:50:00.006-04:00

The Borders at the World Trade Center opened in 1995. I'm told it might not have been very profitable on account of the size of the rent, but it was the company's first store in Manhattan, an important presence for a publicly traded company just a few blocks from Wall Street, and Borders made money in those days. There are worse things than if your face to the world is a store with huge throngs of shoppers selling tons and tons of books.

Lower Manhattan wasn't in the beaten path for me, but because Borders World Trade was such a bustling and prosperous store that sold so many copies of so many books by so many JABberwocky clients it was a store that I liked to visit at least every several weeks. Even if it meant making a special trip, it was a pleasant destination. And on a beautiful day, what better really than take the occasional walk through Greenpoint and Williamsburg, over the Williamsburg Bridge, down East Broadway through Chinatown, down Park Row beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and past City Hall, and around 1:40 after leaving my apartment I was there.

Tuesday September 11, 2001 was a beautiful late summer day. The sky as blue and near to cloudless as you might like, the temperature perfect, and I hadn't been to Borders World Trade in several weeks, can't remember if it was early August or late July, but it had been a while. So the plan for the day was pretty simple, to try and escape from the office a little bit early if I could (and in those days, I could almost always escape from the office a little bit early and not worry anyone would miss me), be out the door by 4PM or 5PM and I'd have that nice walk with the setting sun looming behind the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan as I headed over the Williamsburg Bridge, and have a long overdue visit to the Borders.

Those plans changed.

There was an e-mail from Elizabeth Moon, mentioning this plane that had flown into the World Trade Center.

Like most people, my first thought was that some guy in a Cessna had lost his bearings and had an accident.

I sat in front of the TV for a while. Wondering what was going to happen. It wasn't a Cessna. It was a pretty big fire. It was 1000 feet in the air, and is there any way to fight that besides letting it burn itself out?

And then however many minutes it was after I turned on the television, there was that puff of smoke and then it cleared, and there weren't twin towers any more. And then there weren't any towers at all.

And then I went back to work, kind of.

Denial, distraction, avoidance, whatever the mental state was that was there, I couldn't do much but try and bull my way through whatever happened.

I went out to cast my vote in the mayoral primary NYC was having that day. I shouldn't have bothered, the primary was called off not long thereafter.

I went to the UPS depot with a box of books to send. I shouldn't have bothered. UPS had summoned its trucks back, they were rushing into the yard, they were pulling the gates shut.

I went to the Post Office. The Post Office was open. But a little bit down at the end of the block, you could see the sidewalk on Queens Boulevard full of people who'd walked over the Queensboro Bridge and were now walking however many miles they needed to walk in order to get home. Forest Hills was another five miles away, Kew Garden was six. It was one of those eerie sights you think you might see only in the movies.

I had lunch. I did have the TV on in the kitchen but I didn't sit perched in front of the TV for the rest of the day. One of the things I've learned is that there isn't much to gain watching the telly in times like this. Comes from hours of watching after Challenger, waiting for that NASA press conference that kept getting pushed back and pushed back, and you realize for all the time you're spending watching you're watching for hours and hours and there isn't any actual news.

I called Elizabeth Moon, and we discussed some revisions to her novel The Speed of Dark.

That night, it was hard to sleep. The next day, it was hard to concentrate on anything, to do any work at all. The mind was someplace else.

My synagogue had a memorial service that night. I walked into Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge. You could look south toward Ground Zero, and how could you not, really. The winds were blowing most of the stuff from Ground Zero some other direction, but there was a smell in the air all over the city. Burnt metal, burnt flesh, burnt something. I don't know what it was, I don't like to think of what it was, I don't want to be reminded of it. But it was everywhere. It felt weird walking into Manhattan, but it felt weird not to, like whatever it was that happened yesterday it was necessary to still be doing something like what I often did. And Manhattan was, of course, eerie. Quiet, empty. I stopped by the Whole Foods in Manhattan (back then, there was still just the one in Chelsea) after the service, it was open and it felt good to buy something there even though they had signs up that they'd be closing early, that they might not have some things because they hadn't gotten any deliveries that day, but it was open and it was good.

The #7 train was running. And of course it was a weird ride back, especially as we headed out of Grand Central and under the East River. Everyone was looking at one another. What were you doing on the subway on this evening?

Those of you who know me know I have a puckish sense of humor. It was gone for the next three weeks. Nothing really seemed funny. There was this pit in stomach instead. Every time I was in Manhattan. Coming back on the LIRR from my annual September bookstore rounds of Long Island, sitting on the train heading back into NYC and kind of not wanting to do it.

Looking at some of the pictures from 9/11, New York Magazine has some in their current issue, I realize just how well I've managed to suppress some of the imagery of the day. Not my memories of the day, I don't talk about them or think about them very much, but I can always summon those images quickly, always there right below the surface, never far away and always a part of me. But the images of the twisted steel, the haunted faces, the people racing up Broadway, the jumpers, all of those things that were part of the day, but not of my part in it.

I can still give a guided tour of the Borders that was there. Head off the E train, past the newsstand, turn right in the World Trade Center concourse (some of the tiling of the section between the subway and the concourse survived), I think it's closed off now while they rebuild the PATH station, but will be back) and there was the small lower level entrance a little bit down, up the escalator to the main level by the main entrance doors at Church and Vecsey. Main cash wrap at the north end of the main level. The mystery, romance and horror lined up on the shelves there. A few steps up to the entrance into 5 World Trade Center, this was where you had your displays of new books. In the southwest corner of this main level was where you had your sf/fantasy, the new hardcovers and trade paperbacks wrapped around a column, three sections of low shelving for the mass markets, full of backstock all the time. Shel, one of the booksellers, had some old sf/f covers that he hung up in the section, they'd be part of that smell I could smell. He ended up at the White Plains store. The magazines were also on the ground floor, near the escalator up, which led into the cafe. After one of those walks to the store to meet up with a friend, it's that cafe where my friend and his wife were sitting, and I could kind of tell by that morning sickness look on her face before he said anything that they were expecting. The music was off to one side, this store had a smaller music section than most stores of that vintage. And then a long, narrow upper level with the non-fiction categories spread each side of an aisle that led back to a relatively small children's department at the far end. The store is gone ten years now, but I can still take you there.

So I didn't visit the Borders at the World Trade Center on September 11.

In fact, it was another six months before I went to Lower Manhattan at all. Shortly before I left for London Book Fair in March of 2002, I kind of forced myself to go down to Lower Manhattan, for every reason and for no reason at all. To walk by Ground Zero. To look west down Fulton Street, to this wonderful view of the World Financial Center that was never supposed to exist. To stand near the corner of Church and Vecsey.

As once upon a time, they were.

Good Bad Ugly

2011-08-31T22:45:00.004-04:00

So over the past several weeks I've been spending more money week in and week out at the comic book store than I've done in a long time, mostly on account of the DC Retroactive series of comic books. This send off for the old DC Universe ahead of the New 52 that launched today with Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1 was one of the more delightful ideas to come around. There were 18 issues, six each for the '70s, '80s and '90s, which paired a "new" story from the era in question with a classic reprint. The first few I tried were enjoyable enough that I decided I'd stop leafing through to decide which I should buy, and instead just went for all of them, $4.99 a pop, three a week, several weeks running. Not all of them were entirely successful, some had a good reprint but a so-so new story, others had a good new story paired with a so-so reprint, but the overall was just a lot of fun. Favorites might have been the Green Lantern story with the Jon Stewart GL, where someone learns why secret identities are supposed to be kept secret. Marv Wolfman wrote a Superman that fit in beautifully as a long lost prequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths. There was a Len Wein Batman story that fit hand in glove perfectly with its time period. I wanted to like Mike W. Barr's Batman contribution a little more than I did, but I knew before I got to it that it would be a fair play mystery where the reader would be challenged to find the clues before Batman did, because that's what Mike W. Barr did.

But the big thing here was that these stories were all fun.

And to me, that's the challenge for DC's New 52. Can they bring the fun back to reading comics? Can DC take advantage of the opportunity it's given itself, to tell good fun stories that don't require a master's degree in continuity, that won't insist on getting bogged down in crossovers or big company wide events? Where you're as likely to decide to skip an issue because it's skipping whatever it is you're liking in the comic to tether itself to some other thing that requires reading 9 other comics to properly enjoy? Because you know, even though I'm in my upper 40s now, the kind of guy who can enjoy a serious Vertigo book like DMZ because of the adult pleasures it offers, I'm still likely as not to get my greatest enjoyment out of a good issue of Simpsons Comics or Futurama Comics that are just, you know, fun.

And speaking of which, it amazes me still how often I can enjoy a Futurama comic considering I never liked the show so much. The latest issue there had the gang working at a chain restaurant as big as a planet, which is a silly idea done with its tongue always in cheek that was a delight from first page to last. And there've been a couple great Simpsons issues recently, one where Homer goes off to Canada and discovers it's full of donut shops, as delightful an experience for Homer as when David Bowman goes through the infinite and discovers that it's full of stars. Only, this is way funnier. Or the most recent issue, where Ned Flanders is off on a cruise and finds love, while his kids are finding something else with Homer taking care of them.

Fun.

I want to read comic books for fun, or for some kind of adult intellectual pleasure.

What I don't want to read comic books for?

Sadly, that's what I found today in the dreary dismal disappointing messes that are Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1.

I read the first issue of Flashpoint, didn't find it interesting enough to keep going, but decided to come back for the finale because after all this is the big lead-in that puts a boot kick into the reboot for the New 52.

But the story doesn't make any sense. Maybe it would make sense if I'd read the three missing issues here, but I think the creators of this issue should have made an extra effort to get it to work on its own just on account of readers like me who'd decide to get in on the last seconds of the old New Year on the way to ringing in the New.

What there is of a story just isn't very interesting.

If it does lead in to the reboot, it requires looking at the fine print of what characters are featured in the art that aren't mentioned or discussed much in the story, There's this double-page spread where "and the RESISTANCE" is in big letters to tell us that the Resistance is important, and we can carefully try and figure out which characters are included because none of them are named. And then there's a Speed Force "Boooo ooooom" and the Resistance is gone a few pages later.

The cover says "It All Changes Here." Um, what changed? I didn't notice. Shouldn't I have?

Then we pick up Justice League #1.

Even though this is a reboot, there isn't much said about who Batman is. Or who Green Lantern is. If I didn't know who they were because I've been reading about them for 35 years, there's nothing in this issue that would explain why I should be reading about them.

I'm not sure why the two of them hook up, what their goal is, what their plot problem is.

There are seven superheroes on the cover. We spend time with two of them -- 2, only! -- in 24 pages, with a third making an appearance on the final page, and another who is in a pre-origin state. The JLA Retroactive reminds that it is possible to tell a good story with half a dozen heroes in 26 pages, so why does this original story deal with only 2 heroes in 24 pages? This doesn't make me want to come back again in a month to see more, it makes me think there are better ways to spend $4 than on overly attenuated stories that just go on, on, on, on in an inefficient and uninteresting kind of way.

Jim Lee's art does nothing for me. This is one of the things that will almost certainly keep me from enjoying a lot of the New 52. I do come from an era when art was supposed to be about storytelling. In my own experience, we can look back to Todd McFarland's run on Infinity Inc. as a prime example of how storytelling skills started to give way to a collection of pin-up pages, but at least I often enjoyed looking at the pin-up poses McFarland would give to the characters in that super team.

Look at page 20.

You can do what the first two panels attempt to do, Blake Edwards does this in Victor Victoria when he cuts from inside a restaurant to showing the aftermath from outside the restaurant viewed through the windows, but he carefully establishes the inside of the restaurant and gives visual cues to connect the shots. If you look at what we see inside the office on panel #1 and then try and match that with what we see in silhoutte of the office in panel #2, you can't make that match. Most of the characters close to the window have their back to it, the next shot has all the characters showing a profile to the locker room.

Going from panel #2 to panel #3, the character has his back to the phone in one panel but then has done a 200 degree turn to now have one hand resting on the phone.

Panel #3 to panel #4, we have another reverse angle, and it looks like the character is hanging up the phone with the left arm, whereas the previous panel had him holding the phone in the right hand. Do people often switch hands to hang up a phone? I also believe that in panel #2 the cord for the payphone goes in to the right side of the phone, while in panel #4 it looks like the chord is going into the left side, or that there isn't a cord any more. Either would be a mistake.

The physique of the character in panel #5 looks different than that same character in panel #1. The arms seem bigger in relation to the torso in #5.

Here and there, a nice piece of business. Pages 13 and 14, let's say. Green Lantern is ridiculing the idea that Batman is just a guy in a bat costume, then Batman shows who's boss by removing GL's power ring when GL loses focus and concentration and provides the opportunity.

The sad thing is that I know that Geoff Johns is capable of writing a good script, but he hasn't here, he tends to do his best work when he does a good people story about the people that are superheroes. But in his role as the co-creative-poobah of DC Comics, he doesn't let himself write those scripts. He focuses on doing the big crossovers, where he's occasionally capable of a good first issue and rarely six of them, or to doing something like this. But he can do better.

I don't know if Jim Lee could do better, I haven't looked at enough of his art to make that call. Of course, he is the co-publisher of DC Comics, so I'm not sure if there's anyone at the company who's going to take the time to tell the boss that he can't have the phone cord moving from the left side to the right side, can't have the characters all with their back to the window in one panel and their profiles to it in the next, that he should make some effort at continuity and storytelling. Maybe his people will never look like actual people or even like the muscular exaggerated versions of people that we accept in superhero comics, but some of this other stuff, all it takes is the effort.

You know, it's hard to let go. But I've tried to do it in running my business. My employees come to me and say they're ready for e-mail queries, I'm capable of telling them "you know, I don't have a dog in this hunt," instead of pretending that I'm still the one who looks at the query letters. Not at DC, Geoff and Jim might be the people who are supposed to be in charge, who are supposed to be the ones who be sure their editors are making each of these new 52 truly wonderful, and instead they have their own un-editable selves launching it.

Well, I'm sure that there will be better comics than this in the New 52, and I'm sure I'll still give a sampling to a decent chunk of them.

For all my negativity here, I think the idea of the reboot, of the New 52, is not a bad idea in and of itself. It is an opportunity to do great things for DC and the industry at large. In fact, I'm as negative as I am because I see the problems with Justice League #1 as a betrayal of what the New 52 could be, what it should be, what it needs to be.

For a much sunnier take on these two comic books, you can read the thoughts of award-winning sf writer Michael Burstein, who did a review for SF Scope. Click here.

And if I read Crisis on Infinite Earths today, would I still like that? Or is it not so much that comics have changed as that I have? Am I Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd., decrying that the movies have gotten smaller?

The Noon Report

2011-08-31T11:43:00.005-04:00

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 just demolishing Lukas Rosol, that match is at 6-1, 5-1, the first set took all of 19 minutes and the second set will likely be under 25 as well.

To interrupt this tennis post with some actual business news, we are told via publisherslunch.com that Waterstone's in the UK is ending the "3 for 2" book promos that have been a fixture of UK bookselling for years and years. Here in the office, Eddie's first reaction is that this is an awful decision being made by the new owners, since this has been such a fixture of the trade. I'm not so sure. I've found UK bookselling to be generally in a very boring state in recent years, with the plethora of endless 3-for-2 tables all stocking all the same books at all the same stores to just be deathly dull In any event doing the same thing for years and years can get boring and should sometimes be changed for the sake of it. But then again, if they'll just be replacing endless tables of 3-for-2 with endless boring same-everywhere tables of books being promoted in some different way, it ends up making no real difference. I guess we'll see how it shakes out.

For those not so good at math a 3-for-2 discount is the same as Buy 1-Get 1 50% Off promo that we've had on a lot of trade paperbacks in the US, and which in fact Borders might have imported as a variation from their UK stores.

As I typed those last two paragraphs, Pospisil took the 2nd set 6-2 and Sorensen and Da Silva are on serve after three games of their second set.

And here is a post from the NY Times Straight Sets blog about Malek Jaziri, the Tunisian qualifier who is facing top-rated American Mardy Fish in a 2nd round match tomorrow.

I, Again, Oracle

2011-08-30T21:12:00.003-04:00

Click here for a post from the NY Times Straight Sets blog about Ukrainian qualifier Sergei Bubka, who defeated the Austrian Adrian Haider-Maurer in their first round main draw match on Tuesday. I correctly predicted Bubka could win this. I also said the Rochus/Lisnard match could go either way, and indeed the qualifier Lisnard did emerge at the winning end of this first round match. Ir's easy enough to predict every qualifier to lose, you'd be right most of the time, I'm quite pleased so far to be pretty good this year in choosing the ones that will win.

Vasek Pospisil has his first round match at 11AM Wednesday on Court 10. This is rather annoying to me, because this court doesn't have TV coverage (Ashe, Armstrong, Grandstand, 11, 13, 17 do) so I won't even be able to watch on ESPN3.com on my computer at work. I guess I'll have to set up the thing that live tracks the score, I am really curious and eager to see if Pospisil can beat Lukas Rosol. There are only five men's singles matches tomorrow without TV coverage, so you can see just what a huge major priority this match is the world at large.

Another match with a qualifier, Joao Souza of Brazil against American Robby Ginepri, is on the Grandstand. Not an easy match, but I did tag this one as a possible win for the lower-ranked player.

I, Oracle

2011-08-30T00:31:00.004-04:00

So I think I did OK in judging the chances of the US Open qualifiers to play on Day One. Jaziri won his first round match, which I'd suggested could happen if didn't outright say would. All the other qualifiers to play on Day One lost, most in straight sets, none huge surprises. I did give De Veigy a chance of beating Tommy Hass, he didn't but he took a set and it was a competitive match.

Alas for Jaziri, his next round opponent will be Mardy Fish, the highest ranked American player who has been on fire this summer. So Jaziri had best be prepared for enjoying the moment of playing on Arthur Ashe Stadium, because that's likely to be the best part of the day.

The NY Times tells me I watched history being made when I saw Louk Sorensen qualify. The two Irish qualifiers this year may be the first ever players from Ireland to play in the main draw of the US Open.

Looking Ahead

2011-08-28T11:10:00.002-04:00

So the qualifying has concluded, and the draw has been filled out. Let's look selectively at what the qualifiers face in the days ahead...

The "top half" of the draw, the one with main #1 seed Novak Djokovic, got 10 qualifiers into it.

Romain Jouan and Augustin Gensse have both drawn seeded top 32 main draw players and are not likely to advance to the second round.

American qualifier Michael Yani has a first round match against a young Australian, Bernard Tomic, who made a strong run at the Australian Open this year and is considered to be a real up-and-comer. However, he's often a bit up-and-down, and plays a game that's based as much on taking his opponents out of their rhythm as on having a great rhythm of his own. Michael Yani doesn't have a particular rhythm, he's just happy to be in the main draw of a grand slam. Tomic should win, but it's not unthinkable that Yani will.

Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy has drawn Tommy Haas. Haas was a top 10 player, as high as #2 in the world in fact, but he's 33, he's struggled to come back from a lot of injuries in recent years. This isn't a bad draw, you've got to think, if you're de Veigy.

Sergei Bubka has an excellent draw. His opponent is Andreas Haider-Mauder, an Austrian who was in the qualifying a year ago, and is ranked in the 70s. He's not that good a player, and Bubka can win this match.

Marsel Ilhan and Frank Dancevic are lucky, they got a Q-Q match, i.e., two qualifying players getting to play one another in the first round, which is a guaranteed opportunity for one to get into the 2nd round. And the two players are just two years apart in age. But Dancevic, he's a player I followed in the qualifying for a year or two, he had his one big year in 2008 when he made it to the finals of a summer tournament and had a winnable match against Marat Safin a round or two into the US Open that he lost mostly because of lack of experience in Grand Slam situations. I feel he's 26 but on the wrong side of the career arc. Ilhan is only a year or two younger, but my instinctive feel is that he's still climbing. My money would be on Ilhan, won't complain if I'm wrong. This is a Court 14 match at 11AM in the morning.

Go Soeda of Japan faces top 40 player Kevin Anderson, who's currently playing the best tennis of his career.

Malek Jaziri has drawn Dutch player Thiemo De Bakker, who is top 50 but doesn't have the kind of name to inspire fear in anyone. This is Court 8 at 1PM, and could be a match. Or maybe I'm being a little bit of an optimist.

Flipping to the "bottom half" of the draw, Ireland's Louk Sorensen has top 10 player Robin Soderling, advantage Soderling.

Joao Souza of Brazil has Robby Ginepri from the US, and that's a match the qualifier can win.

Pospisil, he has a match that he can definitely win, against a Czech player Lukas Rosol who is currently ranked in the 60s. Rosol's rank is based entirely on a few good challenger tournaments where he beats qualifying level players, which Pospisil is distancing himself from, and a good run at this year's French Open. I'm a Pospisil fan, and expect he'll have a 2nd round match against the #25 seed.

Jesse Huta Galung has drawn James Blake. This match should go Blake's way.

Jean-Rene Lisnard has a match against Olivier Rochus, whom I've seen in the qualifying. This could go either way.

Robert Farah against Nicholas Mahut -- edge, Mahut.

Lucas Lacko got into the main draw as a "Lucky Loser," chosen by lots as a seeded but defeated qualifier to replace a late withdrawal from the tournaments. Odds are one or two other players will end withdrawing before their first match.

Not counting players I saw in qualifying this year only, there are close to 20 players in this year's US Open whom I've seen in qualies over the years.

Tennis Anyone, IV

2011-08-26T10:22:00.008-04:00

And to close...
The second set of the Pospisil match was anything but routine. It was one of the longest sets of tennis I've ever seen, 68 minutes for a 12 game set, vs. 41 minutes for the13 game tiebreak set Pospisil had with Guccione two days before. There was an epic game early on with Brezak struggling hard to hold serve. Pospisil, whose serve can be so strong, was having games go to 0-40 or 0-30 against and then struggling to fight back into it. Finally, at the very tail end, Pospisil managed to get a break and win the match. It was good tennis!
And as long as our 2nd set is, the Meffert/Farah match on the next court just keeps dragging on and on and on, but you get the sense that's a match that's interesting solely because it endures, not because either play is especially interesting. If neither player has the weapons and tools to really end a point, the points can go on. And on.
Next stop was over to Court 11 to find Dennis Kudla playing Romain Jouan, both of whom we'd seen previously, in a 3rd round qualifying match. This was decent enough tennis, but a rung or three below the highest level. Kudla is 19 -- and just -- and has been a Juniors finalist and a hitting partner for the US Davis Cup, and the good news for American tennis fans is that he looks good on the court, saw that when I saw him when earlier in the week and saw that again today. But holding one's own is nowhere the same as winning, and he just didn't have the oomph or the firepower of the 25 year-old French journeyman he was playing against, who won in two fairly quick and fairly routine sets.
During the first part of the match, I was standing atop the stands at Court 11 and looking down on Court 14, where the #3 qualifying see Marcel Ilhan was playing Lucas Lacko. Ilhan was looking pretty good as he took that in two fairly easy sets.
I was also able to watch people erecting the Citizen side above the south video board in the new stadium that is going by the rather prosaic name of Court 17. I wonder how many years that name holds. In any case, the world will know that Citizen is an official sponsor and official timepiece of the US Open.
I then wanted to see the 3rd round match for Vasek Pospisil, but this had been put on to one of Court 14 with limited bleacher seating, and one side of that was unusable because of the setting sun. Too crowded to find a good perch. I ended up drifting back to Court 8 to watch the Brazilian Rogerio Dutra Da Silva, whom I said yesterday I might want to watch more of, playing his 3rd round match against Sergei Bubka from Ukraine. This is decent, but it's lacking something. I'm pulling for Da Silva, who goes down in the first set, comes down to take the second, then goes down a break in the third. Sometimes you go in rooting for one player and end up a fan of another, as on Day One when I found myself going for Middelkoop over Janowicz, but there's nothing about Bubka that makes me enthuse about his winning over the player I'm rooting for. Toward the very end of the match there's a ball on the sideline I'm sitting on that's reasonably close and is called in. Everyone else near me thinks the ball is out, I'm not so sure myself, and then it has to be not that the call was wrong but that it was grotesquely wrong, that the ball was six inches out, way out. Which just isn't the case. The call's against Da Silva, it's the difference between being at 30-30 and maybe having an opportunity to break back or being 15-40 and staring death in the face, and the crowd's reaction only serves to make Da Silva just a little bit more certain he's getting the royal screw-over. It's the kind of call that makes you wish they had Hawkeye to allow challenges on every single court, so the player can make his challenge and get an answer and kind of get over things instead of stewing in the feelings of injustice. In any event, Da Silva ended up losing.
That match complete, I drifted back to Court 14, where the sun had now gone down far enough that the other bleachers could be sat in, and I found an open seat on the front row toward the start of a third set between Pospisil and a 24 year old Slovenian Grega Zemlja, who was the #8 seed in the qualifying.
What a way to end the tournament!
It was an incredibly tight third set, ended up going 75 minutes which is about as long a set as you can get. Sitting where I was, in the twilight, you could actually see the spin on the balls, and there was a lot of it. The players were both trying to get their shots as low over the net as they could get away with, so it looked as if every ball was in danger of being hit into the net. I was rooting pretty strongly for Pospisil, so it was disappointing when he went down a break fairly early in the third set, and wasn't getting a break back. You start looking at the scoreline, and realize time's starting to run out. But Pospisil did manage to eke out one break and go back on serve, and we headed into a deciding tiebreak. And I can't remember the last time I've been so caught up in a game of tennis I've been watching in person. Pospisil gets a mini-break, Zemlja gets it back, every single shot by both players especially sitting right at court level looks like it's going to go into the net. Every single shot. Except most of them somehow manage to motor their way over and sink toward the ground for a hard pickup of a really really low ball at the other end of the court. And so much, so much, at stake. And finally, Pospisil prevails. Phew!
It was a great day of tennis. In the third round of qualifying even the bad matches are played at a higher and overall more competitive level than in the earlier rounds, which in part explains why the tennis is just about as long in duration with 54 matches on the schedule as the first two days with 64, or one extra per court.
Often I'll savor the moment and linger on the grounds after the final point of the qualifying, today with Irene on the way I hastened ASAP out of the tennis center so I could hit the Lemon Ice King (strawberry banana) and then subway into Manhattan to Midtown Comics to get the Wednesday arrivals. Then I looked for a copy of The Onion, and headed up to the Borders at Penn Plaza and picked up half a dozen client books to refill shelves now that they were 50% off, and then treated myself to a fancy dinner at Keen's Steakhouse. I knew I wouldn't even have the choice of getting into Manhattan again until Monday...

1:05 PM
Pospisil looks awfully good taking first set 6-1

12:30 PM
Underway! Charles-Antoine Brezac vs Vasek Pospisil, reenacting the French Canadian wars!!

12:05 PM
The slow moving women's match on Court 8 has hardly progressed. I am now sitting between 8 + 9 watching Robert Farah (Columbia) and Dominik Meffert ( Germany) on 9 while waiting for 8 to end. Gensse won the Court 16 match.

11:50 AM
Sorensen won routinely, late break in first set and after a trade of breaks at the start of the second by two breaks 6-2. Next match I want to see is on Court 8, but there is time to watch the finish of a match on Court 16 between Portugal's Joao Sousa and France's Augustine Gensse. On serve 4-4 in 3rd set. While I watch the match I can listen to a test of the sound system on the new stadium on the site fo Courts 17 and 18 and also watch installation of the Citizen sign atop the north end video board in the new stadium.

10:35 AM
Around six hours of sleep. Took subway home and didn't have to wait long for train, did walk back this ,owning since I wad up in time. Hot and muggy so I did change my original plan to skip the Lemon Ice King. Cost around six or seven minutes but the mint chip was more satisfying than the handful of minutes of tennis would have been.
I decided to go the Grandstand court which is scheduled for two matches today. It is so intimate you can reach out ant give noogies to lines judges, and a rare treat to have it in use for qualifying. During the main tournament those front row seats are claimed like the land rush in Far and Away.
We are on serve 3-2 Portugal's Gastao Elias serving to Ireland's Louk Sorensen.
.

Tennis Anyone 33 1/3

2011-08-25T11:12:00.016-04:00

To Finish
Well, what a delightful final full match of the day. Donskoy won the first set 6-1, blink of an eye, thought we were headed for a rout. But somehow midway thru the second set Dennis Kudla finds another gear, and it's like the ball coming at him is as big as a pumpkin. He breaks Donskoy, rather to my surprise. Then Kudla starts grunting, as if that will find him another gear still. Grunting or not, he wins the second set 6-3. The third set sees each player break once and goes into a tiebreak, Kudla goes down a mini-break, comes back, takes the tie-break 7-5 and the match. This was very high quality tennis. There weren't many winners, the match statistics say there were only 11 of them between the two players. But there weren't a lot of errors, either, I'm not even sure I can trust the count which is only 1 of them for the whole match, except that it's hard to think of too many. There were balls that missed, but it does seem that almost all of them were off of really good shots by the other guy that weren't easy to get back. Very high quality. The difference in the match looks to be the differential on first and second serve, Donskoy was 70% getting the point on his first serve but only 43% on his second serve. Kudla was more consistent in that metric. Even though this match went to Kudla, I do expect we may see more from Donskoy, who is just 21 and talented. Kudla just turned 19, and is showing some signs of making a breakthrough this summer. Qualifying for the Open could easily lift him 200 spots in the rankings.
There was one match unfinished, so I watched the final games of a 23 year old Croat beating a 34 year old Italian. Not great stuff, probably could have skipped, but having waited out a six hour rain delay why not see some more tennis...
The answer is that play begins in 8:30, I've got to get to bed!
But it will be a very full day, as speculated earlier the plan for Friday is to have 22 remaining 2nd round matches, 21 3rd round matches with the Thursday winners, and then to trot out the 22 winners to play their 3rd round matches as well, two matches on the day, to be sure of having the qualifying done in time. Tour rules require a half hour between matches, and even the top players in the world sometimes have to do two in one day when rain backs things up badly at a tournament. The qualifiers can do it Friday. It's unfair in equal measure to all of them, at least, none of the morning winners Friday will end up facing someone who won Thursday and has the benefit of a night's rest.

10:40 PM
Musical entertainment! Sound check/practice from Arthur Ashe blasting over grounds. Just what tennis players want during big match at 10:30 at night.

10:15 PM
Lacko won the first set in a tiebreak. He is too one dimensional in his game to pose a real threat to anyone, baseline only. That set ended just a few points into the start of the Court 11 match between Dennis Kudla (US) and Evgeny Donskoy (Russia) which I shall stick with, I think. Fewer than 30 unattached spectators, maybe 10 or 12 more coaches/family members. Kudla just made an incredible leap to get his racket on a high smash bounce that nobody ever tries for, I was shocked to see a racket in front of me at my perch in the endzone seats. There is a reason no one goes for those, his shot went up 30 feet and backwards. But I admired the effort. Donskoy is quickly up two breaks, doubt this will be a long match. A few others started around the same time, if any of those are the three tight tiebreak sets which this likely not could be tennis until 12:30-1:00 AM.

9:10 PM
The matches on 15 + 16 ended within a few minutes of one another. Jaziri won his 6-2 in the 3rd set. This made me happy; I think Jaziri is fun to watch. I was watching right next to his coach who wad taking notes in Arabic, and either cheering on his player in Arabic or "get them in" in English. Ryderstedt offered his congratulations as he left the court. I wasn't as caught up in the other match which Bozoljac won 6-3 in the 2nd set, but I would probably take any of these 4 players over the ones on Courts 7 + 16.
Wandering one walkway over I watched the final games of a match between Rogerio Dutra Da Silva from Brazil and Adrian Menendez-Maceiras from Spain. Both were very big grunters and both seemed to my eyes to have especially powerful groundstrokes, Da Silva especially. He is the #5 seed, and won the match in straight sets. Maybe try and catch more of him tomorrow.
After grazing the buffet, I have settled back at Court 15 to watch Marius Copil (Romania) vs Lukas Lacko (Slovak Rep.)I think Lacko is the younger and with more main draw results, in any event are on serve and 15-15 Copil serving 2-2 in the first.

7:50 PM
Court 15 Serbia's Ilija Bozoljac wins first set tiebreak 6-1 over Germany's Andreas Beck
Court 16 Jaziri takes 2nd set, we go to a third
Will hang out between the two courts!

7:40 PM
The plan now is to get in 3 matches on each court, including the Grandstand which is used during the qualifying only in emergencies. That will be 42 matches out of 64 scheduled. Tomorrow play will start an hour early. With rain scheduled to arrive at some point on Saturday I don't know if they plan to have some players do both 2nd and 3rd round matches tomorrow or hope to get in 11 3rd round matches Saturday. The ballperson crews are down one since the youngest can't work overtime which is a problem when all courts need to go long into the evening.

7:33 PM
Back at Court 15 for Jaziri vs Swede Michael Ryderstedt. Jaziri lost the first set 6-2 but up a break in 2nd. Both of these players seem peppier than the others I have been watching.

7:30 PM
Middelkoop won in a 2nd set tiebreak. Not sure how good he really is, but at least good enough to march rou first two rounds here.
Walked over a few paces to Court 11 where Klahn had gone up a break and watched final two games of that match. Hard to believe Ebden is the person who won a 6-0 set yesterday. No game at all today. Klahn was serving very well, and had slightly better places groundstrokes, but not very compelling. Ome court next to the Vioka rooting section, at another found myself standing next to Dennis Kudla's coach. Kudos plays Evgeny Donskoy later.

7:15 PM
Ebden was broken and lost the first set 6-4. The lackluster second set saw both players broken with Ebden taking in a tiebreak. I was bored, after wandering a bit I am settled between Courts 15 and 16 watching the end of 2nd set of Matwe Middelkoop's match against Italy's Matteo Viola while Malek Jaziri plays on the next Court over.

5:20 PM
The match I am now once again watching play having resumed aroun 5:13, is the second round match for American Bradley Klahn and the rising Australian Matthew Ebden. It was scheduled for Court 11, which is one of the largest used for qualifying and thus has priority for drying. Players are just sitting down on the adjacent Court 12, which will resume play some 20 minutes after us, and dryers are still going on Court 16. It is 2-2,and Ebden is facing a break point.

5:08 PM
Since it may be a late night, eating on the grounds. The lamb haandi from Indian stand isn't bad. Have rad 150 pages of Benjamin Tate's Well of Sorrows, and a few issues of Variety.

5:05 PM
Sun has shine a bit, some courts near to dry, and teams of ballpersons are heading out to their assigned courts. May yet be some tennis today!

11:55 AM
Players back to locker room, I am under the overhang on the Grandstand Court near the ball person perch, Andy Murray just left the court after an aborted practice session. Rain really coming down now.

11:15 AM
Grim news, forecast for an afternoon thundershower but there are already a few drops of rain. With Irene coming our way this weekend it might be a challenge to finish the final two rounds of qualifying.
More Grim News: there are mo soap dispensers in the men's restrooms at Court 7 and Court 11. Can someone call the CDC or NYC Dept of Health or something and get that fixed muy pronto.
Grimmer News: A brief rain shower right at start of first match. Iffy day weather wise.
More Grimmer News: When they updated the schedule on the web site as the evening progressed they never updated the printable PDF version which has endless TBD on the later matches, not even "winner of this vs winner of that," just TBD vs TBD. With the weather we should be so lucky as to get to those matches today.

Tennis Anyone, The Second

2011-08-24T11:22:00.017-04:00

To Close
Michon loses to Ram in a tight first set and a not so tight second. Not many weapons. Piña colada ice, Thai dinner.

8:50
Michon is sinister! I mean, a lefty!! Playing a lot to Ram's backhand and trying to construct points. On serve 4-3 in first set.

7:30 PM
Settling in for last full match of day. Could have watched Ricardo Hocevar and Carsten Ball on Court 6, but just didn't find either player all that exciting. So Court 13 has whenever seats, and I know nothing about the French player Axel Michon, who contends against American Rajeev Ram. So the match might be awful, but will have thrill of the new. Did watch a couple games of the Ashleigh Bart match whole waiting for this one to start.

6:50 PM
Shocker! Guccione is up 40-0 serving for a tiebreak at 5-6. And he loses. Five straight points to Pospisil. One is a winning lob off of a net cord, the kind of thing you can't teach that's about instinct and reaction and quick hands. The final point of the match is a double fault by Guccione, which is the srangest of ways to end a match that's been almost all about big booming serves.

6:40 PM
Gootch Guile. Serving at 4-5 Guccione starts to come to the net as often as he cans. This earns him two break points in the 5-5 service game, but Pospisil shows some poise and serves his way out. Another tiebreak moments away...

6:15 PM
Second game second set, Guccione faced two break points and four deuces, but Pospisil couldn't convert. On serve 2-1, but these three games have taken an entire 15 minutes!

6:00 PM
Pospisil wins in a tiebreak 7-5 to take the set 7-6. The latter half of the set had a little more danger with 40-30 games but no deuces or break points. Pospisil clearly has the better ground strokes than Guccione and with his own potent serve is a definite threat and likely to move up quickly. That said, lots of people in the men's game have really strong serves, he hasn't made much of a dent on Guccione's and may be up a set but hardly has this match in hand. The first set flew by in under 45 minutes, a set that goes to a tiebreak will often be an hour long affair, sometimes more, 45 minutes shows how quick these points and games have been.

5:35 PM
different kind of dull, both players have great serves, would be great if there was a radar gun here, neither doing much on the return games, so holding serve 4-3 no break points hardly any rallies.

5:15 PM
So I have no interest in seeing Australian Chris Guccione who has been around a bit without making an impression, but his young Cacadian opponent Vasek Pospisil is supposed to be an up and comer. He had some wins over the summer in main draw, and is the #20 seed in the qualifying.

5:00 PM
Match on Court 10 dull, watching a bit on Court 5 while I wait for things to get underway on Court 6. This is Ireland's Lpuk Sorensen against Spain's Arnau Brugues- Davi. Sorensen won first set in tiebreak. On serve early in 2nd.

4:55
big wooden boxes containing the ESPN "Steve Set," which has magically appeared since yesterday on a platform next to Arthur Ashe stadium entrance.

4:10
what a letdown, the third set went down 6-1 in about as much time as doing my post about the match.
Hard to know when Canadian up and comer Vasek Pospisil will start on Court 6, so I am on Court 10 for the start of Charles-Antoine Brezac (France) vs Daniel Kosakowski (US). If good watch all of it then Australian 15-year old Ashleigh Barty, who is recommended to me by Australian writer Joel Shepherd, will follow. If I don't like this match, will check Court 6 after first set.

3:55 PM
Capdeville now up two breaks. Epic is fizzling in its third act.
Thing I hate most about iPad is that it wants to turn every its into an it's.

3:40 PM
Finally have my epic!
Naso wonmy second match pretty handily, but in a high quality way. In the key games in the second set, both players were winning points with good clean winners.
There was only one choice of match after, which wad the Chilean journeyman Paul Capdeville in warmups on Court 13. Capdeville has been around forever and rarely above the ranks of qualifiers. But at least it was Court 13 with the nice endzone seating, and playing an Israeli, Amir Weintraub, so an opportunity to exorcise Jewish guilt.
It's been a lot of good tennis from both sides. Weintraub went upan early break, frustrating Capdeville, who is the #2 seed and expects to advance But Weintraub couldn't hold on and then played an amazingly sloppy game to cough up the set 6-4 to Capdeville.
At 2-2 in the second set it was Capdeville who got sloppy, but Weintraub then wnetdown 0-40 on his own serve game, came back to deuce, but ultimately lost the game and we stayed even into a tiebreak. Weintraub there had at least three match points at 6-2 orr 6-3, lost them all, but this time recovered to take the breaker 9-7.
So now we are in a third set, but Weintraub again lost focus getting instantly broken in the first game of the final set. Ultimately focus or lack thereof is the difference in the match. Multiple long rallies have ended with a complete mishit by Weintraub, ten or twelve at least. He has had consistent trouble allowing himself to hold an advantage. I do not know if Capdeville is actually better, but he has vast reservoirs of match experience and can take this when its being offered.

1PM
First match ended with a 6-0 second set, ended so early the only choice of next match was next door on Court 5 where another match went by real quick. So I am watching two Italians, Gianluca Naso and Thomas Fabbiano, in a match that looks like an instant replay. Naso had two breaks to take first set 6-2 though it seems it should be closer. Lots of long rallies and good tennis, just that one player is ending up on the winning side way more consistently. One thing for sure, I haven't chosen any great epic matches so far!

11:47 AM
Ilhan has just taken first set 6-2. High quality, both players look good, Ilhan does look 6-2 better.

11:45 AM
is the man two rows back helping, raring or evaluating the ballpersons?

11:25 AM
I got a watermelon ice from the Lemon Ice King onmy way out. Nothing exciting at the Barnes & Noble. Typically mediocre service at Unos, adding ten to twenty minutes to the meal, but the food was what I wanted.

The weather yesterday was about as perfect as you could want for tennis. Around 78, low humidity, gorgeous. Can't remember when I have visited a water fountain less. Today is a few degrees higher and definitely more humid but still comfy, tomorrow more heat and humidity and a chance of a thunderstorm.

Rarely are the first round qualifying matches great tennis, and yestefay was no exception. But none of the matches were actually dull.

Today was a mint chip morning.

I am settled in on Court 4 watching #3 seed Marsel Ilhan from Turkey against Poland's Marcin Gawron. Looks like some high quality tennis, albeit with a strong chance for trading breaks of serve in the opening games... Yep, traded as I post.

Tennis, Anyone, Day 1

2011-08-23T11:11:00.020-04:00

& to close...
Romboli lost the second set 6-1 as well. Odd thing is, I think the match was closer than the score line in this case. It's just that Romboli was making a lot of errors, some inexplicable and some because Jaziri was hitting a very low ball a lot of times that wasn't easy to pick up and get back over net going the other way, but fewer errors it at least would have been a much tighter match.
After that, I watched another American who, Blake Strode, playing against a Serb, Nikola Ciric, in the last act of the second set. I chose this match over another men's match that was midway through because Court 13 has elevated endzone seating that gives a great view of the match, and I'd gone through the day without seeing anything on one of those three courts. Strode won, 6-3 and then in a tiebreak. I'm not surprised Stode is still struggling through the qualies in his mid-20s, however.
Looking at the far court, he seemed awfully spindly for a tennis player. When he came to the near court, I could see that the thigh muscles weren't that much smaller if any than everyone else you see with pro tennis player physique, but the ankles are like toothpicks. One of them was taped up. I doubt he can hold up to the rigors of the tour without really strengthening the ankles quite a bit.
No more men's matches, I watched half a set of one women's match, could have watched more of another final match still going at 8:55, but decided I'd push off. Once upon a time bookstores were open to 11PM, now the B&N in Forest Hills is one of many that don't stay open that late, and if I was going to get over to it and then enjoy an Unos dinner in Forest Hills, couldn't stay. This was probably a good call. Checking the score now I see that the match which hadn't yet finished set #2 went into a 3rd set, which went 72 minutes. So, yes, I would have been at the tennis center til after 10pm and gotten a medal for staying the entire day, but I think the viewing experience would have been torturous.

7:38 PM
Next door on court 6 we had just in its first game Fernando Romboli of Brazil against Tunisian Malik Jaziri, so that's where I am now. Both players seem solid and energetic, but after losing the first set 6-1 Romboli has gone to regroup on a bathroom break.

7:35 PM
The match of the day for me was 4th up on Court 8, featuring Jerzy Janowicz from Poland, the #18 seed and a player I'd watched and enjoyed last year. Very young, good serve, decent ground strokes, not yet fully formed but you think can grow into a better game. He didn't qualify last year but came close, he's had a few main draw matches over the year since. I roamed the grounds and kept an eye on the women's match preceding on the court, glad it didn't go to a third set.
Well, his opponent was a Dutchman, Matwe Middelkoop, and by the end of the match my allegiances had shifted.
Janowicz played one abysmal game in the first set, double faulting at least twice, and lost the set 6-3.
The second set was hard fought, tight, went to a close tiebreak that Janowicz pulled out 7-5.
But over the two sets I wasn't seeing any spark, any sign he was doing anything better this year than last. Which isn't what you want to see in a player this young. Middelkoop wasn't playing great, but he was playing a solid, calm, controlled game, good and relaxed court presence and no mistakes.
Janowicz went down a break early in the third set and the outcome seemed clear. Hadn't had even a break point against Middelkoop that I could recall. Janowicz knew it. He started gently dropping his racket three times on a trip down the baseline.
Final score 6-3 7-6 (5) 6-2 Middelkoop.
Maybe just a bad day at the office for Janowicz, tennis players can have the match of their lives and they can have the anti-match. But I have to entertain the prospect that Janowicz may be a journeyman in training instead of a rising young star. Neither player, I think, does well against a Richard Berankis or an Evgeny Donskoy no matter how close the rankings of the day might look.

5:48 PM
Chair umpire Carlos Ramos has just taken the next seat over from me watching on Court 8!

4:45 PM
Gael Monfils doing pushups after a practice session on Grandstand.

4:20 PM
2nd set was a tad more competitive than the first, Ebden won 6-3 with ine break, but not as competitive seeming as that score might suggest. Hanging out at Court 6now, watching the highly regarded Lithuanian and #12 seed Richard Berankis closing out Spaniard Guillermo Alcaide. I came in start of second set, first went to Berankis 6-2, and the 2nd set may be the same. I was right on the Fratangelo match, 2nd set was also a 6-2 win for Wolmarans.

3:35 PM
Ebden match is a demolition derby, he gave Lemke a bagel (6-0) in the first set. Not much fun to watch, thou you can tell Ebden is good hard to tell how good when so little opposition on offer.

3:30 PM
So it wasn't kids shaking the stands. I didn't notice so much but the Richmond earthquake was felt at the tennis center. Begemann won a pointing to the Ebden match, Ebden up a break in first set.

3:10 PM
Wolmarans won first set 6-2, up a break in second. As a rule I watch full matches but have left that behind to see #14 seed from Australia, Matthew Ebden, playing James Lemke, another Aussie. While I wait for that on Court 15 taking a quick look in on Court 14 where Michael Venus from New Zealand is probably about to lose to Andre Begemann from Germany. Did I watch Begemann last year? As to Fratangelo, he isn't bad but Wolmarans is simply better, at net and on serve and I felt pretty safe leaving Court 7 that no miracles were in store.

2:15 PM
The match on Court 12 ended 6-2 Jouan in a game where all the points were decided on unforced errors, I.e., people making mistakes instead of great shots. Matsukevich had four of those errors to get broken. Basically, not very good tennis. Match time around an hour or so, Da Silva would beat either. Delic on Court 7 is around 30, now plays as a Bosnian instead of an American. His opponent from Russia is the 24th seed and in his very early 20s. Final set was a bust, Delic's game collapsed leading him to a ball abuse warning and I believe a point penalty for racket abuse. I was rooting for Donskoy, shall we say, hard to judge his game when his opponent's was going so far south. The first set was won by Delic in a tiebreak with at least four breaks of serve along the way. Final score 6-7 6-4 6-2. I am staying at court 7 to watch another young American, Bjorn Fratangelo, against Fritz Wolmarans from South Africa.

1:45 pm
settling in for final set of Amer Delic (US) and Evgeny Donskoy (Russia).

1:10 Matsukevich complaining to chair ump, likely since there is now even louder work being done by the "Chase Center" sign atop the nearby indoor tennis center.

12:55 PM
Jouan has the first set 6-2, but in a way I feel Matsukevich has been dictating the play with his errors, and that if he plays tighter it is still anyone's match. Court 12 is adjacent to the new small show court and there is a man two feet away drilling in concrete to make for a convivial tennis playing atmosphere. When I arrived at this court I was next to Jack Sock, an up and coming US player with a wild card into the main draw.

12:40 PM
I am on Cort 12 now, watching Russian Denis Matsukevich against Romain Jouan from France. Chose this because it was still in the first game when I was looking for a new match, so counts as a full. Jouan is up an early break 3-0 in first set.

12:35
Da Silva won in a tight 8-6 2nd set tiebreak. Good match.

11:50
Next page in the paper of man next to me is a USTASHI Line Evaluation Form. Isn't "evaluate" more a synonym for "rate" than for "help?". First set tonDa Silva 6-4. On serve in second, Da Silva just came to net, now 2-2 in 2nd set.

11:36 AM
Da Silva to serve for set. Man next to me in stands making notes tells me he isn't rating the lines people, he is "helping" them. I must remember that nice euphemism.

11:25 AM
The US Open is allowing iPads, so I can blog during the tennis day!

Though I niw live a mile further from the Tennis Center, Google Maps found me the quickest route to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, which makes up for it. Large vanilla chip.

On the grounds, a small new show court is now where courts 17 and 18 once were. The video boards on the grounds are working from day one instead of being tested, which will make it easier to check matches in progress as the day progresses. Armstrong and the Grandstand are open for people to watch practices from day one as wel.

I am on Court 6, watching the #5 men's seed Rogerio Dutra Da Silva from Brazil against Clement Raix, from France. Raix just double faulted to go down a break on the first set. I like that he is coming into net now and again However, in the early going Da Silva is clearly the better player and serving quite quite well, maybe even half a dozen aces in the first six games.

B&N cuts back

2011-08-17T19:01:00.004-04:00

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 would put in an initial order of 6 copies.

Those are nice numbers. You could certainly fill one pocket on the tower, maybe even fill two pockets, and maybe even have a copy or two left over to go back into the section.

Well, not any more.

Now a publisher is paying to get a book on to the New Mass Market Tower, and B&N is ordering 3 copies for the bad stores, 5 copies for somewhat better stores, dramatically fewer copies.

So, big picture, where once B&N might routinely have ordered 6000 copies in exchange for a New Mass Market Tower placement to cover store stock and a ready reserve for the warehouse, now it could be more like 4250 or 4500.

Little picture, let's look at those bad-in-genre stores that had gotten 6 copies and are now getting 3. Well, 3 isn't going to fill 2 pockets, so maybe you'll only get one. For thinner books, 3 copies might not even fill a pocket. Either way, there's no extra copy to go in section, so some dedicated genre fans who bee-line to the section might not notice your new book on the Tower. If one copy sells, all of a sudden there are only 2 copies in a pocket that can fit 3 or 4 so it's harder to see the book on the Tower, the display looks forlorn and lonely. B&N has a great supply chain and can get more copies of a new book from warehouse to store in a couple of days, but if demands at any of these stores is way stronger than expected you're still looking at maybe having only one copy for a day or two or maybe even going clean before the 72 hours it might take to get a box opened. To have this happening now... I can think of some B&Ns where demand might uptick because a nearby Borders has closed, it's a bad time to decide to be less robust in your ordering.

Will these things cost sales? Of course! If the initial order is down by 25%, if some stores are getting 50% fewer copies -- well, it doesn't matter if you have the same placement, this is going to have an effect.

But not to worry, you'll still find plenty of ways to accessorize your Nook.

Harlequin and e-royalties

2011-08-10T12:32:00.006-04:00

There was a bit of controversy in June because Harlequin was sending out letters to "increase" their e-book royalty rates, but to levels that were in some instances less than what had become the industry standard. They've now sent out a second round response to some of the complaints that had been received, which I thought I'd comment upon.

The Harlequin offer is that they will pay the current industry standard of 25% of net receipts for books in their "single title" program. These are books that come out under Mira or Luna or other imprints that are under the branding of an imprint just like a Del Rey book from Random House or an Obsidian book from Penguin, but not under a broad 4-in-a-month numbered series umbrella like Harlequin Nocturne or Harlequin American. For in-series books, their offer is a scaled royalty of 15-20% of net receipts with escalations based on total digital revenue for the books. They explain this lower royalty by saying, essentially, that they are special. That their series are so heavily branded, and sales so dependent on the readership that buys their Harlequins every single month in their series of choice, that the author just isn't as important to the success of things.

If I had a stable of romance authors, I might say... Just in general, there are other publishers that have distinct marketplace impressions. Baen, Daw, Ace military SF, a Berkley Prime Crime book, these are some examples of publishers that have really strong identities in the marketplace. And even within a series there are books that will sell better or worse because of the identity of the author or quality of the manuscript. What if a book is first published as a series, the author takes off, Harlequin repackages outside the series to give the author a longer ongoing life resting more on the author name than series name? There are a gazillion other things that could be said about their offer, the letter explaining it.

But what fascinated me most is this part of the FAQ:

Q: When an older contract provides that the digital royalty is 50% of NAR [Net Receipts], how does that work in practice?
A: Our authors contract with Harlequin Books SA (“HBSA”), our related Swiss company. HBSA licenses the right to publish an author’s work in print and digital to our operating companies and to third party publishers, which then bring books to market in their country (incurring costs of translation, production, distribution, marketing, branding, etc.). In return, HBSA receives a license fee. The NAR is the license fee. For editions where the author is to be paid 50% of NAR, the author’s royalty is therefore 50% of the license fee received by HBSA. The license fees are expressed as a percentage of cover price. Historically they ranged from 6% to 8%. The author’s 50% share of that fee would then equal 3% to 4% of the cover price.

This is where Harlequin explains why it is better to get 15% or 25% of something, where you might otherwise think you are entitled to 50% of that exact same something.

Which -- guess what -- isn't entirely correct.

There are a lot of Harlequin contracts from the early 2000s that, per this FAQ, treat an e-book as a subsidiary right that Harlequin clearly has, but more as a right to be licensed to someone else instead of sold directly by Harlequin. Thus, instead of having a royalty rate, they lump those in with rights like book club or large print or audio that are most often, when given to a publisher, split 50/50 with the author. This is a general situation that pops up in publishing more often than you might think, when a publisher develops the capability to exploit a right that once required a third party.

The right to sub-license within Harlequin isn't as blanket a right or ability as the FAQ would suggest. Sometimes there will be language in a contract that says that licensing within the family has to be done on an arms-length basis, or on terms reflective of what one might get from licensing to a third party (loophole alert: who gets to decide what terms are reflective?), and even without the specific language there is a body of law on fiduciary duty that says you can't be too egregious in doing things that undercut the position of somebody who's entitled to a share of your income.

So let's look at how I as agent might discuss this FAQ, and what alternate answers might be given:

1. If you license your book to Rosetta Books, or to Open Road, or to eReads, you are going to get something like 50% of that third party e-book publisher's net receipts. If you go to Amazon's KDP platform, you might get 50% or 70% of the e-book list price that you establish less small deductions for delivery fees or the like.

2. If you're in the single title program, Harlequin is offering an industry standard royalty rate. You have a problem with that? And 25% is half of the 50% if Harlequin did all its e-books via Open Road, Rosetta, etc. There are many restrictions on using KDP and the similar e-book platforms, no major publishers are using those.

3. If you are in a Harlequin series, where they want to offer you a starting royalty rate of 15% of net receipts instead of the currently more customary 25%, things get a little more interesting but still to only a limited extent. The idea that you sign for 15% of net because it's better than the 3-4% of cover we'd have to pay under that 2002 contract doesn't look so good, but I'm sorry to say the argument isn't entirely that easy for the author or agent to make. As an example, if Harlequin did a broad license with an Open Road, can they say that some percentage of the customary e-book royalty was going to be allocated to granting Open Road the right to use Harlequin's series trademarks and branding, and that this was worth a fraction of the royalty? Probably, it might depend in part on just how much use or co-branding there was, but yes, there are probably ways to do this. Suddenly 50% of net receipts becomes 33% or 40% or 45% of net receipts that are actually allocated to the underlying rights to the book, the rest allocated toward use of the valuable branding or trademarks, and getting one-half of that would look very much like the offer Harlequin is making.

4. The biggest pitfall for Harlequin that I can see is on the question of whether it's a bona fide sublicense if Harlequin publishes a Harlequin e-book. The argument that can be made here is that Harlequin pays a full cover royalty in North American when their editors in NYC sign up a book for a contract that you negotiate with their Ontario-based contracts person, and that even if the contract is with Harlequin S.A. they don't claim that Harlequin S.A. is publishing the book under license to Harlequin in North America. If they don't make that claim for the mass market, how can they make it for the e-book? If that argument were successfully made, Harlequin might not be able to publish the e-book without having a specific royalty rate amended into these older contracts. Since that would be more of a Mexican stand-off, maybe Harlequin would sweeten their offer for the series titles.

5. But even then, there are alternative approaches Harlequin could take. As an example, the precedent is very much that not every Harlequin imprint around the globe does every book that Harlequin does in North America, so if they had e-books done through an Australian or British subsidiary that has a track record of exercising selectivity, and if the web sites that sell those e-books don't have tight territorial controls over where they sell...

In the course of publishing events, authors have made point #4s, and publishers have found point #5s. As an example, in the late 1990s (if memory serves) Harper settled an action over how much money Harper US received selling books to Harper Canada. If they sell the books to themselves for less, the net receipt is smaller, the author royalty is less. The authors "won" this, and Harper stopped selling books to Canada intracompany at artificially low rates. Then Harper decided to offer a lower royalty on those sales moving forward, and to be very firm on keeping to that lower royalty rate. The victory was ephemeral.

This post isn't to say that everyone rush to sign on Harlequin's dotted line, nor to say you rush to their attorney ready to make my point #4 regarding their 2002 contract. I'm admiring, in a way, because the Harlequin offer on series titles might be low, but at the same time just high enough that it's hard for the average author to say no. It's the velvet glove version of "make him an offer he can't refuse."

Separation Anxiety

2011-07-29T07:34:00.003-04:00

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 Borders was that they did a better, more consistent job of stocking core series across a full range of their stores, they'd be the place that would have all the Deathstalker books and all the Blood books when Borders would be the place that had the weird gaps of not carrying books #1 and book #4 at various stores. Now I can't count on every B&N to have the entire Nightside series by Simon Green. Maybe I'm being old in my thinking, because Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett have stormed past my other clients, but I don't see Tanya Huff or Elizabeth Moon or Simon Green as doing appreciably worse now, not at all. They've been leapfrogged over, but I'm still reasonably certain that a typical B&N should have better selections on all three than they are. And even with Charlaine, B&N stopped carrying her Wolfsbane & Mistletoe anthology, which has been selling several dozen copies on Bookscan week-in and week-out without B&N, which means it should be at B&N.

So, no, I don't want to spend my life traveling around visiting B&Ns. With Borders, I could kind of afford to have the thrill of the hunt with walking into a bad one with a bad selection because at least I knew there was another chain with a more consistent selection, or maybe even a better Borders in the area. Now, if I visit a bad B&N, it'll just be depressing.

All in a day's work

2011-07-22T14:53:00.000-04:00

So there are people in the world who wonder what an agent does and why an author might want one...

A couple months ago, a publisher came to us wanting to re-add e-book rights to an old contract, in which the e-book had to be published within x months and wasn't. The author wants to help out, we want to help out, we have an ongoing relationship with the publisher and want to support the newer books by the author. But I also pointed out to the author that there was an unearned advance of a few thousand dollars, that we'd get around $1.25 for each e-book sold, and we'd be a while in actually getting any royalties based on realistic expectations for the e-book sale. We ended up reaching an agreement with the publisher for the e-book to be separately accounted, so that print sales could still go against the advance, but it would be mutually beneficial for us to sign an amendment for the e-book edition.

[tying back to my last anniversary musing, the ultimate difference that Bill Baldwin and I had was this: I think if you're a professional writer that the goal is to make money, Bill that the goal is to have books in print, and the two are not always synonymous. This is an instance where the author's first instinct is to want to have the book available, and here I as agent was able to step in and find a way to bring the two goals closer together.]

We have our first contract with a big publisher. Big publisher is thinking they should no longer publisher children's books that they can't do an app for, because this is the big next new thing that people are talking about for children's books. Have they done any apps before? Not really. Are they definitely going to do an app for this book? Who knows. Do they know what they might include in the app if they were to do it it? Not really. But nonetheless, they have to have the rights. Big publisher wants to get the rights in the broadest way possible. The problem is that their broadest way possible will not make the general counsel at Big film studio happy if ever we are able to sell film rights, it probably won't make the publisher of any audio edition very happy, this app with who knows what that may or may not ever exist could make it impossible to sell other very valuable rights. So we have to go back multiple rounds with Big publisher to narrow the definition as much as we possibly can. Besides the back and forth with the publisher, when it becomes clear that the publisher is getting very insistent on having these rights, we need to talk to our client to have client support for the idea that the publisher has to come at least a certain way toward our position, or we will in fact say "no" to a decently sized advance. The ultimate resolution, we are still granting these rights to the publisher for the first time, and we're not very happy about it, and we really wish we weren't, but we've at least narrowed things down to the point where the definition is as narrow as it can be without saying "no," and we think narrow enough that if we ever have to discuss the contract with Big film studio, we should be able to do a film deal that will co-exist with the book deal.

Another publisher is very insistent on publishing books in the reverse order of the delivery dates in the contract. Hence, the author is delaying work on the revisions his editor requested on book #1 in order to have book #2 in early. Someone has to explain to the publisher that the author's delivery and acceptance advance on book #1 shouldn't be entirely held up because the publisher requested to have the other book in early.

These are some of the things we do to amuse ourselves during the workday.

There are bad agents who might not do any of these things. There are authors who have the knowledge and the inclination to do each of these things just as well or maybe better. But if you can't look yourself in the mirror and sincerely say to yourself that you would've held off on having an e-book edition just because it wouldn't make you money until 2017, or understood the conflict between the app rights and movie rights and dragged out your contract negotiation for rounds and weeks to protect yourself, and/or felt comfortable arguing when the publisher explained how it was like taking first born child to pay a delivery and acceptance advance for a book that hadn't had its revisions delivered and accepted, then you might conclude an agent can do some things for you.

An Anniversary Musing #8, Martial Law Pt 1

2011-07-21T14:40:00.005-04:00

Military sf has been part of my existence as a literary agent for most of my career.

My first author in the genre was Bill Baldwin. Bill was a very, very successful author for Warner at a time when it didn't have a particularly successful sf program. There was Warner, then there was Questar, then there was Aspect, then there wasn't much, and eventually when the French publishing conglomerate Hachette came along and purchased Warner Books, they imported Tim Holman, who had done a great job building the Orbit UK list, moved the sf program from Warner to Little Brown/Grand Central, and have since had much better results. Not so back then, the Warner program wasn't much, and Bill and his Helmsman books were rare projects that would be displayed at the front of the bookstores. The Helmsman series was classic in its appeal, the lead character Wilf Brim a man's man of a space captain with a life full of women and adventure.

Working with Bill was one of the experiences that taught me that the first batches of royalty statements in the old days, before breaking out of reserves against returns, were good pretty much for toilet paper. The first statements would always be for really small numbers for books that were plastered at the front of bookstores, but mostly because there were 50% or 70% reserves or who knew how much, so if you looked just at those Bill was always magically in the midst of a collapsing career until two years later when the publisher stopped taking reserves and lo and behold the sales were nicely in line with all the earlier books.

When I went off on my own to start JABberwocky, Bill was incredibly supportive, except that he decided to go back to agent he had been with before joining Scott Meredith, who had lots of wonderful good ideas. Those ideas ended up being along the lines of "let's sell the next book in the Helmsman series!" Bill ended up coming back to the JABberwocky fold a few years later.

We still didn't have the best relationship. I tried hard to break him into the mainstream with a WWII thriller, but wasn't able to sell it. And I've always felt there are times that the best deals are the ones you don't do, that sometimes rights are valuable just sitting in the drawer until better things come along, while Bill really very much wanted to have his books "in print" even if it meant putting a book into iUniverse or with a smaller publisher on unfavorable terms. So we ended up parting ways again.

There would be an audience for the Helmsman books on Kindle, I expect. Those aren't available, but you can find the thriller of his that I wasn't able to sell available on Amazon, along with some of those small-press reissues and audios that I wasn't so fond of having. And if you think you like classic military sf, you'd probably have a good time with these.

Rick Shelley was my next military sf author. He'd started his career with stories in Analog and in Terry Carr's Universe anthologies (if you don't know Terry's name, he was the editor not just of the great Universe series but of the Ace Specials line, which discovered just a few wee important books to the field like Neuromancer by William Gibson and The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the very important editors in the history of sf/f, Terry was).

Rick is a little like Ronald Kelly, an author whose native gifts weren't as prodigious as for some, but who made the very very very best of them. The main thing with Rick, his batting average was really awful. For every published novel of his, there's probably one that wasn't and to be honest, shouldn't have been. It's not the nicest thing to have to say in one of my anniversary musings, but I think it's worth saying because it's an important thing for a writer to know, that you can have a long career and sell dozens of novels but still have a rough patch or an off outing, or can occasionally divert to something to try and stretch your aims and ambitions (though doesn't hurt to be prepared to return to home base if you need to), that you can have a relationship with an agent that can last even if there is sometimes a book that the agent can't sell or perhaps won't want to try selling. There are many kinds of careers in publishing, and they don't all consist of selling every word you write without anguish or setback.

And the books I liked of Rick's, I liked them. The first novel if his I sold, which wasn't the first novel that he sent to the Scott Meredith agency, it was something like the 4th or 5th (another lesson worth repeating for new writers, your first published novel is often not going to be the first novel you write, even some of my biggest clients like Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett have learning experiences on their hard drive), was Son of the Hero, the first book in the Varayan Memoir fantasy series. I think it would make a good movie, it's a good example of a very archetypal story about the kid who finds there's something more to his life than he knows about. The trilogy will soon be available in JABberwocky e-book.

After an interesting attempt at Moorcockian fantasy (The Wizard at Mecq, The Wizard at Home), Rick found his calling writing military sf, but again not without some ups and downs along the way. His Lucky 13th series did pretty well, his Buchanan novels somewhat less well. But when I read Officer Cadet, I knew this was something that could be destined for bigger things. I encouraged the editor at Ace to follow the model Warner was using for David Feintuch, which they did, and the DMC series, which is now available on e-book, really took off.

Neither Rick nor I was making so much money back then that we could afford to travel a lot, and I met Rick only once at the 2000 WorldCon in Chicago. We had a very tasty lunch at Pizzeria Due. It was an especially enjoyable lunch because the DMC books were doing very well, Rick was tasting true success for the first time in his life, and we had things to be happy about.

And then a few months later, Rick was dead. Massive heart attack in the hotel lobby at Chattacon the following January.

It was strange, because Rick had always been very aware of his own mortality, that his father had died young and the men in his family died young. And then Rick died in his early 50s, with only a couple years of enjoying success when he really should've had the opportunity to enjoy it for another 20 or 30 years.

And the odd thing is, for all the books Rick wrote that I didn't like, there are books he wrote that I wish were published (the third book in his Wizard series, which was completed and cancelled), books he proposed that I wish he could have written (the sequel series to the Varayan Memoir books), and all in all still a feeling of loss. And something like the third book in the Wizard series, that was written in the mid-1990s, I doubt I even still had that pile of paper in the office five years later, because why would I keep it around? And I didn't talk to his mom or his sister about doing an instant recovery mission for any old manuscripts or old diskettes. Must check if any of that's still laying around somewhere...

You can click here to find your way to the available JABberwocky e-books from Rick Shelley, six as of July 21 and more coming.

Maybe I'll have a chance before the slower summer months give way to the much busier fall months to continue the JABberwocky military sf story...

Running on empty

2011-07-18T18:33:00.003-04:00

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 now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

And let me make very clear, you can love Borders or hate it, you can rue the day they came in to your neighborhood in 1994 and helped to kill some local independent store, you can say you liked Barnes & Noble better, or that the staff at your local Borders were rude, or they never seemed very nice when you wanted to arrange a signing. You can do all of that. But if you love books, if you care about the power of the written word, of the ability for a writer to tell stories, and for those stories to move people and give meaning to the lives of others, if you care about any of that you can't be happy today. This is the saddest day for the book business that any of us have ever seen, and let us only hope that we can still say the same 25 years from today.

There are millions of people who now don't have a good, convenient, physical place to buy and explore books, unless you think a computer screen counts. And I mean that. I don't agree with everyone Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith say about agents, I don't remotely like they'll have an extra hour to drive to visit a good bookstore. There are millions of people living in Manhattan, many millions more working there on a weekday, and we're about to revert back to before Sept. 5 1995 when Borders opened at the World Trade Center -- only worse because before then there were at least a handful of indies on the island with decent and wide selections co-existing with B&N, and now you can't look at the sf section of Posman Books in Grand Central and think this is a place you want to go for your book shopping needs. So for all the rest of us, our book selection is now only and solely what Barnes & Noble decrees it to be. And I've got news for you, if you think publishers have been spending the past several months doing detailed analysis of their Borders sales and finding the 1% or 2% of their titles that were selling well at Borders alone and are now going to give those the extra TLC to get B&N to share the love -- well, the idea's good for a laugh. There are authors who no longer have a store to sell some or all of their books.

And yet I can't be as sad as I feel I should be.

I tried awfully hard when I visited the Peabody MA store in February. It was that brief window between the bankruptcy filing and the start of the liquidation sales for the first round of 200 closures, the sun that day was still shining even as the dark clouds gathered and the storm approached. It was a Borders store that time forgot, still with the old-fashioned woody shelving with the sf/f hardbacks and trades separate from the mass markets. I knew at one level that I could have shopped those same shelves twelve or fifteen years before. But I couldn't really get "up" for that experience.

That's the thing, once upon a time it had been fun to enter a Borders, good or bad not to know what you'd find selection wise on the shelves, to roam some weird diagonal aisles, to look at the different things that store had up at the front that other stores wouldn't, to peek into the mass market overstock shelves and find some singleton copy of a book that I could rescue and put out where customers could see and buy it and have some real sense of accomplishment, or climb the ladder if nobody was looking to rescue something from the overstock there.

But the stores didn't have personality any more. If they did, it was the personality of a ghost town, of walking in to the Plano TX stores or Preston Road stores in April 2010 and feeling the cobwebs rolling along down the aisles of these large empty boxes without merchandise enough or customers enough to sustain.

And on the other side of the ledger, there's supposed to be some comfort in finally reaching the end of a death that was long in coming. None of that here. Around 11,000 people that will be out of work. The authors who don't have an outlet for their books. The readers who don't have a bookstore to explore. There's pain, there's sadness, there's misery, all around. There's no sense of relief.

But for a few minutes, let me find a tear or two for the pensieve, and let me try and find those good memories of times gone by:

First walking into the original Ann Arbor Borders some twenty years ago, looking at more books than I'd ever looked at before in amazing and wide and stunningly broad profusion, that first purchase of Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy. And then the hours spent exploring those shelves during my college years.

That happy moment when I "broke the code" and realized what the numbers on the buff inventory punchcards meant and knew I could now browse the shelves with entire new layers of meaning.

All those visits to DC, visiting Borders by Ride-On and Metro and by foot, doing all those things I mentioned above that I'd love to do at Borders, in an area where almost all the bookstores really were above average. The hustle and bustle of 18th and L during lunch hour, of White Flint on a Saturday night, of watching Germantown sprout from the corn fields to become a hugely important location for my clients.

Walking in the first time to the store in Columbia, MD or Gresham, OR or Milpitas, Mission Viejo, Torrance CA or State St. or Fairview Heights IL or South Bay and Mission Viejo or Fairfax and Bailey's Crossroads, VA, Redmond WA, and realizing you'd just walked in to one of the best bookstores around, the places that were getting in 24 copies of some new paperback that you'd have sworn there wasn't a store getting more than 12 of them, and that would sell through all two dozen in no time flat.

The first visit to the first Borders that was actually close to where I was living as an adult on Park Ave., finding a bookstore for the first time that had 100ish books I'd sold on its shelves.

The birthdays I'd spend taking the train out to Long Island. Really. There were many many years I'd quite happily spend doing the great Long Island bookstore tour.

Professionally, going to Newark DE or to Bailey's Crossroads VA to see clients signing at those big special stores for dozens and later hundreds of people.

The thing is, in a way I wish Borders had died unexpectedly, that these happy memories were fresh in my mind and not dependent on tears in the pensieve, but it's all so interconnected, so related, so entirely unaccidental that these stores will soon be no more.

The bulbs will burn out, or be turned off by Hilco and Gordon Brothers, on some Sunday in mid September.

The end was expected.

The stories, now only stories.

The borders open, and many crossing. That time is not now.

As once upon a time, they were.

A Dance with Adjectives

2011-07-13T13:33:00.006-04:00

So everyone else is reviewing A Dance with Dragons, the fact that I haven't actually read the book shouldn't stop me from doing the same... Or at least, in a limited basis, trying to explain how the first page of the latest GRRM opus shows him breaking the rules in order to follow him.

There are enough sample chapter places all over the internet that I'll take the liberty of typing in page 1:

The night was rank with the smell of man.

The warg stopped beneath a tree and sniffed, his grey-brown fur dappled by shadow. A sigh of piney wind brought the man-scent to him, over fainter smells that spoke of fox and hare, seal and stag, even wolf. Those were man-smells too, the warg knew; the stink of old skins, dead and sour, near drowned beneath the stronger scents of smoke and blood and rot. Only many stripped the skins from other beasts, and wore their hides and hair.

Wargs have no fear of man, as wolves do. Hate and hunger coiled in his belly, and he gave a low growl, calling to his one-eyed brother, to his small sly sister. As he raced through the trees, his packmates followed hard on his heels. They had caught the scent as well. As he ran, he saw through their eyes too and glimpsed himself ahead. The breath of the pack puffed warm and white from long grey jaws. Ice had frozen between their paws, hard as stone, but the hunt was on now, the prey ahead. Flesh, the warg thought, meat.

A man alone was a feeble thing. Big and strong, with good sharp eyes, but dull of ear and deaf to smells. Deer and elk and eve hares were faster, bears and boars fiercer in a fight. But men in packs were dangerous. As the wolves closed on the prey, the warg heard the wailing of a pup, the crust of last night's snow breaking under clumsy man-paws, the rattle of hardskins and the long grey claws men carried.

Swords, a voice inside him whispered, spears.

The trees had grown icy teeth, snarling down from the bare brown branches. One Eye ripped though the undergrowth, spraying snow. His packmates followed. Up a hill and down the slope beyond, until the wood opened before them and the men were there. One was female.

[excerpted from A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin, ©2011, published by Bantam Spectra Books, buy here]

So there's this adage in writing that you "show, don't tell." This means that the writer is supposed to use a character's actual words, deeds, gestures, to use these to allow us to get close to the character. The other approach, the "tell" approach, has the narrator telling us things. One small example taken from a submission I read recently, the narrator tells us that a character is anxious, and the better approach in about the same amount of words would be to tell us that the character could feel his heart pounding or his pulse racing. We've all felt our heart pound or our pulse race, we know when and why it happens, we can imagine the sensation. Using those words makes the prose immediate, it brings us into the world, it helps us feel what the character feels. The tell way, to say the character is anxious, does none of that.

The interesting thing with the prose I've excerpted from Dance With Dragons is that it's full of telling, but almost all of the telling is intensely visual, and intensely relatable, so even though Martin shouldn't -- and believe me, by the rules he shouldn't -- be using such a potpourri of purplish prose to start his book, he's actually doing something with it.

Let's look closely:

The smell of man. I'm assured by Myke Cole that I haven't experienced the smell of man until I've changed in the Coast Guard's Sector Hampton Roads locker room. I still don't especially like the phrase, we're in the outdoors and unless there's a Roman Legion of very sweaty soldiers standing right there I don't think the phrase is right, even if an army just marched past five minutes ago that would have to be one hell of an army to leave that stench. Still, as bad opening phrases go let's say that I've seen a lot worse. The examples I have to give to point out why I don't like the phrase still all point in a certain direction of what's just happened, is happening,is about to happen in this space. It's not a picnic, not a quilting circle.

Piney wind. If you've never been in a pine forest this phrase won't mean much, just like the "smell of man" phrase might not resonate for everyone sufficiently removed from high school gym class. But if you have, and here in NYC we can go strolling through the Arthur Ross Pinetum in Central Park, these two words tell us an amazing amount about what these woods look like. A pine forest doesn't look like other kinds of forest.

Puffed warm and white from long gray jaws. This phrase and the ones immediately preceding in the paragraph give us an idea how many wolves are racing through the pine forest. Now, we know it's cold, we know that there are those vapor trails of the breath emerging into the cold air. And then we can add the visual of the stuff frozen beneath their paws. This is another of the visuals that doesn't quite work for me, I don't have enough experience seeing that to really buy into it, but buy into it or not I can visualize.

Last night's snow breaking. Again, a clear visual.

Of course, between these well-chosen phrases, GRRM continues as he does in this series to lay on the lists:
fox and hare, seal and stag, even wolf
smoke and blood and rot
Big and strong, with good sharp eyes, but dull of ear and deaf to smells. Deer and elk and eve hares were faster, bears and boars fiercer in a fight

Let me say on a personal level that this opening page tells me I wasn't wrong to bail out of this series around 90% of the way thru book #2 without any deep regrets. There's a lot that I can and do admire about the prose, in fact I often recommend GRRM's "Fevre Dream" as a writing textbook for authors needing to learn some lessons about writing good dialogue. And reading this one page, I can easily admire all of the perfectly chosen two or five word phrases that tell an incredible amount and pain vivid pictures for me that are entirely different than the pictures I'd draw in my mind with any other two word phrase in the Engish language. At the same time, there are a lot of words here, a lot of words. Rich and powerful but still so very very many of them. What I came to realize with this series was that for me, where I am, with the time I have to give to read things for pleasure, that the pleasures of the series weren't quite rich enough to justify my own time investment. It's fun to admire the prose, I just can't afford to admire so much of it.

This is not exactly the same as saying I wouldn't agree to represent if a client of mine decided to write the next Game of Thrones, or if it came in through our query pile. Pleasure reading time is precious, while work reading is a question not just of what I like, but also of the marketplace, of the investment I have in an author-agent relationship, and other factors. Your spouse might not make the world's best quiche, but you can happily eat that quiche having brunch at home while choosing not to order a quiche of equivalent quality at a local restaurant.

My submission pile will not lack for people trying to emulate GRRM. Alas, very few of them will be able to emulate in a wholly successful way. GRRM can get away with his love of lists in part because he can match example for example with one of his perfectly chosen two word phrases.

Or with people who think there's a difference in meaning between an azure sky and a blue sky. And you know what, there really isn't. Unless you work devising colors for Behr and Benjamin Moore, Tupperware and Corning, KitchenAid and Waring (please note that not all lists of six are equally interesting as those on the first page of Dance with Dragons) you're substituting use of a thesaurus for an actual demonstration of literary craft.

The fantasy submissions we get are as rich with derivative RPG-inspired fantasy novels as the opening page of Dance with Dragons is with rich visual imagery. I'm glad to see GRRM succeeding with these books even if I'm choosing to abstain because they are incredibly rich, a major literary accomplishment in a field that often settles (you could say this of most...) for considerably less.

But new writers beware: GRRM's richness is of a piece. I would say it is even less tolerant of success via mediocre imitation than the RPG-inspired.

The Agent as Publisher

2011-06-29T15:39:00.003-04:00

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 Monday that Dystel & Goderich (DGLM) have decided to become an e-book packager.

Here's their announcement: link

This bothers me enough that I decided to do my first ever guest post on Brillig to comment.

I think the decision to help an author self-publish a book, after failing to place it with a real publisher, is rooted in hubris. Yes, we agents hopefully have good taste, and there are client projects we all feel should have sold but didn't, but to turn around and put them out into the marketplace anyway, shows disrespect toward the editors who should be among our closest colleagues, takes up time and energy best spent elsewhere, and detaches us from reality, which can't be good.

It's really disappointing to see such a high-profile agency go this route. DGLM seems to have the support of their clients, if the comments on their site are any indication. They also seem to be trying to do their best to be forthright about everything.While it's possible that an agency, especially a larger one, could successfully keep these concerns separate (and good luck keeping it that way), it is a conflict of interest for most.

I'm not a member of the AAR, but if I were, I would move to make an active effort to kick out any member agency who serves as first publisher to their clients' books.

Good luck to everyone at DGLM. Many of you have been doing this for much longer, and with greater financial success, than I have. Maybe the rest of us will be shown the error of our ways.

If anyone reads this post, and thinks I'm the one in error (or agrees...), feel free to comment via rock with note attached, or in the comments section.

Eddie

I don't disagree with Eddie on this. There are times I've rolled about in my own mind on this question. There's a book we absolutely love, we can't find a publisher, we're sure they're all wrong... And yet I haven't actually gone ahead and flipped that switch and said "darnit, nobody else wants to publish this fine book we're going to go do it ourselves."

And yet we at JABberwocky are in fact e-book publishers, with a growing list of authors and titles. Albeit all reverted backlist titles first published by major publishers and now back in the author's hands, some of the books in fact published, reverted, resold, published again, and then back a second time. We're trying to occupy some kind of middle ground that may or may not actually exist between being full-fledged publishers of electronic books and saying we can't and shan't be publishers at all. I dealt with some of our thinking on the whole e-book program in this blog post when we had our first e-book go live.

Is there a distinction, or is it a distinction without a difference, to object as Eddie and I do, to an agent who "serves as first publisher to their clients' books"??? I see in my mind a very real difference between what we are doing, what Robert Gottlieb says we should/shouldn't do, and what Dystel and Goderich have decided to do. But even if I'm right to see that different today, will it still exist tomorrow?

As Eddie says, let us know what you think. I'm not sure the rock with attached note is such a good idea, but otherwise...

Doomed to Repeat It

2011-06-14T00:47:00.003-04:00

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 looked as nice. Borders would sell Kim & Scott's pretzels at all of their stores but they wouldn't be branded as Kim & Scott's pretzels. Since Borders couldn't run the cafes well, farming out the business to Seattle's Best and having some degree of consistency and a recognizable brand and all that sort of thing seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Just like, since Borders was late to the internet and a distant third and not running things very well, farming Borders.com off to Amazon was kind of a good idea at the time.

In both cases, however, the better solution would have been to run things better within Borders.

But even after the Seattle's Best conversions and the money spent fixing up the cafes, the cafes were better but still not as good. There was still less variety than at a B&N cafe, still not as attractively presented, and some stores were never converted, and even those that were it dragged on over several years. And of course those conversions were one part of the endless rounds of store remodels, and ultimately even this seeming good thing in the remodel process was maybe not so good after all.

Smooth move.

There may also be another few dozen Borders locations closing, as many as 20 superstores and 30 mall and/or airport stores.

And these, Borders would actually like to keep open.

The problem here is that these are stores that are very profitable and well trafficked in very good locations or stores that have really really good leases. Under the calendar that's in effect for the bankruptcy, Borders had x months to decide if it wants to keep or reject store leases, clock will be up in September. While there are some buyers circling around a substantial portion of the business, there's no way a sale can close in time for the new buyer to take over the leases before that September deadline.

And Borders is still a little tight on cash until a buyer is found. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, a company has to find a lendor who will float cash for the company to operate during the reorganization. This is called "debtor in possession" or DIP, and the company that's giving the DIP money is first in line to get paid back ahead of everyone else. For Borders, the DIP financing was on the low side because of the challenging circumstances facing the company, and this is exacerbated because Borders lost a lot of money in March and April, maybe somewhat less in May, but they've burned through a lot of their DIP money.

And because these are good stores, like the Penn Plaza location in Manhattan or downtown Boston, in good rentable locations, the landlords aren't rushing to compromise with Borders and extend the deadline for rejecting leases. All the other locations, there's a signed piece of paper that in most instances is pushing the September 2011 deadline into the opening weeks of 2012. Not these.

So there are these 50 stores with millions of dollars in inventory in them, that Borders might have to vacate in September, like it or not, on account of the interaction of these various factors. If you are going to vacate the stores by September, you need to start liquidating the inventory by the end of June, to allow July and August for the going out of business sales and a couple of weeks in September to clear out. And in order to do that, you need the court to approve the sales and the liquidators to put in their bids for the honor of running the sales right about now.

With its back to the wall, Borders is struggling to get the DIP lendors to give them more time, or to find some way of getting the extension papers signed by the landlords, but with no certainty of getting anywhere with either, they have to put in their filings and motions to approve the sales. They think maybe it will end up being closer to 15 stores than 50 that end up having to shutter, but who knows.

The manager of the Borders store in downtown Boston has said it's 100% certain his store will close. The closest major bookstore would then be the Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center, around two miles away. That's practically like having it another city. If you're wondering if there's any effect on the ability of people to buy books as a result of losing these stores, I can't think of any better example.

BEA Day 1

2011-05-24T20:50:00.005-04:00

So here are some of the things seen at Day #1 of Book Expo America, the biggest trade show for e book publishing industry in the United States...

The Rebellion/Solaris booth gave first look at a finished book copy of Dead of Veridon by Tim Akers, which goes on sale next week. Sometimes a book cover looks different on an actual book than in the steps along the way. This one looks nicer than I might have expected.

The Macmillan Audio catalog has a special "Just Announced" insert page for Mistborn: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson. Because they hadn't planned to offer a retail consumer product, but I persuaded them to give it a think and they decided that they in fact should. Me happy. Next, trying to persuade them to provide physical consumer product for the original Mistborn trilogy. If you would like to see that, let me know.

Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner doing a joint book signing at the MWA booth. Hard to believe, but this is Charlaine's first ever trip to BEA, and tomorrow she is featured at one of the major breakfast events. This is one of those things as an agent that you dream of having clients important enough to be doing.

Roaming about the digital section, with an amazing assortment of eReaders that you haven't heard of, many of which are different than the two years ago eReaders you've never heard of, one of which has an office just a mile or so away from JABberwocky in Astoria/LIC that we've never heard of. Kobo, which is unveiling a new device, is the most prominent in attendance. No Nook or Kindle at BEA, neither is counting on mom and pop outreach or libraries for selling devices. Amazon has a stand for their publishing operations.

The show floor is mixed up from years past. Recorded Books is in the digital section and Tantor is only in the Rigths Center so audio row isn't this year. Major publishers have booths in strange locations. Due to renovations there is a blocked off section in the middle of the show floor which breaks up the expanse.

Who says you don't get free books any more? I picked up around 20 without even trying that hard. My parents and siblings will be getting some care packages!!

On the way over to Javits, seeing the mass market of Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings in the bestseller facing at Hudson News, which tells me Tor has put some money into getting good display for us on this book.

So just a few quick idle notes...

This past weekend was the Nebua Awards weekend event in DC. IT was a good and well run event, but I find it sad that only around 200 people show up for the awarding of one if the top prizes in SF. No representation that I saw for Orbit or Harper Voyager, as an example. Still I think it was a good networking opportunity for Myke Cole. I got to catch up with David Louis Edelman over good west African cuisine. I wad happy to see an Analog story by Eric James Stone win in one of the short fiction categories because Analog is very important to me, Stan Schmidt is important to me, and Eric James Stone is an author I like. Met a few agent- hunting young writers, so fingers crossed for when their partials arrive.

I could say more about both BEA and Nebulas, but will settle on this for right now.

evolution in action

2011-05-04T12:53:00.005-04:00

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, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead & Gone paperback
Retail market share 43%

May 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Familly
Retail market share 39%
[and this is a book that would have been competing with mass merchandisers like Target and K-Mart as well]

January 2011, launch week for Simon Green's Hard Day's Knight
Retail market share 54%

these are all books that came out before the Borders implosion, a January 2011 release like Simon's would have been the last one for

March 2011, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North
Retail market share 32%

April 2011, launch week for Jack Campbell's Dreadnaught
Retail market share 32%

April 2011, launch week for Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family paperback
Retail market share 40%

OK, if you want to you can poke holes left and right in the argument I'm making. The only direct year-over-year 450-Borders-operating-normally vs. 200-Borders-in-bankruptcy comparison I'm making is with Elizabeth Moon, and one comparison is a point, not even a line and hardly a definitive trend. It's an anecdote. I don't know exactly how many of the copies that sold a year ago sold at the 250 Borders that disappeared over the year following.

But I've been in the business for 25 years, and I consider the year-over-year drop in retail market share for Elizabeth Moon to be jaw-dropping. It's not like people couldn't buy cheaper hardcovers on Amazon a year ago. It's not like the economy's in dramatically different shape now than a year ago, it's pretty shitty in both instances. And somehow or other, brick-and-mortar booksellers are losing huge market share to internet, and I'd suspect that it's the biggest such drop in percentage terms since Amazon arrived in business fifteen years ago, almost has to be since if you lose 10% of your market share every year for fifteen years you don't have any business left to lose. And the one big difference between brick-and-mortar and Amazon now vs. last year is those 250 Borders that went up and vanished, and it just seems to me to be abundantly clear that most of those shoppers haven't decided to drive an extra mile to find a B&N.

Let's just say I'll keep an eye on this!

And if you're looking at this and wondering if/how Borders can come up with a plan to reorganize, I don't think you'd feel encouraged.

selective reading

2011-04-30T00:15:00.002-04:00

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 stores. How can I possibly think that dropping titles that might have sold so few copies would be the killing blow? But I did, I do, I always will, and it's that sentence in that WSJ article this week that sums it up. No, the books hardly sold worth a damn, but the customers who did buy deep into the catalog were important customers.

Some differences which I think made this effect even more important to Borders. I think the customers who didn't buy the books still kind of noticed them, and that their presence enhanced the overall impression of the brand, more than is the case for these items Wal-Mart is returning to the shelves. And more important, there are still guns and sewing cloth to sell so Wal-Mart can turn back the clock and stop selling them. The deep catalog advantage at the best Borders was built up over a fifteen or twenty year period, and many of the books Borders stopped selling went out of print and bye-bye without Borders to sell them, making it harder to just put them back on the shelf after a year or two away. It's also one thing for books that don't sell a lot of copies to justify continuing to sell them here or there as a matter of happy inertia, and another thing to decide to get back in the business of selling books that don't really sell all that well.

Bottom line is that when George Jones was saying on conference calls in the quarters following the reduction in title count that he ordered that same store book sales were down by 13% and we think a few points of it is from overdoing the drops in title count, I think he was underestimating the real impact of what he had done.

Statement Night Fever

2011-04-29T01:28:00.006-04:00

One of my clients anxiously sent me a link to a recent Business Rusch post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch regarding royalty statements. "Is this something I need to worry about?"

Well, let me give some perspective from my end...

In some ways, yes, because e-book royalty reports are particularly susceptible to problems right now.

E-book sales may be somewhat more receptive to problems because

(a) the publishers are reliant on third party royalty reports which are of varying qualitfy. As an example, Amazon's Kindle platform for the general public won't as yet generate an author-sorted royalty report. Why should they, because it's for authors who are putting up their books so they're by that author. Well, not quite. We use this platform, other smaller agents and publishers use this platform. Lack of author sort means we have extra steps as we get more things on Kindle to sort everything by the correct author. Extra work means a temptation to shortcut. What kind of reports and sorts do they provide big publishers, who might have over 10,000 titles they need to properly allocate to the correct royalty account.

(b) the reports lack the audit trail of having physical copies go places. Everything is an electron. If you think it's tough to audit a publisher's records for print sales where they have physical books that can be tracked, imagine if a major publisher tries to audit Amazon's records. The amount of computer forensics that would need to be done is staggering.

(c) the business is still relatively new, and any time you have something new you have kinks to work out. As an example, the Penguin royalty reports and Harper royalty reports are designed to give each ISBN its own royalty statement page, and for the first several years of e-book sales each e-book format had its own ISBN, which meant five or seven pages reporting sales for different e-book formats. That's a staggering amount of paper being generated. Now they are doing "only" three e-book ISBNs instead of five or seven, but anything put into e-book prior to Fall 2009 will still have the several ISBNs assigned. Even for the more recent books, a title that might once have just had a one page royalty statement for a mass market paperback will still have that one page, plus three e-book pages, plus a summary page. Better than eight pages? Yes! Better than one page? Hell's bells no!!

So yes, we've found some major e-book reporting errors. One of our books was somehow assigned the same ISBN for one e-book format as a Dean Koontz book, and our author received credit for thousands of e-book sales that belonged to Dean Koontz. It took us multiple tries to get the problem corrected, to the point where we even asked the author "hey, we told them about this six months ago, they still haven't fixed it, they must be saying it's correct, so do you want to keep $5K of Dean Koontz's money, or having tried to fix this from the publisher side shall we now go and let the Dean Koontz people know about this." Our author was very ethical, and told us to inform the Koontz camp. In another instance, this same publishing conglomerate had two books with the same title by different authors and gave our authors e-book sales to the other book. We had to threaten an audit before they finally got down to brass tacks of looking at it. How did we notice this? Well, when you look at the royalty reports for a series of books and see e-book sales of 7K, 6K, 1K, 6K, and neither I nor the author are getting angry e-mails asking why there isn't an e-book of the third book in the series, you get to thinking maybe there is an e-book, maybe it too sold 6K, and you wonder where those copies are hiding.

At the same time, please keep in mind:

1. There have always been problems with royalty statements. Twice in my life with different publishers distributed by different publishing conglomerates, I noticed that there were no Canadian royalties being reported for two straight royalty periods. Once I will forgive, because maybe there's some lag in the big publisher getting the reports to its distribution clients. Two periods in a row, that's a problem. Or there are games being played with the reserve against returns. Or sub rights money that hasn't shown up. Or the royalty rates have been set up incorrectly.

2. As hard as it can be to find e-book problems because of the paper trail/audit trail issues, they can be found if you look carefully, no different than that it's hard to notice the Canadian money is missing because it isn't there to be noticed. You find that series of books where one book in the series has a number that doesn't belong with the others. You find numbers that don't seem to dovetail with the Kindle Store ranking you've been assiduously checking.

3. Sometimes there are innocent explanations for things that seem impossible. Real world examples, Barnes & Noble put a mixed Tanya Huff "Valor" book floor display into all of their stores last summer ahead of the hardcover release of Truth of Valor, and in Fall 2009 when Charlaine Harris had nine books at once on the NY Times bestseller list stores were taking in stunningly huge quantity of her books for the 2009 holiday season. I could go into stores that sticker books many many months into 2010 and still see large numbers of Charlaine Harris books from October 2009, I can go into B&N stores now that still have 2/3 of the Valor books they got for that special floor riser promotion last summer. Going back twenty years, the Scott Meredith agency represented The Stud by Jackie Collins, and almost like clockwork we'd get one statement when lots of copies went out tied to the release of one of her newer books, and then see negative or small numbers the next time out. So yes, you can have royalty statements that report sales less than your Bookscan number for that period, the first question you need to ask is whether that holds if you look at the full year of reports, instead of just the one six month period.

Some of the examples above were offsetting errors, and sometimes an error is made in the author's favor. That said, the errors do over time trend in the publisher's direction, kind of like how you play the slot machines long enough over time the casino will win.

The message to take from Kris' post isn't that the game has suddenly changed and authors must enter full-blown panic mode because authors are now being cheated like they've never been cheated before. The message to take is that you need to be very confident that you and your agent are looking carefully over your royalty statements. Your literary agent can get several hundred pages worth of royalty reports, some maybe even a few thousand pages or more. You don't want to assume even the best agent can look as closely at those as you can look at the few pages or few dozen that might belong to you.

Tourism Done Weird

2011-04-20T16:01:00.001-04:00

Even as the success of JABberwocky in recent years has expanded the horizons of what I can afford to do, my world seems to be shrinking.

The multiple Borders bankruptcies fill me with a deep sadness not entirely because of the lost places to buy books. The entire business can become electronic but people will still want to read a good yarn and I will still have some role in that business. No, as much or more is the knowledge that these closures will make it harder to fight back against this shrinking world of mine.

It was 1993, I think, when I first headed out to Long Island on my birthday to visit Borders stores. And over the years, they've been my excuse to see the world. Lots of people went to WorldCon in San Jose. I saw the entire Bay Area from Los Gatos in the South to Fremont to Dublin to Berkley to Emeryville to Sunnyville to Milpitas. It came to be that way in areas around the country. I know the usual thing is to go and never leave the convention hotel or to leave and visit the museum that everyone goes to. Neither of those is for me, but yet I've seen the world.

1999 wasn't just the first year of my visiting London Book Fair as I discussed here. It was also when I first went to Australia and was the dawning of the international expansion of Borders into those two markets. Some things like a day trip from Glasgow to Edinburgh I think would have taken place regardless, but not getting out to the Glasgow suburbs. Parramatta in Australia has the first government house and the first sheep farm, but it also had a Borders.

I feel foolish even writing this because I am talking about behavior that isn't what "normal" people do which is go to the museums, but in actual fact I know plenty of people for whom normal is the inside of the convention center and whatever you see in the cab to/from the airport. So I hold my head high and proudly proclaim I have seen the world one Borders at a time.

And now what? The joy of seeing the world one Borders at a time was the maddening inconsistency of the brand. You never quite knew what each new Borders would bring. Who would travel the world to see the boring sameness of each "new" Barnes and Noble? I like Costco, but so many of those are stuck far from the bus routes in the car required parts of town. Visiting the world one Whole Foods at a time would be very fattening. True joy is still finding there is a Wheaton IL where you can find a Borders and Whole Foods sharing a parking lit, and sadness knowing that this is no longer the case in San Ramon.

Even right here at home, I remember how I went six months without stepping foot in lower Manhattan after 9/11 because there wasn't anything to bring me there. Will it be that way again, the entire part of the world south of Houston St. no longer part of the world I inhabit?

I do like to see the world, and by that the suburbs where people live and the power centers and strip malls where they exist as opposed to the places where the impressionists and the cubists stare down from the white-walled galleries. I guess I will find some way of doing that still. I hope so. But I'm just not sure.

And yes, I am sad knowing there are fewer places in the world where Jig the Goblin and Guards of Haven can be found, but that doesn't leave the same emptiness in my heart as does the sense that each shuttered Borders from the Jam Factory to Colleyville and Watford to White Flint closes off a small part of the world

An Anniversary Musing #7; London Book Fair Now

2011-04-19T11:35:00.002-04:00

OK, so the first time going to London Book Fair in 1999 wasn't a perfect experience, but there was little doubt that I was going back.

I might not have known it in the earliest months of 2000, but that was the year when I finally moved my commission needle from the low 30Ks into the middle 30Ks and started the upwards trend after five long years of investing in the business for returns not all that much more than break-even. I did feel comfortable enough to upgrade to a snazzier looking Hilton that I walked jealously past in 1999 on my way to and from the Fair. I had a few more appointments that year than the year before, and a higher percentage of those were appointments worth having, and you could say the same for each year thereafter. I got a new computer which allowed me to migrate the catalog to AppleWorks, which was slightly more advanced and did away with the cut-and-paste of images into the catalog, which slowly grew more pages and which went from Staples and me stapling to a local print shop that would staple it for me and by the mid 2000s to having somebody else desktop publish it, though it was quite a long time before we finally updated the last page that still retained touches of the original WriteNow 1999 appearance. There was the one fun year of 2001 when I got campyllobacter somewhere in London, which started to make its full effects felt on the plane ride home. I had a fun visit to the bathroom the moment I got through customs, and was in the ER getting rehydrated a few days later. That was also the last year pre-9/11 when you still got a hot snack in coach for the second feeding on the evening flight home. There was the first year when somebody actually sat down at the table and made an offer for something at the Fair, which I don't go to the Fair expecting but I'll never complain when it does. In 2002 or 2003 I introduced the "Dead Until Dark Chocolates" to the table, and then a year or two after that I got a year or two out the Speed of Dark Chocolates, and now everyone knows that there will be chocolates waiting when they visit the JABberwocky table.

The first year I attended, the International Rights Centre (IRC) had fewer than 200 tables. That number crept up over time, as did the bookings for publisher booths, and in 2006 the organizers decided that the event had outgrown the Olympia convention centre and moved it to the Excel Center in the Docklands, a more modern facility that Reed Exhibitions had been using for other things like conventions of arms dealers. That year is worthy of special note. For the Docklands was a miserable and ugly and awful experience. Essentially, Excel is a big convention center surrounded by a hotel village and very little else. Imagine having the event someplace like Bayonne, NJ, and that's kind of like this. The only transportation is the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), small trains that run without human intervention. Maybe arms dealers liked this, but publishers did not. The DLR was horrible to take back in the evening when everyone was heading back from Excel to the civilized parts of London all at the same time. It wasn't much better in the morning. It was much further to travel back to a good restaurant at night or to do other kinds of things that people in my line of work want to do with their evenings. The convention center might have been newer and shinier than Olympia, but that didn't make it very nice. The particular thing I will always remember is that the closest bathrooms to the convention hall with the IRC weren't in the hall or even on the same level as the hall. You had to walk out of the hall, downstairs, past the staff locker room, and only there could you find a men's room. I felt pretty strongly that this was as miserable a design decision as when the Newburgh Beacon Bridge was built with only one lane of traffic in each direction.

This was also the first year that I had company with me for the Fair, as the agency's first full-time employee Steve Mancino went along. Steve had no experience having LBF in a civilized setting and didn't mind the Docklands all that much. But let's just say that other than for Steve most publishing people enjoyed finer things in life than arms dealers. There was such a rebellion against having the LBF at ExCel that the people who organize the Frankfurt Book Fair started to arrange a competing event for LBF in 2007. Reed Exhibitions felt that this was not a good thing. They somehow managed to sneak in and take the dates at Earl's Court out from under the competing event and it came to pass that London Book Fair moved from being Sun-Tue in March to being Mon-Wed in April.

Earl's Court is much more civilized for we publishing folk. You are steps away from the Tube to get to the restaurant or party or cultural event of your choice in London. It does mean that the airfare and hotel aren't going to be as value priced because it's more during the peak season than mid-March, but I can roll with that punch now.

As the business grew, we expanded our presence at the Fair. We started to split a second table with Baen Books, and in 2011 we took the second table all to ourselves. After an ill-fated attempt at having three people from JABberwocky attend in 2010, which turned into two of us getting there by way of Paris and one never making it because of the Icelandic volcanic ash crowd and two-thirds of our appointments not making it either, we did have the entire office over for 2011. We had close to 80 appointments over the course of the week including around 75 at the Fair itself. Where most of the appointments used to be about going over and introducing our list to people, now there are markets like Germany and France where we've sold the JABberwocky list so extensively that we can spend time on other things, discussing what's happening with the authors someone's publishing, or maybe gossiping, or kind of whatever. Almost all of the appointments are with people that we are doing business with or could be doing business with, in 1999 one-third of the appointments were with people not worth scheduling again and this year it's certainly no more than two or three of the 80 people we met with that we wouldn't try and meet up with again. I now know and accept that almost everyone will be late, so I'm much better at taking advantage of the time to get through some of the day's paper.

I can't take all the credit for the much more substantial amount of business we're doing. I started to attend LBF in 1999 just as it was beginning to cement itself as the spring supplement to the Frankfurt Book Fair that takes place in October. From fewer than 200 IRC tables in 1999, there were 575 in 2011, and they were sold out a couple of months before the Fair. I was surprised this year by how many people we were meeting with from China or smaller Eastern European markets or Scandinavia where we've hardly had any appointments and certainly not productive ones in prior years, and that is certainly a combination of greater attendance and broader relationships.

I hate to say this where the people at Reed Exhibitions might see it, but LBF is important to our business. Over the early months of 2011 I've had this nagging sense which I haven't totally researched by checking year-over-year activity that we've not done as many deals as I'd like in translation for people not named Charlaine Harris. After the experience of 2011 when we were making many first-time contacts with publishers in all corners of the world and renewing our acquaintance with many people whom we did not get to see in 2010 because of the ash cloud, I am reluctantly forced to ponder that the deal volume in early 2011 may have something to do with the lack of an LBF in 2010 when 80% of overseas visitors didn't make it in and 65% of our meetings vanished with mostly only UK and French publishers making it to our table.

There are agencies bigger than ours with client lists much longer than mine that don't have the presence we do in London. Some of this business, some of it, has fallen into our laps. You represent a Charlaine Harris who was one of the top ten or twelve authors in the US in 2009 and has that TV thing going and will continue for many many years to be a major author, you can sit back and deals will happen. But I always thought there was too much of that when I was at Scott Meredith, and I've had this missionary impulse to go out and make things happen for JABberwocky in the translation markets. I can understand why others don't. Nobody makes a lot of money selling rights in Slovenia for $1200. And while there's this little voice that says I'd be just as well off not to spend the energy and effort to set up that appointment with the publisher in Lithuania that contributes to the second table and the second and third employee going to LBF, I can't shake the belief that the agency ends up being bigger than the sum of those individual deals. All of us working at and represented by JABberwocky have come a long way since 1999.

An Anniversary Musing #6; London Book Fair Then

2011-04-18T10:53:00.003-04:00

In the earliest years of JABberwocky I was not making much money, but I was making a little teeny tiny bit each year. My break even for my first year was somewhere at maybe $24-25K in gross commission and I ended up doing something like $30-32K. And I did that for my first year, and my second and third and fourth and fifth years as well. Sometimes I'm not sure I'd have started the business if I'd known it would take so long to start growing it.

Nonetheless, it was still a tiny bit more each year than the bare minimum necessary, and as the years progressed I never wavered in the belief that if I was making enough each year and building a backlist and creeping toward having royalty income as well as advance income that I could let out the belt and spend an extra dollar or two.

So when a piece of direct mail showed up in the box talking about London Book Fair in March of 1999, I started to ponder if maybe I shouldn't finally see London. There were some things to do first. One was to check with my co-agents in translation markets that some of them did in fact attend the Fair, so that I would have a few people to meet with if I went. Another was to see if I could do an air/hotel package for under $1000, which I felt would allow for a total budget including the fee for my table and my incidentals, that wouldn't creep too much over $1500 total for the trip. On that account, it helped greatly that the Fair took place in March in those days, because March was off-season and the package rates were cheaper, and this I knew because that was still a time when AAVacations advertised in every Sunday's NY Times Travel section (print ads in newspapers, who ever heard of such things!). It also helped that the Fair went Sunday thru Tuesday back then, so I could do it in just five nights, arrive on Friday to have some time for the jet lag, and leave on Wednesday. So yes, I would have some people to meet with, I found my air/hotel package for under $1000, and I pulled the trigger.

I knew I'd need a catalog, so I put one together myself using an extremely primitive word processing program, maybe hadn't even moved to AppleWorks yet and was using WriteNow. To add some imagery to the catalog, I had to print out images, and get out scotch tape and tape them into place in the catalog. It wasn't the snazziest thing, it was run off at Staples, but it was my first ever rights catalog and I was very very proud of it.

The AirTrain JFK hadn't opened, and I didn't have much money. Getting to the airport meant hopping on the subway with a relatively big suitcase since I had to pack three ensembles with sportcoats, and then squeezing into the Q10 bus for a long ride to JFK during the middle of rush hour so the bus was very very crowded and not really designed for going to the airport with luggage, but it was the option one had.

The hotel experience was not pleasant. I got what I paid for. I was in the top eaves-y floor of a tourist class hotel near Marylebone Station. The single rooms on that floor had a small bed and a small aisle next to the bed and a small bathroom and shower with hardly any closet space or desk space. The TV hung over the bed. The phone was on a niche over the headboard. I learned that I was never again going to take the airport transfer as part of my package, after waiting in Heathrow for an agonizingly long time for my van to depart, and then having it meander through London dropping everyone else off first, even with limited geography realizing at one point that we were very close to my hotel and then having the van head into Bayswater to drop off someone before finally doubling back to drop off yours truly.

No Google Maps or Mapquest back then, but I had carefully mapped out as best I could that I was within reasonable walking distance for Joshua of the Olympia exhibition center, which meant around 50 minutes. But a pleasant 50 minutes, a chunk of it cutting on the diagonal through Kensington Gardens. When in London, I kept my map book with me at every moment, as the streets had this habit of curving, or changing their names every few blocks and then changing back.

I had something like 22 appointments at the Fair, and maybe a third of those I shouldn't have even bothered with because there was little in common with the publishers I was meeting with and the JABberwocky list. Everyone was late for their appointments, and I was antsy, and I interpreted late as meaning people would not show up at all. So I spent a lot of time sitting at my table stewing waiting for people to show and not getting anything done. I spent a lot of time worrying about appearances that everyone would wonder if I had a right to be at the Fair because I just had 22 appointments and spent half the day doing nothing while everyone else was engaged in very very important business. I had lots of time to walk around and see who else was at the Fair and if anyone might perhaps be willing to accept a catalog that I didn't actually have an appointment with. I had lots of time to go downstairs and roam the aisles of the Fair looking at all of the stands from all of the British publishers that would surely want to be in business with me if only they had a better idea of what wonderful things I had to sell them. Right!

But for all of that, the Fair was clearly better than this makes it sound. Sure, a third of the appointments weren't worth it but that did leave two-thirds of them that had some merit, getting to meet for the first time some of the agents in overseas markets that had been working with my list for only a very short time in some cases or in others dating back twelve years to my earliest sales at Scott Meredith. I was getting to see actual bookstores in another country and educating myself a little about the marketplace in the UK. And of course it was London. And I have to say that it was pretty much love at first sight for me and London. The city seemed to have something interesting on every block, and seemed to be full of life on virtually every block, and it was all knitted together with an extensive tube system. And all those helpful markings at the crosswalks that told you to "look left" and "look right," and everybody jaywalked or crossed when it was safe regardless of what the light said just like at home. I loved walking around the West End.

It's just twelve years since that first trip to London Book Fair, but it seems like an entirely different life. We'll take forward to the present in the next Musing...

Things from England retailing

2011-04-17T05:13:00.001-04:00

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 Waterstones and Waterstones is ailing.

It is currently owned by HMV, the music/video chain that is ailing. It is for sale, maybe to some Russian tycoon, maybe with participation of someone from the Waterstones family. Will it be sold? Will the new owners have the cash and ideas to bring the company forward?

If not them, who? A few Foyles stores in central London, a Blackwells, not much else left.

Even now, the merchandising at Waterstones is hideously boring, every store filled with the same pastel-signed mix-and-match 3-for-2 tables and bays. No sign of the theme tables selected by local stores that were there a year ago. Barnes and Noble can be boring in the same way but at least doesn't have blaring pastel signs that suggest the only reason to buy a book is because it is 3-for-2 and books aren't subject to VAT.

Two years ago Borders was still around with a broader range of US imports, which Waterstones now has in lesser quantity. Bad that "illegal" US imports are less likely to introduce an author to the UK, good that prospective sales to UK publishers less likely to be dampened by loss of sales to imports, bad that Amazon still does "illegal" imports on anything it can so if no print book chain is providing a range of in demand US titles it drives more sales to the Internet and away from physical stores. And Borders/Books Etc. had sufficient mass to maybe give a book a physical presence without Waterstones including a much wider assortment of imports from the US.

Happily for my business we have Charlaine Harris who is carried to a degree at HMV, Smiths, other places that sell a small range of books. And the Brandon Sanderson and Jack Campbell books are very big business at Waterstones as is Peter V Brett with a smaller # of books out. Three years ago Elizabeth Moon was our top seller, and she sells as well as she ever did and has a presence at every Waterstones while our overall business in the UK is much bigger.

But there is a cost. Overall I think the typical UK store may carry fewer of our non-Charlaine titles than a few years ago. The rich are getting richer but if in 2008 I could say it was a publisher excise to say they could only buy things they could afford to promote now it seems genuinely the case that a smaller book will have a hard time fighting is way to the fore. The retail environment is boring, not much reason to get excited about entering any one store and no other store to go to for some variety.

And I fear it may only get worse. And if this one kind of boring chain to stop isn't there, the market is dead. Dead. It will be Amazon. And Amazon. And Amazon some more.

There is a cautionary lesson for publishers in the US. Publishers don't want to resume trading with Borders on standard trade terms and understandably so, but they should want a Barnes and Noble monoculture even less.

I do not know if the Kindle has any big box retail partners in the UK. In bookstores, the Sony eReader is much more prominent than in the US which makes it more annoying that Sony doesn't seem to be very open to a range of content providers the way that other eVendors are. There are other readers like the iRiver and Elonex that we are unfamiliar with in the US that also have substantial UK bookstore presence. We need to get Sony to return our calls and explore some of these obscure vendors if we are to have the penetration in the UK market for the JABberwocky ebook program that we have in the US.

Quantity wise the biggest title counts non-Charlaine for our clients were around two dozen books, the worst stores more like 12 or 15. Forbidden Planet, which imports with abandon, had around 100.

I stopped by two old Borders in outer London that were still empty 15 months after closing, the one on Charing Cross at the Borders HQ is a TK Max store, the Oxford St flagship had been sold to a fashion retailer to raise cash ahead of the company going under and the Oxford store now a Tesco Metro grocery store.

In Australia, 16 Borders are closing (9 will remain open) as part of the REDGroup bankruptcy along with dozens of small format Angus and Robertson stores. There are dueling lawsuits between REDGroup and A&R franchise stores that want to break away. Like unhappy families each Borders chain has gone bankrupt in it's own unhappy way.

Here in the US would you go to work for Borders right now? Since most sane people would say no, the need for the bankruptcy court to approve some kind of bonus and retention plan for Borders execs is real. I hate to say so, don't like these plans at all as a rule, but here it does seem necessary.

Bottom line here is that I'm not encouraged by what I see in the UK, and have deep fears that we're heading in the same direction in the US.

On Earning Out

2011-04-16T16:13:00.003-04:00

A wise man recently was asking me about that old canard of how his first novel would be doing nicely if it earned back it's advance. It took me more time than I thought to explain to wise man why this is not correct.

Let me try here in the best way I can think of.

Imagine that there are two books that are in every way identical. Each has a $7500 advance. The publisher spends the exact same amount of money on each, ships the exact same number of copies, absolutely everything the same. The book is a $7.99 mass market paperback and sells the exact same 15,000 copies.

Only difference is that one author has a 6% royalty in his contract, the other author has an 8% royalty. Both rates are common.

Now do the math.

7.99x15000x.06=$7200 and the book has an unearned advance of $300.

7.99x15000x.08=$9600 and the publisher writes out a royalty check above the advance for $2100.

If you believe that your book becomes profitable only when you get royalty checks you are forced to believe that the publisher of these two otherwise identical books has a profit on the book that cost more total money net of author royalties and a loss on the book that cost less.

Since that is obviously not correct, safely ignore anyone who attempts to say that the bottom line on a book is the earn-out status of the advance.

Battle LA

2011-04-03T01:54:00.003-04:00

So having seen this as part of a group outing with Peter V. Brett, Myke Cole and a friend of Peter's let me not add it to the list of movies I've seen that I want to review and never do.

Peter's friend hated the movie. The rest of us were debating the fine points of its aspirations to mediocrity.

For those of you who can't figure it out from the title, if from nothing else, the movie is about a battle. Set in Los Angeles. Well, most of it is actually set in Santa Monica, which is worth setting foot in now pretty much just for the excellent rugelach you can get here since both the Borders and B&N on the Third Street Promenade have closed in recent years.

So if aliens want to destroy Santa Monica, just so long as they leave that one block on Montana Ave. with the good rugelach untouched they can really do as they please.

So the thing is that the movie kind of delivers pretty much what it wants to deliver, which is just unadulterated war porn military action. The opening fifteen minutes of the movie (after the kind of prologue that I don't like very much when I'm reading fantasy novels) sketches out the most archetypal characters collected from every war movie ever known to man. The USMC Sgt who's ready to call it a day after losing men in a recent military operation, the fresh-from-school lieutenant he'll be serving with, the guy who's buying flowers for his wedding. And then the aliens attack, and we quickly get into two hours of decently lively military action (I must leave it to Myke to comment on the accuracy of the action, as he's the military man in this movie-watching crowd) that is filled with more cliches from military and other movies. As an example, when an alien is shot, falls into a pool, and a marine starts poking around in the pool, if you have seen any horror movie in the last 35 years you will not be surprised -- no, you will be expecting -- to find that the alien isn't actually dead.

Well, no, let's not just rely on Myke for the military accuracy. Sure, he's entirely right to say afterward that one the good guys call in for an artillery strike on the bad guys that maybe, just maybe, the guy at the other end of the line would ask another question or two, or maybe the code would be something a little harder than I think it was "one-two-zero" which isn't even as many digits as for my ATM card. But Myke liked 300. And how accurate was that, did the blood in ancient Greece really spurt so artistically? And if you think there's a force based in midichlorians that can help Luke nuke a Deathstar you can think the military will send artillery when you call up and say "dude, artillery, one two zero, we'll have it lasered up like a Pink Floyd Laser show, ciao!"

Enhancing our enjoyment of this 1:35 of military action was that we were seeing this on one of the AMC ETX screens. This is where they take a really really big auditorim in a multiplex and make the screen as big as they can make it in the auditorium and gussy up the sound, so the bass notes made me feel like I had gone back 38 years or so and was watching Earthquake in Sensurround. Detracting from the enjoyment is the $4 upcharge to experience the movie in ETX. Which I won't complain about too much, I like in London when they charge an extra pound or two to see a movie on the big screen at the Leicester Square multiplexes because I know then that I'm getting the big screen experience.

As a completely unrelated note, AMC auditoria with ETX, apparently people spent all their money going to ETX instead of buying books because the Block at Orange CA, Tyson's Corner VA, the Metreon in San Francisco, Aventura FL, and Century City LA all have ETX in the vicinity of a recently closed or closing Borders.

On the other hand, if you go see ETX at the Yonge and Dundas 24 in Toronto, Ontario you are just steps -- steps!! -- away from The World's Biggest Bookstore, where Jessica Strider helps to run the best sf/fantasy section a chain bookstore has to offer.

So getting back to the movie for a moment, it's just so replete with cliches that the fight scenes have no emotional content to them. You care about people, it's a lot harder to care about living breathing cliches, and that's what all -- all -- of the people in this movie are.

And there is more humor to be found in this blog post than in the movie.

So ultimately, you can sit back and enjoy the movie at a certain level, but pretty much only at a certain level. If none of us were willing to go along with Peter's friend that the movie was just awful, none of us were prepared to say it was actually good, either. There's a subset of people who like military action and who'll love that this movie does its best to dispense said military action without stopping for characterization or comic relief or plausibility. And for the rest of us, we could do better or worse.

Thieves & Robbers at Hilton

2011-04-02T17:52:00.004-04:00

UPDATE 6 April: This is one time where some good came from complaining. The webmaster for the Nebula event was told to add the fine print on the deposit to some of the pages (though I don't see those changes put in as yet). I was able to explain to Hilton why their disclosure isn't as good as they think. I will admit there is a decent chance someone filling in their credit card info manually in the guarantee area might notice that the deposit is being taken right away, but for an HHonors member signed in with the info pre-filled "we will charge $145 one night's room and tax right away" doesn't look much different than "we will charge $145 on night's room and tax if you don't cancel" if you quickly check over things on a 3-page reservation screen en route to the final "accept" button. That needs to be better. The payment of the deposit needs to be indicated in the reservation confirmation. There should be a receipt-like substance in the process. Finally, since they are taking a deposit, the fine print needs to be more clearly state what happens to the deposit. Right now it says you can cancel the reservation 72 hours ahead, it doesn't clearly say if the deposit will be refunded or not once you do so. This isn't a good place for ambiguity. I also do not like that this is yet another example that right now the only squeaky wheels that get the grease are the ones who use Twitter. If I hadn't written this letter, posted it, and tweeted to it, I'd have been stuck with the see/hear/speak no evil monkeys at the phone customer service or waiting a very long time to get a response to a letter. An e-mail complaint would probably have been handled with the same smug complacency as my phone call. So I want to give SFWA and Hilton some credit for their response, but I'd still give Hilton an incomplete until they address some of these issues on a corporate level instead of on an individual basis with me.

April 2, 2011

Mr. Christopher J. Nassetta
Hilton Worldwide
7930 Jones Branch Dr., #1100
McLean, VA 22102

Dear Mr. Nassetta:

I am extremely upset with how Hilton handled the taking of a one-night deposit on a reservation I made at the Hilton Washington for the SFWA Nebula Weekend event in May.

When I visit the event web site, and click their hotel booking form and am taken to the Hilton website for the event page, see attached page, there is no indication that deposit will be taken.

When I click on “Terms & Conditions,” there is no indication that a deposit will be taken.

When I go to the “Select Room & Rate” page, the Rules & Restrictions say nothing about a deposit being taken.

When I go to the Guest Information Page, the prominently displayed “Your Pending Reservation Details” does not say that a deposit will be taken.

In the 2nd page of the Guest Information, the depost information is indicated in the Hotel/Guarantee section. Unfortunately, this screen is pre-filled when you sign in with your Hilton HHonors account, and I think a lot of people aren’t going to look again at a pre-filled screen.

In the 3rd page the deposit is hidden in very very small fine print that nobody reads.

Finally, after burying the information after multiple places where you DO NOT inform guests that you will be taking a deposit, you send an e-mail confirmation for the reservation which says nothing -- nothing -- about the fact that you have been charged for the night. No acknowledgment, no receipt, no nothing.

And then when I get my credit card bill, the only identifying information is the hotel, there’s no information regarding the confirmation # for my reservation, and the arrival date is given as February 24 instead of in May when this reservation is actually booked for. So even after I’ve been charged, it’s impossible to tell what the charge is for.

When I called customer service to complain about this, everyone was annoyingly smug in acting like I should have of course noticed the deposit was being charged, wouldn’t anyone! And when I asked for the address of corporate HQ so I could write you a letter, I was given the customer service address in Texas. Even after I specifically asked Johnathan Shorters in Guest Assistance “that’s the corporate HQ, you didn’t move to Virginia, I thought you moved to Virginia” he continued to insist that he had given me the corporate HQ.

Well, since you’re shading the truth of the deposit multiple times during the reservation process, why not lie to me when I call Guest “Assistance" and ask for the address of your corporate headquarters.

If you want to take a one-night deposit, it should be abundantly clear that you are doing so. The fact that you are taking a deposit should be prominently indicated in the exact same place where I give the final click to confirm. And after you have taken the deposit, you should clearly acknowledge with a receipt and in the e-mail confirmation that you have done so. You did none of that. The information regarding the deposit could have been provided in at least three or four different places where it was not. The disclosure near the final click is hidden in fine print. And you do nothing to acknowledge or receipt the transaction afterward.

This is a miserable excuse for how to run a business.

An Anniversary Musing #5 Collaboratively Speaking

2011-03-28T09:44:00.001-04:00

For part two of my Elizabeth Moon musings, this is a good occasion to talk about the benefit of doing collaborative work.

There are two approaches here.

One is where you put an author on to a Star Wars or Halo novel, expecting to get the Star Wars or Halo audience to rub off. This NEVER works, in my opinion or experience. People who buy media novels, they might be readers but they're media readers. For the rare thing like when Tim Zahn launched the original Star Wars fiction line 18 years ago, it can be SO big that even a small percentage of carry over is SO big that it can make a visible small dent in the base of sales for a much smaller regular novel. But for the most part, an author should do these things for the money or for the love of the media product, and nothing else. There's no umbra or penumbra or coattail or other benefit to be had, maybe that you're making the publisher happy because the publishers keep seeming to think this kind of thing is so wonderful you really ought be doing it.

The second, represented by the Planet Pirates books, is to collaborate (back then, "sharecrop" was a term often used) in another author's world. And when you have two good authors that are a good match for one another, this kind of thing can work very very well indeed.

SASSINAK by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon was the biggest Baen book to that time, an instant and immediate success and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And it did indeed bring more people to Elizabeth's own work. [Newer readers may not realize just how big a name Anne McCaffrey was back then, she's still a big name to be sure but was at the height of it 20 years ago.]

But, this worked only because the authors really liked one another, and they had a similar look and feel to their work, so it was a good fit. If not a marriage of equals, Elizabeth was enough regarded in the field that this could be seen as a real novel and not as exploitation. Same thing today with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson on Wheel of Time, even more so as the two authors and series are all even bigger than McCaffrey Moon then.

However, the trap is this. Most of the benefit of the collaboration is realized from doing it once. There are only so many Robert Jordan fans, only so many Anne McCaffrey fans, and they're not minting so many new fans between books that you'll find scads more who will decide to sample the partner's work between 1st and 2nd collaboration. Grab what you can from doing once, then give your new fans new work of yours.

So In an ideal world to Joshua Bilmes the Literary Agent, Elizabeth Moon walks away from doing GENERATION WARRIORS and Brandon Sanderson walks away from doing TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT unless given a much better deal than on the first book, because their careers are now improved to the point where they are much better off doing their own new book which they own 100% of than doing a collaborative book for a much smaller percentage. In the real world, the younger author knows that the publisher wants them to do more and doesn't see as the younger author that the publisher might if push came to shove pressure the established to give a better deal. And is a fan and enjoying the relationship. And even though the long term benefit is to do solo work the immediate advance will often be bigger for the collaboration than for the solo project.

So intellectually, I know and understand and respect why have little success getting my clients to let me be a mean ogre in negotiating book #2 of these collaborations, same reasons why collaboration #1 works are why author will want a collaboration #2.

An Anniversary Musing #4

2011-03-25T17:30:00.007-04:00

With Elizabeth Moon's newest book KINGS OF THE NORTH now on sale and (knock wood) headed somewhere on the NY Times extended bestseller list, seems like a good time to send an anniversary musing this direction.

Elizabeth was just starting to publish in Analog at around the same time I was starting at the Scott Meredith Agency. At Baen Books, where I'd done freelance work during college, publishing books by Analog authors was a kind of major sub-niche. And I was enjoying some of Elizabeth's early stories like "ABCs in Zero G" very much. And reading magazines and finding wonderful things and reaching out to authors was the kind of thing agents were supposed to do. So I asked the higher-ups at SMLA if it would be OK to reach out to Elizabeth Moon and ask if she had a novel.

Did she ever!

Rather to my surprise, since I was experiencing Elizabeth through excellent hard sf stories in the magazine full of hard sf stories, she had a completed fantasy trilogy around half a million words long. A fantasy trilogy? A fantasy trilogy???

And while I wasn't exclusively a science fiction reader, I was certainly more of a science fiction reader than a fantasy reader.

But I started reading this massive fantasy trilogy, and I found myself enjoying it. I read some of it at the Rego Park Burger King on a Saturday night, where my eating out treat (people working six months in publishing are not often rich) was using the Buy One Get One Free coupons for the original chicken sandwich. I read some of it on the grass at Juniper Valley Park, while people would ride or run or walk by and the novelty "Let's Go Mets Go" song that was extremely popular in the late summer of 1986 would play on their radios.

But getting back to the important parts of the story, I read it, and I liked it, and got the OK to take on Elizabeth, and she said yes, and off I went to try and sell the thing.

Elizabeth had been in the Marine Corps. As a young agent with less than a year on the job when I started marketing the trilogy, it didn't occur to me that you would mention something completely irrelevant like that in trying to sell a fantasy trilogy. A really really good fantasy trilogy. A clearly special and wonderful fantasy. Great book, author has credits in Analog. But then we'd start getting these rejections from people like Lester del Rey and (via Betsy Mitchell) Jim Baen that they couldn't buy into this whole "woman warrior" thing in the book. I was starting to get a little annoyed at this. Elizabeth was starting to get a little annoyed. I knew Betsy Mitchell, she'd given me my first job in publishing and all, so I called her up and said "Betsy, I've got to tell you this letter from Jim's annoying and Elizabeth's getting kind of upset because she's an ex-Marine and all of these people keep saying she can't write a fantasy with a woman warrior in it." [Not those exact words, but that was the gist of it.]

Well, Betsy was kind enough to take this information back to Jim Baen. And Jim, to his credit and because he is was always-will-be a fan of all things military, was man enough to change his mind and give Betsy the OK to buy the trilogy. That little thing about Elizabeth being in the military which it never occurred to me to mention in the cover letter became in a box on the back cover of Sheepfarmer's Daughter "Her background in military training and discipline imbue Sheepfarmer's Daughter and its sequels with a gritty realism that is all too rare in most current fantasy."

Lesson learned. When more recently taking Myke Cole's Control Point to publishers, his military training wasn't left to the reader's imagination.

And lesson for you to learn: Much as we hate to think it, life sometimes is not just about what you know, but who you know. There's a legit chance that if I hadn't known Betsy and felt comfortable enough to push back on her rejection that this classic fantasy trilogy would have been unsold for many more years.

So continuing with the story, Sheepfarmer's Daughter comes out the latter half of 1988, and however it is that word of mouth works people decide they like this one, and the book goes into a second printing very soon after the release date, and the next two books in the trilogy follow on a quarterly release schedule (the idea of having books come out close together from a new author wasn't invented recently) and the series is a hit, a genuine bona fide hit. This struck home for real when I popped in to the B. Dalton at Paramus Park Mall and saw that they had an entire shelf devoted to the work of Elizabeth Moon.

Elizabeth and I have been together 25 years so there's a lot that I can talk about and I will give her more musing. Part I, I end here, a part II tomorrow.

A Dozen Eggs Breaking

2011-03-18T11:22:00.002-04:00

Publishers Lunch links to the updated Borders closing list, with another 28 stores scheduled to close by the end of May, 12 of those stores that I have visited. As with the original list it includes stores of all shapes and sizes. Hollywood & Vine that did business but I doubt ever enough for the rent at that location. Milpitas CA which I will miss, because it was one of the nicest stores in the country for selling sf/fantasy on the day I visited. Fairfield CT, which I was surprised to see wasn't on the original list and which I'd visited on opening day and occasionally since as a quick on/off Metro North. Stamford CT is a somewhat historic site, as it had been put up by Waldenbooks prior to its purchase by Borders as part of their budding "Bassett Books" chain of superstores, the original location in Towson of Borders #44 that is now in Lutherville MD had been another. Braintree MA and Tacoma WA had both once been extremely prosperous, and I don't know if their demise reflects high rent or half of their business going elsewhere over the past several years. Federal Way, WA and Cranston, RI are both stores that had relocated to supposedly better locations. The store in downtown Philadelphia PA is another surprise because that store sold a lot of books and was still doing so at my last visit, but it was also a big store in a high rent location designed for selling books, music and movies (in fact, a relocation of an older smaller location that may have been books only) and likely has too big a rent bill for a time when there isn't much of a music and movie business any more. You think on these relocations and you realize how miserable the Borders strategists were at forecasting the demise of hard copy content sales.

In its bankruptcy filing, Borders reserved the right to close up to 75 more stores, so the additional 28 suggests that at least some stores were given rent concessions to help keep afloat. The very un-busy Glendale Queens store as an example gets to enjoy life still. Stores like Hollywood & Vine or in downtown Philly, there's not much of a chance the landlord will do Borders any favors because locations like that can almost certainly find new tenants.

I visited one ongoing Borders in Manhattan this week and one that is closing. Even a going out of business sale with 30% off and an extra 10% off for Borders Rewards (around 36% total discount) doesn't seem to move sf/fantasy at the Park Ave. Borders, which has many depleted sections but sf/f looking like it was hardly touched, and overall still has a surprising amount of inventory four weeks after the liquidation sale started. They're about ready to bring down the remaining merchandise on the 3rd floor music/movie area, and part of the 2nd floor was closed off. I was undercharged for my purchase, pointed it out, waited around while they re-rang, gave them an extra $10, and was given $18 in change. I didn't point out that they had now made a bad situation for them worse.

The front of store at the Columbus Circle store that is to remain open still had lots of books and looked very full. To give Borders credit for something, they've done a decent job of scrounging and scraping for inventory to give a good initial impression of things when you walk in the front door, and that is important. The store still had customers going in and out, but when you got into the actual section shelving you did notice that things were a little lighter inventory wise than usual. A theoretical order for 4 copies of Kings of the North by Elizabeth Moon had turned into an actual order of 2 copies coming from Ingram, this goes on sale Tuesday and at least they'll have some. There were some books being reordered and on the way from one source or another, and 120 copies on order for the mass market of Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Family that is on sale in a couple of weeks. At the same time, there was supposed to be a promotion for the new Mark Hodder book in FOS Bay 4 from 15 March for 2 weeks, but no Borders stores have actually gotten the book, and who knows when or how or from who because the publisher can't be entirely pleased to have some money owing as a result of the bankruptcy. So it's a very mixed bag, the stores are there and open and at some level getting the titles they need to have to look that way, but they're going to suffer if they can't start to get back to ordering and restocking in the usual way.

A funny store I'm told third-hand. The closing stores are essentially managed by the liquidation company at this point, and as the romance section was being relocated and consolidated at Borders Wall St., management decreed that books should be arranged by price because people would be coming in to hunt for bargains. The employees did say that this was not such a good idea, and then did what they were told. Well, I'm looking for a bargain too, but if I'm going to find my bargains they better still have a semblance of alphabetization because I'm not that kind of a bargain hunter.

In other book news from Publishers Lunch, indie chain Joseph Beth is putting it up for sale and closing an additional store. They haven't been able to come up with a reorg plan that everyone likes since filing for bankruptcy in the fall, and the sale process now seems like the only way to keep any of the business ongoing.

And if you're interested in UK book news, here is an article from The Bookseller where the head of Waterstone's says the UK may have as much as 3 million excess square feet devoted to book distribution (not stores, but distribution facilities) and that he'd like to bring return rates down below 10%. A competitor says this would be too low because you then aren't taking enough chances, and this is in fact correct. Since it's impossible to tell in content business what will or won't work when it actually confronts the public, you need to be able to take a few uncertain bets in order to find the things that will work.

Borders update

2011-03-15T00:19:00.004-04:00

Borders CEO Michael Edwards gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal and the company also had a conference call with creditors, which was covered by Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace. The company will soon decide, based on discussions with landlords, on the fate of an additional 25 to 75 stores that may close. Publishers Marketplace does a good job of putting this into perspective. The 200 stores liquidating now were all drawn from the not quite 500 superstores so it was a full 40% in the initial round, and as few as 145 of those 500 stores were solidly profitable. That is a scary statistic. These articles differ on whether it not there will be a round of closings for the smaller format mall and airport stores.

The company is getting supplied by major suppliers on a cash basis. It is begging for the major publishers to resume shipping on regular terms. Good thing to hope for. Costco will brag in its annual reports that it churns inventory so fast it is often getting paid by its shoppers before having to pay suppliers, Borders has to pay suppliers long before it gets any money from customers. Publishers Marketplace doesn't see why anyone would resume selling on net plus 30 when Borders had a 50% return rate then stopped paying then went bankrupt, but after a point if publishers want to keep a diminished Borders around they will have to take some risks on resuming normal trading terms.

While the company will continue to sell a variety of e-readers in stores it intends to fully invest its marketing and promo efforts in the Kobo. In exchange Kobo will give Borders a piece of all of its US ebook sales. Publishers Marketplace hates this, says selling the same old also-ran eReaders as it has been as it's fallen behind in the business is more of the same old. I disagree. Barnes & Noble isn't going to start selling the Nook at Borders. It can do so at Books a Million because BAM is still a smaller chain with a smaller selection with a much smaller national footprint while large parts of the BN business plan in recent years are driven by gains based on consolidation, I.e., Borders going away. Amazon isn't going to start selling the Kindle at Borders. The only good strategy for Borders is to be the one bookstore chain that offers eReader choice instead of our way or highway. The only choice is selling things that aren't Nook or Kindle. Getting a few pennies on every Kobo ebook sold could be a valuable lifeline to Borders especially as the cash needs of the company will be much smaller moving forward because of the reduced store count and reduced drain on resources from unprofitable locations. Kobo needs the Borders distribution channel, especially with its Australian business now hurting due to the RED Group bankruptcy there. This is an intriguing development, one of the better pieces of news in the Borders Bankruptcy stew.

As in any major bankruptcy that isn't pre-packaged there are disagreements over how much time to give current management to come up with a reorg plan. Creditors want June, Borders as late as August, looming over is when people can plan for holiday ordering. Creditors say the Borders Debtor in Possession financing is both too big for immediate needs thus costing too much in fees while not being big enough to finance Borders thru the holidays. Publishers Marketplace does point out the inconsistency.

Website, Borders says they have lots of visitors but too many of whom leave without buying. Well, they don't offer the level of discounting that BN and Amazon do, they can't afford to necessarily, I don't know how Borders turns this around. And I like the Borders website now.

For a typical 25k sq ft superstore Borders would like to have 15k devoted to books and 10k for other stuff. This doesn't bother me prima facie other than for the implication that it could be yet another round of remodels for a company that has already spent far too much money and energy rarranging the deck chairs. Borders says sales at ongoing stores have surpassed expectations. Publishers Marketplace interpretation: people have been showing up at those stores expecting a fire sale and stay to buy things anyway. There are times I like the added snark and analysis on Publishers Marketplace compared to the offend no one blandness of Publishers Weekly, but today I do not. Yes, Borders is in bankruptcy, has been run like shit, may not survive, but Publishers Marketplace is so snarky on Borders now you get the impression that their stopped clock wouldn't even be right twice each day.

taking it personally

2011-03-12T14:47:00.004-05:00

Oh, the nuclear power industry. We tried scrubbing, we tried soaking, and still we have ring around the collar. The interesting thing from a risk management standpoint is that the old-fangled coal and gas plants kill people bit by bit from their emissions and the costs of getting the coal or the gas out of the ground. Over the course of 20 years, do we lose more people 22 in this coal mine disaster and another 6 there vs. how many might die from radiation exposure as a result of the Japanese disasters? It's impossible to tally all that up, especially when you add in the externalities of emissions, etc. But we do know that these occasional nuclear power disasters are very big and very noticeable and very disastrous. Hence, there is a perfectly good argument to make that nuclear is still an important and necessary part of our energy portfolio moving forward. I don't want to be the person who tries to make that argument with a straight face, even though it is there and legitimately made.

Libya. Idealistically yes please let's get rid of Qadaffi. However, the US doesn't have a good national security interest to make that happen. He does a perfectly good job of pumping the oil. In recent years (recent, we can't forget things like Lockerbie which are hardly ancient history but also not yesterday) he hasn't been an active exporter of violence that we know of. One of the only nuclear-trending regimes to give it up, in fact. No guarantee that the people who replace him will be better than he is, we've seen that tribal enmities in Africa don't die easily and that yesterday's savior (Mugabe) is tomorrow's disaster. It may not seem like the right thing to do, but as much as the US can sit this one right out we're likely better off to do so. Situation in Egypt was very different, in no small part because Egypt is essentially a 51st state, hugely dependent on the billions of dollars we give in aid. And it was also a little more abundantly clear there that Mubarak was going to go one way or the other in the near future, so getting it done better was in many more ways than in Libya a genuine need for American policy makers. It's very nice that the Arab League would support us in getting rid of Qadaffi, and I'm still not convinced we should rush to take them up on that invitation.

China. They're keeping the lid on the unrest, but they still run the risk of repeating the Soviet path. Why? Because they have to spend so much time, money, energy on protecting the regime that can be used for other things, and over time it gets to be very difficult to absorb those costs.

TSA. Which we don't seem to learn in the United States. We happily spend countless millions of dollars and lose enormous amounts of human time and energy and effort in order to fight -- well, who? what? Yes, the US will be victimized by another successful terrorist attack, sure as the sun will rise. But how many lives have been lost in the US due to terrorist attacks in the past nine years now and counting? Yet we give up our rights and our privacy and our freedom to guard against, and if the TSA has its way as it almost certainly will they want to make it less enjoyable to travel by train or by highway as well in the name of fighting this threat. On my most recent flight, I had a suspicious banana in my backpack, so I had to stand around for a few minutes and watch while my tax dollars paid for man to delicately paw through all the pockets on my backpack to retrieve a banana and then put the bag back thru the magnetometer. It's almost funny, except that it's really very very sad.

Liberty. But the right wing libertarians are more concerned about the government encroaching on their right to burn wasteful incandescent light bulbs. Why can't more of these people join me in the fight against unreasonable search and seizure, making the US more like the communist states we spent 50 years necessarily fighting where you had to have your papers to move about the country? Please. The incandescent light bulb is an ancient technology that turns electricity into more heat than light. Try and feel up one of those bulbs with your bare hands. There should be reasonable limits to the kind of nannying the state will indulge on our behalf, I think the argument that the health care mandate will lead to mandatory consumption of broccoli is, as straw man slippery slope arguments go, one of the more intriguing ones to puzzle over as a thought exercise. But I cannot see the defense of the incandescent light bulb as the last bastion of liberty. This is the exact kind of area where government regulation serves a powerful public good, keeping us from doing something that is cheaper to the individual and costlier to society. We are surrounded by examples of such. Flammable PJs might be cheaper to manufacture, but we aren't given that option. We survived the banning of CFCs in refrigerators. Please, pretty please, will you attack the TSA monstrosity instead of the compact fluorescent light bulb?

Building Codes. In fact these are a very good example of an area where good government regulation keeps us from things we might like to do or would find cheaper to do but which in the long term aren't such a good idea. Just like banning incandescent light bulbs!

An Anniversary Musing #3

2011-03-06T14:28:00.010-05:00

Since we've just gone live with our own e-book editions of several of the books, a good subject for my next anniversary musing would be the Hot Blood anthologies and their siblings, edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett.

I can't take credit for starting the series. That goes to Kurt Busiek, a noted comic book writer who made a brief stop at the Scott Meredith agency in the late 1980s. He sold the first book in the series to Claire Zion at Pocket Books, and I picked up after Kurt left.

The history of the series is a good prism through which to view a lot of different aspects of the publishing business.

1. The importance of relationships. When I picked up the series and was selling my first books to Claire, I was thinking the books were doing well enough that the authors should get a little bit bigger advance. Claire, whom I hadn't done business with previously, automatically assumed that my request for a raise meant that I wanted to make a big splash with my first deal and get the advance doubled or some such. It took much longer than it should have been to sort this through.

When Claire left Pocket Books to go off to NAL, we quickly found out that our relationship with Pocket was largely a relationship with Claire. Even though the books were doing well, it tended to be a struggle after she left to negotiate each contract thereafter because there was forever this lingering sense that they were doing the books because they kind of should commercially but at the same time really wished they weren't and were always looking more for reasons to stop than wanting logically to continue.

1.a. Yet relationships will sometimes get you only so far. An author named Dave Pednau wrote a powerful story for, I think, the third Hot Blood books. It was called The Accusation, if memory serves, and dealt with the aftermath of a false rape accusation. This was not PC. Claire insisted that the story be pulled, her reason ultimately coming down to the fact that she was uncomfortable with the idea that anyone would ever suggest that anything like this would ever be used as a tool. It was a good story. Thought not much known today, Pednau was a fairly well-established thriller writer for Fawcett Books who was selling decent numbers of copies. But there was no arguing on the subject. We were forced to our dismay to dump the story in order to get the anthology accepted. Even worse, Pednau passed away in 1990. Were he alive longer, I think we'd have gone back and tried at some point to get the story into a subsequent book or one of our new e-books or something.

1.a.i. This was one of two occasions when I ran into difficulty with a project that went up against conventional wisdom on issues such as this. There was a huge panic in the late 1980s and early 1990s about child abuse rings going on in daycare centers, you can read the Wikipedia article about the McMartin Preschool case here. I tried to sell a book called The Child Abuse Industry which did a very good job of debunking the panic, but of course that would be anti-child. Never sold.

1.b. One of the things with anthologies is that people have different tastes and don't all cotton to the same stories. It was always interesting to compare notes on which stories in a book were my favorites vs. Mike and Jeff's vs. Claire's. Sometimes with other stories that didn't hit such hot buttons we had more success arguing with Claire over stories that she didn't like but which I or the editors liked very much. Another major problem came about with a Grant Morrison story that had to be edited at publisher command, a truly great story by a really great author, you'll especially know the name if you pay any attention to the graphic novel/comics business. We weren't able to be in business with Grant Morrison in the series thereafter, and this was a loss.

2. Some of the horror stories you hear about publishers really are true. Back in the day, the computers at B&N had a hookup to the computers at Ingram where you could see how many copies Ingram had on hand and on order of different books at the various Ingram warehouses. When Pocket put the first three Hot Blood books out of print, I could l see quite clearly that they were doing it even though Ingram alone had hundreds of copies on order, more than enough to pretty much cover the costs of a decent-sized reprinting. This was one of my earliest experiences of having a publisher attempt to deny the evidence of my own eyes. Since it was now going to take six months instead of six weeks to cover costs of a new printing, and since these were books that management didn't really love anyway, they weren't going to keep in the Hot Blood business, and the cold equations that they'd make money doing it were no longer going to be acknowledged because the money wasn't worth it any longer.

And when they finally and reluctantly published the 10th Hot Blood book, it went clean within weeks of publication, could have sold thousands more copies, but Pocked didn't want to be in the Hot Blood business any longer. They printed barely more than they needed to cover the initial orders, refused to print any more just because it would be the logical money-making thing to do, and we had the quickest ever turnaround in my 25 years experience from publication to reversion of rights.

3. The Hot Blood series didn't really pick up until the second and third books in the series were published. The first didn't do badly, but it took the aggregate presence of multiple books on the shelves for people to notice them. For all that we had our difficulties with Claire Zion, it was also crucial to the series that she was willing to go ahead and do more books in the series even though the first had done OKish but not minted money. It's as good an example of any of why I do not like publishers that won't commit to at least two books for a new writer. This is one of my frustrations with our burgeoning business in children's publishing. We're getting as a rule considerably higher first novel advances in middle grade and YA than we get for selling sf or mystery novels, but usually the genre novels are part of a multi-book deal while the children's publishers adamantly insist on wait-and-see. Which I don't think works. By the time you wait and see, and then finally go ahead and buy the next book, which then has to be written and published, that next book will often not be published in a timely fashion. And even today, it might be harder but it is still possible to build a career over time instead of with an instant hit first novel. Jim C. Hines is a good example of this from the JABberwocky list over recent years, I think Jeri Westerson with her Crispin Guest medieval noir series might prove to be another. But children's publishers seem to be really bad on wanting instant success or having no success at all. Yuk.

4. Publishers will pay for things that make their lives easier or more defensible even if they don't actually make money. The Hot Blood books have always sold on the series and concept. It's sex, it's horror, it sells. There's no particular evidence that any Hot Blood book has sold better or worse because it has a Big Name on the cover, yet Pocket Books was happy to pay a bonus advance so that we could include a higher-priced Joyce Carol Oates story in one of the volumes. There's no overlap between Joyce Carol Oates and the Hot Blood audience, but she's a name, which makes it easier for the sales and marketing people to talk to retail accounts about the book, so they'll pay for that. In the case of Jeff Gelb's solo edited SHOCK ROCK, having Stephen King's "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" was a mixed blessing. The number of copies that Pocket was able to ship was extravagant in the extreme because of the Stephen King story, but it didn't increase the actual audience commensurate with the added copies that could be shipped. Which leads to bad sell-thru, which retailers hate worse than anything. Sell one copy of one, and they love you, sell ten of one hundred and they hate you. So orders get cut back, and you have to work to overcome that. Names, names, names. Even with the anthologies Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner are editing for Ace today, Ace wants very very badly to have x # of NY Times bestsellers in each book because it makes them feel warmer and fuzzier, even though none of those names are more of a sales hook than Charlaine herself being in the book. And of course publishers are blind and oblivious to the fact that their quest for names sometimes forces editors to take inferior stories by better-known authors. That might lead to bad word of mouth, that might create problems with the long tail of the anthology or make people more reluctant to buy the next. But those are all worries for another day, and the publisher is concerned only that having names makes it easier in the present to push books into sales channels.

After Pocket ended the Hot Blood series, the books lay fallow for several years, though we did set up most of them with decent results on pioneering e-book company Peanut Press, with some decent results. And then John Scognamiglio, who'd been a junior editor at Pocket during the waning days of the Hot Blood series, moved to Kensington. He had fond memories of the series, and decided to bring it back with new books and reissues of the old ones. That whole relationship thing again! This meant we were able to have some of the same conversations about how many names we should have!! But which also brings me to my next numbered point...

5. Covers Count! The Kensington mass market reissues of the Hot Blood books had some excellent covers that were at the same time very very bad. The packaging was so intently focused on the names in each volume that the Hot Blood concept and the Gelb/Garrett co-editor names too easily got lost. This was a problem but not an insurmountable one at Borders which had a discrete horror section and stickers on the books that told employees where to shelve them. This killed the books at Barnes & Noble, which had done away with its horror section. Employees would see "Joyce Carol Oates" in really big letters on one book, "Jack Ketchum" on another and "Lawrence Block" on a third, and instead of having the benefits of shelf presence for the series (see above, re: how series took off initially only when more than one book was on shelves) the books had a tendency to be strewn over the entire length and breadth of the general fiction section where the horror titles were now being mixed in. We did object, but sometimes when publishers are set on doing things a particular way they are really set on doing things a particular way. We've been having that same problem today with Scholastic, which put bad covers on the Alcatraz novels by Brandon Sanderson and refused to listen to us at the time of initial publication and even today with Brandon a #1 bestselling author refuses to repackage and reissue the books. They say they've suggested the idea to major accounts who say they're not interested, I say they're Scholastic and if they just went ahead and did it for a #1 bestselling author the accounts would react accordingly. Deep down, the cover might not have been a good idea, but unless you have a change in personnel it's difficult for someone to volunteer to do something that if successful might prove an earlier decision to have been wrong. So even after you can look at your sell-thru and see that things aren't working, it's full speed ahead. Getting back to Kensington, it was also interesting that they put very different packages on their trade paperbacks
for the new Hot Blood books than they did on the mass markets for the reissues. In this case, there are good reasons for this. They were able to get some Front of Store promotion for the trade paperbacks with more upscale covers that never could have been gotten for the much louder covers of the reissues that certainly would stick on a rack at the supermarket.

6. And all of this also circles back to Borders. The mass markets did have shelf presence at Borders because of those stickers and the tight confines of the horror section, people could go to a Borders and find three or five or seven Hot Blood reissues (depending on the strength of the individual store) all together, and people would buy them. Not in vast great quantities, maybe Borders sold 250 copies a year of the top books in the series and fewer as you went down the list. But these were the sorts of books that the best Borders carried that other bookstores did not, of the books that gave people a reason to walk into the best of Borders. And the kinds of books that were dumped uniformly in 2008. Borders didn't go bust because they stopped carrying the Hot Blood books, let's be clear about that. We're looking at $10K or $11K in lost sales for a chain that went belly up owing orders of magnitude more than that. But I am utterly convinced of the fact that the devaluation of the brand image when they lost the depth of selection at their best stores was one of the things that started the final death spiral of year-over-year sales declines over the past three years. While Borders didn't go bust because they stopped carrying Hot Blood books, the books went bust without Borders to sell them because that was the primary outlet for physical copy sales. No coincidence that the books were remaindered and put out of print over the year following the title drops at Borders.

7. Which also points out to the importance of the physical bookstore, at least as recently as 2008. Yes, people could go on line and buy copies of the books, but the on-line experience is still not as much a browsing experience. The physical bookstore is still where you can browse the shelves and decide to buy something because it catches your eye.

In this post I've spoken lots about the business side of the Hot Blood series

Let me close with a tribute to the creative end.

The Hot Blood anthologies contain a lot of great horror stories. I love The Tub in Hotter Blood, or Black Cars in Hottest Blood. There were multiple Stoker Award finalists and some Stoker winners included in the anthologies. Graham Masterton was a standout contributor to the series with almost every volume having a long novella from him, many of them brilliant pieces of work. The series crossed cultural lines way more often than is common in the anthology trade. Grant Morrison was just one of several comic book writers who did good prose work for the Hot Blood books. Film director Mick Garris was in the series, as were other film industry veterans. Some of the books have music industry types writing prose fiction.

Please do see for yourself. If you click here you'll find buying links for all of the currently available formats (Kindle and Nook as of this writing) for the books available thru JABberwocky. And I want to give some public thanks to John Fisk.
Every time I go looking at the array of covers for these new e-book editions, I smile, for I think John did a wonderful job coming up with the perfect vibrant look.

I've been working the Hot Blood business for over 20 years, and I don't think I'm near finished with it. I'd love to see a publisher do a Best of Hot Blood compilation or some of the best stories in the series from women writers (erotic horror isn't just a guy thing!).

Going Busting

2011-03-01T00:05:00.002-05:00

I'm scared by the full-throttle attack on public employee unions that's taking place in many of these United States rights now.

Not unambivalently. Unions can stand for featherbedding, for archaic work rules, for stagnation. But they can also help individual employees to stand up to large corporations, to help raise living standards for their members. Bottom line, there's a reason why big corporations fight so hard to keep unions out, and it isn't because they're looking out for the little guy. And every bad thing you can say about unions, you can say sometimes about employers. If there are union heads living high on the hog off member dues, there are corporate CEOs doing the same. There are businesses that are staying wedded to old ways of doing things. I spent seven years working for Scott Meredith, who was in many ways the epitome of a bad boss.

Public employee unions are a little bit more awkward for me, largely because most politicians of my acquaintance especially here in New York City are very fond of having union support, union phone banks, union contributions, and are very eager to do the bidding of unions in ways that are harmful to everyone else in the city. For many years in NYC, any felony trial required the jury to be sequestered during the deliberations, even if nobody in the media was covering or would care about the trial. This was expensive, disruptive, unappealing to potential jurors. But it also meant jobs for court officers who had to watch over the jurors. As a result, it took many many years to do away with this stupid law. Multiply that out by negotiations across the country, where public employee unions have won things in the legislature that they couldn't win through collective bargaining or gotten things in collective bargaining that have price tags paid after the mayor leaves office, and yes, public employee unions have contributed to the financial crisis that states are facing.

But...

It isn't just an expense problem that's leading to the fiscal crisis. It's also a revenue crisis because of the economic collapse, the Great Recession, of recent years.

The general tack of the argument is to say that public employees should be happy to give up on things like good medical care or good defined benefit pension plans or good protection against unjust job termination because workers in the private sector have seen all of these things eviscerated in recent years.

It says that your goal isn't to uplift people but to bring them down. It buys into the worst short term logic of the capitalist marketplace that puts short term profit over all other concerns. It buys into the idea that no government is good government and that the best tax is no tax.

And I don't buy into that philosophy.

We aren't going to make our country better, our business climate better, our prospects better, by having a country full of people who can't afford good medical care, who can't afford to retire, who have to worry that they'll be fired for teaching evolution.

The United States is a rich country. It shouldn't squander its resources, no person or family or business or government should, but rich people are quite capable of spending money in frivolous and silly ways, and some of that money can be paid over in taxes to the greater good of all of us. Regulation can create an environment where business can go and thrive just like good parenting can do that for children, and this is an analogy I'll take and run with. Corporations are often like children, rapacious in their quest for immediate gain with no cognizance that it isn't always good to get exactly what you want at any given particular time.

I'm a businessman. I get to deal with government red tape. It can be a pain in the neck. But I can see as my authors work with publishers how my ability to leverage a client list helps every author on my list to do better -- and could do better still if authors could actually collectively bargain with publishers. Follow the logic of Scott Walker, and if one author will agree to a 4% royalty then all should, if one author will sell film rights then all should, the goal should be to single-handedly protect the interests of the publisher until every author is thoroughly impoverished.

I want to say that some of the public employee unions have had this coming because they've been very corporate in their rapacious approach to using all tools at their disposal to get pension and benefit programs that are ultimately unsustainable. And how many of those unions would support a governor who says "no raises, I need to fund the pension plan!"

But we as a society won't be better off if we can cut them off at the knees, if we do away with the idea that good benefits and good middle class jobs are something worth fighting for. That's something Henry Ford recognized, that his employees had to have some chance of buying his cars.

Quick Newsy Notes

2011-02-28T12:47:00.002-05:00

A few items from the past week...

HarperCollins is doing a "this tape will self-destruct" thing on its e-book library loan program, allowing 26 circulations per library purchase. Why? I figured this out before I read it officially. They feel this about matches the iifespan of a printed book in the typical library, and they don't wish to have an e-book purchase become an eternally available sort of thing when a print book truly can't be loaned forever before it falls apart. You can find a Library Journal article on the subject here, link courtesy of publishersmarketplace.com. I'm of mixed emotion on this. I don't think it's prima facie a heinous thing to do because businesses do need to adjust to changing business models, and the longevity of the product sold is enough of a concern that it's just kind of sitting there to be noticed and looked at. On the other hand, it pisses off customers. In the real world, libraries rarely would replace copies of a book that was ready to go to pasture unless it was maybe something like Harry Potter that doesn't come along very often. The book would be discarded or sold away at a Friends of the Library sale for 25¢ and that would be it. The main difference might be that if a patron discovers, let's say, Simon Green's Nightside series when the library had the 10th book, maybe they would go out and buy the first ten and now with e-book lending they could still find the first book sitting on the electronic shelf six years later. But even though readers are readers, I'm not sure the dedicated library patron would be the reader who'd go and actually buy a series like this. Hence, I feel as if Harper is addressing a real problem, but also that they've inflated and enlarged this bogey-man beyond the stature it actually deserved, and thus perhaps come up with a remedy that's a little more punitive sounding than it needs to be.

That same issue of the Publishers Lunch Deluxe from publishersmarketplace.com reports that Bloomsbury is reporting e-book sales at 40% now, while Sourcebooks was saying 35%. On the other hand, Penguin still has print as 85% of its business and thinks people need to be reminded that the lion's share of the book business is still in the old-fashioned print variety. Penguin also reported having a very good year even after taking reserves and allowances for the $42M that Borders owes and additional sums from the bankruptcy of RED Group, the major bookseller in Australia and New Zealand.

Tweeted a link to a NY Times article that went live last night about bookstores dealing with non-bookstore channels to sell books. This is the kind of thing that's hardly news news, though the Times tries to hook it as having new urgency in a post-Borders era. Alas, these channels can't replace Borders. Their selections are too small, maybe you can get a couple hundred appropriate books into a big Whole Foods markets, or twenty in some other retail channel. These sales also don't help a lot, because they can be invisible. Publishers do look at Bookscan. We once had a book by John Zakour, Man's Guide to Pregnancy, that was selling a gazillion copies at Motherhood Maternity. But because none of those sales are on Bookscan, selling the sequel was impossible because (1) we had to take a "trust us" approach in telling people that there really were all of these sales because it was 90% of more and the visible sales to other publishes hardly there at all and (2) if you don't think the sequel will sell to the same place then you have to conclude there's no market to be had.

Finally, we've achieve launch on stage 2 of our e-book program with most of the Hot Blood erotic horror anthologies now up for sale at Kindle. We should have those up on Nook soon. Kobo we're very close, they have a slightly more cumbersome process but the account is set up. We had a problem getting the account set up at iBooks which took weeks to fix, and now we're having trouble getting them to accept uploads of the same ePub files that everyone else is perfectly happy with. We need to get in touch with Sony, still. And Mayer Alan Brenner and James Robert Baker programs are progressing, while Rick Shelley is starting to come up after.

The True Social King or the Grit Network's Speech

2011-02-27T20:25:00.064-05:00

11:37 having the presenter do all the encomia for the acting nominees instead of the array of past winners, well OK, not lime the thing they did the past few years is unalterable. But the Best Picture nominees are all lumped into one montage. The producers don't have their names read aloud and have to settle for just type on the screen. And even the Best Picture winers have to deal with music telling them time is too shirt. C'mon, broadcast somewhere around 3:15 you can let the winners for Best Picture have their say.

11:32 why Jurassic Park music of all the films Spielberg has directed

11:31 not in love with his acceptance speech. trying too hard.

11:25 Colin Firth was also great in A Single Man last year.

11:20 unless Jeff Bridges wins in a category that is almost certainly and deservedly going to Colin Firth, safe to say that True Grit is the evening's big loser. Lots of nominations, lots of bos office, no love from Oscar. I didn't like the movie all that muspch save the painterly and stunning cinematography by roger Deakins, certainly not the performance by Bridges. I did love Jesse Eisenberg in Social Network, but as a stutterer myself I can tell you there are bits of the teenage me on the screen in Firth's King's Speech performance.

11:19 she will thank Mr Oster for inventing the blender she blends her protein shakes with in the press room afterward.

11:18 and giving such a boring cliche ridden speech that I would rather be listening to Jar Jar.

11:16 the buzz is right, what would Jar Jar Binks say to have his next door neighbor winning an Oscar?

11:13 Warren Beatty, being the loving husband to Annette Bening. He coulda been a contender, and not just on the football gridiron in Heaven Can Wait. Buzz is Portman, I want Bening.

11:08 Fancy Feast ad it's not, but M&M ad cute

11:02 supposed to be David Fincher's category and is not. Tom Hooper takes it for King's Speech..Well, it's a good movie too, but I am disappointed. But I will plug Hooper's earlier film The Damned United. One of the best sports movies I have ever seen, to where it is hardly a sports movie at all. Bottom line, much as I wanted Fincher and The Social Network to win in this category, I cannot begrudge Hooper the win.

10:52 John Barry, Tom Mankiewicz, Gloria Stuart, William Fraker, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Culp, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Yates, Arthur Penn, Susannah York, Ronald Neame, David Wolper, Jill Clayburgh,, Irwin Kerschner, Blake Edwards, Theoni Aldredge.

10:49 the Lulu German chocolate cake is really good, sorry Jim C Hines but this is the one place where coconut s a good thing. I am a big fan of the Juniors version of this cake but have to make special trip to Brooklyn to buy it. Only problem with liking Lulu version is that they do not always have the same cake lineup so it's not like I can count on having when I am in the mood for it.

10:48 and he is giving such a delightful speech

10:46 found myself rooting for the song from 127 Hours after hearing all four, but I cannot complain to have Randy Newman winning. Hard to believe 20 nominations for him have resulted in so few wins.

10:41 I walked out of Hereafter. I couldn't quite believe I was walking out of a Clint Eastwood movie, but after the wonderful opening scene of the tsunami, the movie gets boring and dull and even worse pretentious. Lots of good talent, Matt Damon whom I always like and Jay Mohr and Eastwood is Eastwood. But my only regret is that I didn't Orleans before the Tube bombing which just sickened me. You have to earn the right to get emotional points out of terrorism, and otherwise you're the worst kind of exploiter. And I sat watching that scene, kind of figured where it was going before I got there, and said to myself that it is Eastwood and he can't be going there. But go there he did. A bitter aftertaste, that's the main takeaway for me from that movie.

10:33 is this four for Inception? And now another well-deserved win for Social Network for editing. I do not often think of editing when I think of a film, but just thinking back to the opening fifteen minutes of this movie, it is hard not to. The crackling conversation between Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend won't crackle without good editing. Te tension that simmers as the opening credits roll over the walk back to the dorm room, that's a lot due to the editing. I didn't love Social Network the second time I saw it, and yet each new win, each playing of the movie's theme, makes we want to see again.

10:31 bad repartee, nothing new, and white ties that you can hardly tell are there since they fade into the shirts.

10:19 but this musical montage that just finished?

10:16 what a wonderful excited enthusiastic speech from the documentary winner, and yes this of us in NYC are happy to hear NYU mentioned, not sure if I have ever heard NYU in an acceptance speech before. What a great speech.

10:09 the Randy Newman song is nice but sounds like 16 other Randy Newman songs for animated movies. I like Newman, scores for The Natural and Ragtime are bookends at the earlier end of his career but not this. The second nominated song is also nice but sounds vaguely familiar. I gets me humming some other song, something la da da, I can go the distance or something like that, instead of the song itself.

9:59 two wins for Alice in Wonderland? Wow, if Tim Burton entered an Oscar pool he may be the only person with any chance of winning.

9:54 the red velvet "twinkie" at Lulu was quite good but must try and pace myself for the other two treats...

9:51 in fact I think Inception now has the most Oscars on the night. Which will not win Best Picture. Better to have the Fancy Feast ad win than Inception. Which if put into pill form would put Ambien out of business.

9:46 but one of the major changes in Oscar voting in my 30 years paying serious attention to such things is that the awards in smaller categories have become more likely to go to deserving winners instead of the evening's sweeping Best Picture.

9:44 and a pleasant surprise that it won. most of the buzz for this category was that it would go to Alexandre Desplat as part of a King's Speech evening.

9:43 my favorite original score is that for Social Network

9:39 I cannot believe they just took two minutes to talk about the renewal of the ABC license to televise.

9:32 but this is an amazingly competitive category with Geoffrey Rush, Mark Ruffalo in particular both giving worthy performances. I have been watching Christian Bale for close to 25 years since Empire of the Sun, and there as so often he has been overpraised in so-so movies lie that or gone unnoticed in things like Newsies or Swing Kids, which might be the prior movie where I most warmed to him, which I haven't done very often indeed. I am almost surprised at how much I liked him in The Fighter. And listening to his acceptance speech -- Ewan McGregor one hardly sees doing other than a British accent and Christian Bale only seems to be in movies where he does American dialect.

9:31 and he does

9:30 Supporting Actor has to go to Christian Bale

9:19 David Seidler's speech was very nice. I do not think this was the best script in the category, but no complaints. Oh -- the Fancy Feast ad in the last commercial break was better than some movies I have seen over the past hear. The Diet Coke commercial just ended, are they maybe getting a little too full on themselves in Atlanta?

9:15 the adapted screenplay win for Aaron Sorkin for Social Network is expected and well deserved. Sorkin's speech isn't as tightly edited as the movie was.

9:14 Blinded by the white! These two white tuxes together on stage are screechingly awful to look at.

9:06 Toy Story 3 was one of the best films of the year, deserves this, everyone expected it to win. And the winner clearly had his speech prepared, unlike Melissa Leo. Who let me say was really good in Frozen River. Just not, not, not that good in The Fighter.

9:03 More vapid dialogue in presenting the Animated Short. Justin Timberlake deserves better.

9:01 I thought Melissa Leo was one of the least pleasant things in the somewhat overrated (good, just overrated) The Fighter. Jacki Weaver was one of the best things in Animal Kingdom, which you must rent. And Helena Bonham Carter whom I never like was wonderful in King's Speech.

8:58 but credit Melissa with a good adlib.

8:55 pleased that Jacki Weaver was nominated for Animal Kingdom

8:55 please not Melissa Leo.

8:52 making lecherous small talk about Anne Hathaway? Who is writing this thing?

8:51. serendipity, here comes Kirk Douglas.

8:49. I think my biggest regret in the nominations is that Michael Douglas wasn't nominated for Best Actor for Solitary Man. But nobody saw it, and Wall Street Money Never Sleeps some people did see but it wasn't as good a performance and wasn't a fantastic movie.

8:47 I did not like True Grit, but Roger Deakins deserved to win this for True Grit. No sweeps tonight, that's for sure.

8:45 Alice in Wonderland for Art Direction? One film will not win all three awards this year. How many people have this in the Oscar pool.

8:41 first year I cab live blog with an iPad

8:40. Flatter than the dictator's nose after the steamroller in Sleeper.

8:38 The dreidel joke was borrowed from my review of Inception.

8:35 I though the pre-opening opening was a commercial. The opening montage I think is falling flat.

8:25 Once again doing live blog for Oscar night. I am rooting for The Social Network, but it will probably be Best Picture for Rocky done as Masterpiece Theatre. Main course for dinner some brisket from Righteous Urban Barbecue, about to take some mashed potatoes and veggies off the stove to tap off the meal. Desserts tonight come from Lola in Chelsea.

An Anniversary Musing, #2

2011-02-25T11:04:00.000-05:00

A couple years ago I did some postings on technology and the agenting business, in the first one I talked about how the Scott Meredith Agency kept a lot of records on green index cards, called not very creatively "green cards." Alas, those were gotten rid of in the mid 1990s when the agency moved, doing some of these anniversary posts I think how wonderful it might be to look over some of the detailed histories on some of them. But they ain't around, we must move forward!

One of my other earliest clients was a horror writer by the name of Ronald Kelly. I remember being held rapt by his "first" novel on the Shortline bus ride into Manhattan. It was then called "The Tobacco Barn." It ended up being published right around New Years, 1989 into '90, as Hindsight. It took rather a long time to sell, longer I would still think than it should have, before being taken by Wendy McCurdy, then at Kensington/Zebra, so even though Ronald was one of my very earliest clients he was beat to publication by several other authors who came later.

Like many of the authors I took on during my Scott Meredith years, Ronald had used the agency's fee reading service, and The Tobacco Barn wasn't the first novel the agency had seen. Alas, those records we kept track of on what I think were the white cards, which are as dead and gone as the green cards, but if memory serves he went into horror after some initial tries at writing westerns. I didn't read the earlier novels but Barry Malzberg whom I believe did would tell me that Ronald had kind of hit upon success by sheer force of will, that he kept at and kept at until he found something that worked. That makes Ronald a little bit of a rarity. By far the large majority of aspiring writers don't have and won't have and can't have the special gifts that allow success to occur. And then a lot of the writers who do and will and can have those gifts, they have them the same way that some people are born to hit baseballs or shoot baskets. To achieve the goal through hard work, passion, commitment -- even the talented writers need that, but to make the gifts yours, to kind of take and grab them, is another skill set entirely that is vanishingly rare.

So I liked The Tobacco Barn, I worked hard over a couple years and I think nine to twelve submissions though it may have been more, to place it. Ronald ended up becoming a fixture of the Zebra horror program over the next half dozen years, with eight books published.

Alas, the Zebra horror program came to an end, with two books that Ronald had written that were not to be published. The horror market had pretty much collapsed entirely at that time, and I had no idea how or where or to whom I could market them. It didn't help that there wasn't a lot of editorial support at Zebra. The horror line was kind of about the product, they had their two slots to fill and they were going to fill them. Ronald wasn't pushed to go beyond what he needed to do to fill out his spots in that program, which meant the books he'd written with that program in mind weren't likely to go over as mainstream horror/thriller titles.

A decade or so after we parted ways, I was happy to see Ronald have a renaissance of sorts. Two years ago, Cemetery Dance published a collection of his short fiction called Midnight Grinding and Other Tales, and subsequent to that one of the novels that was caught up in the horror collapse of the mid 1990s, Hell Hollow, finally saw print as well. You can track down some of the good notices for those publications here. Another collection called Dark Dixie is available for e-book. And you can check out Ronald's own blog here.

My relationship with Ronald was hardly the longest-lived that I've had, but I will always have a soft spot for him and his work because he was one of my very very first clients, not to many that I was reading on the Shortline bus which automatically puts him in the first six months of my now 25-year career. His resurrection in recent years is inspiring.

An Anniversary Musing, #1

2011-02-24T11:11:00.001-05:00

It was 25 years ago today that I started at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and here's a glimpse at the hardcover cover of the very first book I sold, Mary's Grave by Malcolm McClintick. Scott Meredith had a reading fee service, and this novel was what was called a "send-up," a book that a fee reader liked enough to suggest it be taken on. The author had a story or two published in Hitchcock's, and this was the first in a series of novels featuring the George Kelso character who also appeared in some of the AHMM stories. The book was published quickly, in the first half of 1987, and subsequently appeared in paperback from Avon. The acquiring editor at Doubleday was Michelle Tempesta, the long-time editor of the Doubleday Crime Club, and at Avon the editor who took the first three Kelso books was Nancy Yost. When the Doubleday family sold Doubleday to Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate which had owned Bantam Books and which now owns the entire Random House publishing empire in the US, the library-oriented hardcover lines at the old-line Doubleday, which included a small sf program edited by Pat LoBrutto as well as a western and romance imprint, were all terminated. My relationship with Malcolm did not last long. I was not very diplomatic or tactful in my publishing youth, not very much at all, and Malcolm was not the easiest author do deal with, and after a blow-up he ended up getting switched to another agent at Scott Meredith. Avon lost interest in publishing category mysteries, and Nancy Yost ended up establishing her own literary agency, which has endured nicely with a good list of mystery, romance, paranormal, and other categories.

There used to be several library-oriented lists like Crime Club. Charlaine Harris stopped at the Walker and Scribner mystery lists along the way to Sookie Stackhouse. Walker got out of the mystery business, and when Scribner was sold to Simon & Schuster the same kind of thing happened as when Doubleday was sold to Bertelsmann, the larger company preferring to place bigger bets instead of relying on smaller trickles of reliable income. Today Avalon Books still has a library-oriented hardcover publishing program in the mystery, western and romance genres, and Five Star Books popped up to serve the market as well, this series packaged by Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books for publication.

Bride of List!

2011-02-23T00:21:00.002-05:00

All told I have visited around 80 of the Borders that are closing, adding two in Burlington and Peabody MA this past weekend. Around 25,000 square feet, e average store that's closing. Leave aside the drain represented by entire stores, each of those could have done it's business in 5000 fewer square feet, 5K x 200, and that's one million extra square feet floating around, and the troubling thing is that the 450 stores that remain open probably carry around another 2M spare tire around the belly, and the bankruptcy filing doesn't help that.

Start at the top, alphabetically by state, and the Anchorage store is as typical an example as any. When I visited Anchorage in 2006, the Borders was disappointing. I had been to the amazing Waldenbooks in Wasilla, which had an amazing selection in an amazingly small space, kind of a captive audience, and then the BN in Anchorage which was selling books in jaw-dropping quantity. And then the Borders? Well, it was just OK. It had no doubt been first in the market, but clearly was no longer best. Move ahead four years and a remodel or two later with four years of likely declines in same store sales, with the music and movies sections gone, and then you would end up with that 31k sq ft box looking like the tumbleweed friendly environs of the Plano TX store in 2010.

In the San Francisco area, we've got the too expensive flagship in Union Sq that's closing, the Pleasanton store in the Walmart mall where you can almost see the better-situated BN on the other side of the highway in Dublin, the Fremont store which I doubt ever made much money, and the store in San Francisco Center that is only 20k sq ft and doing a decent business but which must be carrying a heckuva rent bill.

LA, there's the Century City store that replaced a prosperous small Brentanos with a Borders that I thought should have been a gold mine but somehow never came close. Pasadena was 40k sq ft, which can't be justified any more, and the equally large Glendale store that was a ghost town long before a spiffy huge BN opened across the street. I am surprised that the older Long Beach store is going, but then you see it's 30k sq ft which is too big even though it was still selling books. The newer store in downtown Long Beach was a shipwreck from day one.

Connecticut us getting creamed. The Danbury store was quite prosperous in 2002, Milford is an upgrade from a Waldenbooks to a new wing of the mall by e movie theatre, and that's going. Manchester was a really nice store once upon a time but was in decline and started to look seedy and had a spiffy new BN to contend with -- and still had a better wider selection in the sf/f category than that spiffy BN as of Thanksgiving. Is there any chance Borders could have sublet the old store several years ago and grabbed the BN location? Southbury was a Waldenbooks replacement new concept store that opened less than three years ago.

Chicago is getting creamed. It is the anti-DC, a market where every store seemed below average but where more and more and more were opened. Huge swaths of the market are now being ceded to BN. But what does it say about the company that 16 of 29 stores within a 50 mile radius of downtown are closing? Did they all start losing money only recently? I mean, the Evanston store was my first introduction to a seriously underwhelming Borders, and that was over a decade ago.

And on and on it goes, stores that never should have opened (Commack NY) or ended up on the wrong side of the tracks when a better-located BN came along (Peabody MA) or too big and perhaps helped to their death by bad management (Westbury NY was not known for the quality of its alphabetization, and Monroeville and Langhorne PA a tad large), or relocated to make more room for more stuff even after the death of music-movies was on the horizon (Austin north), or strangely placed (Mt. Kisco is mediocre, White Plains is starting to fade, let's in-fill with a store in Scarsdale).

All happy bookstores are alike, all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own special way!

When I went to Dallas, I got annoyed that Borders was sending big national authors to their original Dallas area store that was big, cobwebbed, not looking very prosperous any longer, while there was a livelier happier somewhat newer store a few miles down the road. Why? Because that was the old store where big tours had always stopped, thus they always should. The "good" news is that the friendly better nicer store is going to stay open, the original Dallas store will not. Alas, that inability to be fleet of thought remains intact.

Some people want to blame the Borders inventory stickers as the quintessential example of inefficiency. Um, NOT! Stickers told employees where to shelve books, every store has to do that somehow, you can go to a BN and watch employees spend time scanning books to figure out where to shelve them, which is its own kind of inefficiency. Books needed to cross the warehouse and go from the incoming boxes tome outgoing boxes, sticking along the doesn't add a lot of time. The process could cause an efficient business to take ten days instead of eight to move a book, the problem at Borders was doing in weeks what BN could do in days, and Books a Mllion and many other stores use stickers.

No more long Borders posts forma while, unless developments warrant.

Funny book Roundup Tuesday

2011-02-22T00:40:00.001-05:00

I got Red Robin #20 because it was crossing over from Teen Titans, and it was OK, just a basic Robin Needs Help Calls in Old Gang thing.

I go into the 80 Page Giants out of curiosity with low expectations, which were surpassed by Superman Giant 2011. Which means there weren't any stories that I entirely skipped, which happens often. These books are used a lot of times for apprentice work by newer talent, and not much you can do in ten pages when you grow up in a world where everything is a multi part epic. The veteran Cafu did the best art in Beau Tidwell's opener, which was a good job of telling a pointless backfill prequel to Superman The Movie which I haven't been holding my breath for. Worst fir me was a Bizarro story with art that looked like refugee work from a Plop story from 30 years ago.

DC Legacies was OK, not living down to either worst fears or up to best hopes as they move into retelling stories from my comics hiatus.

We save some of the best for last. DMZ 61 was one of the best fill in art issues in the Free States Rising series as it started to move the story forward in current continuity and Shawn Martinbrough did a good job channeling the style of series co-creator Riccardo Burchielli. But the next issue with Brian Wood and Burchielli together on a DMZ for the first time in too long totally rocked. As with Pier Gallo on Superboy there's something quietly wonderful about the art that makes me linger on it a little, where the graphic part of the comic book comes alive. With the last ten issues kicking into gear and the original artist back on board this issue reminded me of why DMZ has been a favorite of mine these past five years.

Brian Wood also wrote The New York Five, a sequel to a series The New York Four in the Minx DC imprint of women-oriented titles a while back. Hadn't read that, but with more DMZ behind me thought to try some more Wood Ryan Kelly is the artist and co-creator here and is doing excellent realist with the sets yet just a tad stylized with the people artwork that I liked. Characters all NYU students, bit soap opera-ish. Ya know, I will come back for issue 2. Rather against my better judgment I want to see if Riley will buy Frank a cup of coffee.

And finally and delightedly, Superboy 3&4 by Jeff Lemire and Pier Gallo. Fantastic, still. There is a scene with Conner Kent telling a kid at school that he can hang with Conner or with Superboy but not both which is well enough. written and the even better because the art is every bit the equal partner. A mild fault that the character's reaction doesn't get much follow- up, and similarly something from issue #2 where the followup if any is nebulous. Not sure they are quite mastering the art like the best TV shows can of letting things play out in a way neither too obvious nor too subtle. However what is on the page is so consistently good it seems churlish to complain about what isn't. This book is a must read.

Funnybook Roundup Monday

2011-02-21T11:01:00.001-05:00

It is a good thing that DC is holding the line at $2.99, because something like Brightest Day seems just that little bit easier to indulge at that price than at 33% more. I am catching up on comics over the Boskone President's Day weekend and just did issues #17-20. #17 was half good with Firestorm and Deadman stuff that was interesting and the. Hawkman stuff that was not. #18 is almost all Hawkman with a little Deadman and may end (spoiler alert, but really, if you care about the series you read this issue a month ago unlike me) with Hawkman and Hawkgirl being dead, and does anyone really care? Hawkwoman? Cannot stay dead, even as a DCU backwater for most of his existence eventually the attorneys will need them revived for trademark purposes, but maybe we can hope not until 2015. Issues 19 and 20 have an Aquawar. Lots of fast page flipping in #19, some payoff in the followup issue. I want more Firestorm in the final four issues, and at this point I think I can spend $11.96 or something to see where it goes. This isn't great stiff, but I am more involved than in the last 23 DCU crossover epics which counts for something.

Speaking of trademark rejuvs, I have been selectively sampling the DC Comics Presents reprint books, and should have selected away from The Atom. The first half from twelve years back has some Gil Kane art in what is intended asman homage/return to Silver Age comics. But Silver Age didn't mean incoherent, and this is. With a script I couldn't comprehend the charms of the Gil Kane art, ne being one of the quintessential Silver Age artists, were elusive, and I felt guilty for preferring the more contemporary art by in the Atom pages. The second half was a more contemporary story equally incomprehensible. So let's be fair to Brightest Day and other current comics not as good as that. It's only via extremely rose-colored glasses that there was a good old days when only good comic books were published.

Superman isn't looking good right now. DC made a big push with issue #701 of it and Wonder Woman with J. Michael Straczynski taking over both. WW wasn't good at all, Superman was interesting, a brave stylistic choice, but not a clear winner. Straczynski bailed, deciding he wasn't doing great work and shouldn't do at all. Now novelist and iZombie writer Chris Roberson is writing from JMS plots.

The first of these, issue #707, which has fill-in art, is off to a bad start by panel two. Superman keeps a freight train from running over a little girl, but the art shows him doing this by stopping the train. I would vote for picking the girl up off the tracks, much less likely to cause collateral damage. A few pages later we have a caption where Superman worries about whether a factory's insurance will cover something. There is realism and there is realism, and this is a little much. Later Superman is tempted to take the side of a plant owner who says if he can't poison the environment nobody will have jobs, and I don't see Supes as the type to settle for false choices like that. Issue 708 is a downhill step, the art is at least with series regular Eddy Barrows instead of the static fill-in of the prior issue, but the script starts out with an I erecting idea, loses it's way in prose like "you were trying to reconnect with the formative experiences that first taught you your values" and soon commended a guest appearance by Wonder Woman. Issue #709 is looking like a doubtful...

Funnybook Roundup Sunday

2011-02-20T14:12:00.000-05:00

DC Comics recently reversed a decision to go to $3.99 pricing on some books, and all regular monthly titles are now $2.99. Which is a good thing. Except that a couple of story pages were dropped. 20 pages is still more than the 17 I can remember a long time back, but not 22 or 23. But I am still doubly thrilled because at least one of the pages will be used to restore letter columns to the books. I loved letter columns. Even had some published back in the day. We will see if they print good letters and bad, or if they use it to have some real dialogue, but just the idea of seeing them back thrills me no end. Even on a limited basis, pushing feedback and dialogue to your readers in the comic instead of having people pull it by visiting a forum or bulletin board or whatever is a welcome return to a better way of doing things.

If the opening issues of the new Superboy series are all that can be good in comics, the first issue of threw Shazam is every bit the opposite. If you haven't picked up a book involving Shazam in a while you'll be surprised to know it isn't Billy Batson and Mary any more; he and his sister lost their powers and a non-entity named Freddy Freeman has. The issue quickly devolved into a fight scene with a demon (well, at least acts a lot like one) who's being double-crossed by Mary in a plot to take Freddy's powers. No real closure, and it is instantly going to crossover with another title. I shan't follow the crossover or be back for issue 2.

The new team of JT Krul script and Nicola Scott-Doug Hazelwood-Scott Koblish on New Teen Titan is still on probation. Issue #91 winds up a somewhat incoherent plot about a mysterious dude doing genetic experiments on high schoolers with an extended fight scene, evil mastermind gets away. Not good. But there is enough decent characterization about the Titans to keep me interested and reading. Then again just a few issues into the new team and the to be continued is in an issue of Red Robin. I am not sure I am up for a crossover, as inclined to not buy Titans as to now have to start buying Red Robin. We'll see...

On the Bongo front... I do not like Simpsons mash-ups either on the show or the comic as I have said in my funny book roundups many times before. And yet I loved -- loved!!! -- Simpsons #175. Homer buys a magnet to pull his car into his garage. Homer is soon telling a judge "It was the nineteen seventies. That short time between 3-D movie fads!" Turn the page and Lisa Simpson is green, doing her best Kermit the Frog imitation, and we are off and running with mash-ups of The Muppet Show, Little House on the Prairie and The Rockford Files. I even liked the mash-up of Little House, which I never would have gone near in the seventies.

Simpsons Super Spectacular tends to disappoint, so happily issue #12 is at least good for the standards of that book. The lead story takes off amusingly enough from a Dial H for Hero thing, and the lead and back-up story both get to be kind of silly, but a kind of silliness I can see others liking even if I didn't entirely. While not one of the best Simpsons experiences it does exemplify one of the best Simpsons traits, happily working on multiple levels where a younger reader might enjoy the antic energy while I notice they're using Dial H for Hero as the touch-off point and using a more obscure hero like Black Lightning with as much zest as some of the more prominent. Simpsons #174 was an average issue for this book, which is not a bad place to be. Lisa is saving an owl, Homer is being used by Mr. Burns to drive down property values, Bart is being Bart. Not the heights of the issue that followed, but more than good enough. Futurama #53 is a good issue of a series often much better than just good.

The Ten & Five Stores

2011-02-17T14:29:00.000-05:00

For general impressions of the closing Borders see my last post here This will start some store specifics. I believe that Borders #10 at the White Flint Mall in Kensington/Rockville MD and Borders #50 on 18th and L St in downtown Washington DC were in their prime two of the best bookstores in the entire country.

Store #10 was one of the first stores opened by the brothers Borders as they expanded across the US. It was the second Borders I ever visited, my late uncle Matthew dropping me off at the Bethesda Metro station with instructions on how to find my way there as I was heading home after from something or other. I loved it. It was exactly like the experience of visiting the original Borders, and I no longer had to go to Ann Arbor for it. I was upset they were not carrying Simon Green's Blue Moon Rising in it's original Roc edition. That store was in a small standalone retail building on Rockville Pike, subsequently filled with an Anthropologie and now vacant; the Borders proved so popular that it was no more than a few years before it left its books only building behind for an anchor location in White Flint across the street, with one of the hugest Borders signs you could see facing the Pike. And it was so popular there they even took over adjacent space for an even bigger selection. What a selection! What a crowd on a Saturday night! So many books sold, 30 copy initial order of Elizabeth Moon's Sporting Chance, if I recall. I could easily and happily spend an hour or more there, looking at every end cap, reveling in the crowds, checking the behind stock of the sf section.

The 18th and L store opened a bit later, probably after the K-Mart purchase of Borders. It was in the basement levels of a DC office building. It was hard to appreciate just how big the store was because it was on two levels and the lower was in an L shape with the walled off music and movies section taking the lower part of the L so you didn't know about the foot of the L if you didn't head in. It's Saturday night was lunch hour. Every lunch hour. If you could get a book on the new mass market table to be admired by the lunchtime throngs you could sell ten copies in a week easy. I tried hard over the years to fill an empty slot on that table, or if the table was low to bring up copies from the sf section downstairs.

As Borders did in those days, the front of store at each was full of facings and tables that reflected the character of the store. The downtown store would be big on politics, and there were books displayed in quantity there that you didn't see elsewhere. The White Flint store would long retain some of the tweedier university town aspects from being one of the first stores out of Ann Arbor. Both easily carried over 100,000 book titles, well over. The downtown store was never as strong in horror, both sold sf/f in such large quantities.

Both stores, when I might commonly expect to see 55 or 60 JABberwocky titles in a superstore, I could go here and find 80 or 90. White Flint may have been one ofmthe first stores where I found 100 titles when it wasn't a fully stocked opening day.

So what happened?

The downtown store didn't face direct competition, but it's sales were clearly slowing because of environmental conditions. Not just the ebook. The first superstores tended to open up in core urban or suburban locations. As the population migrated out and more stores opened in the suburbs, the original core stores lost business. In DC right now the more outlying stores in Germantown and Columbia MD or Fairfax VA may be among the most profitable.

But beyond that, Borders happened to Borders. A Barnes and Noble opens on Rockville Pike a mile up from the Borders. Not very happening at first. But over time, even though the Borders has a theoretically bigger selection the long lag time in replenishment will mean that you cannot actually find your book, as could the Borders quirk where a book that got shipped to the wrong store would be listed as received at the theoretical destination instead of the actual.

Both stores were hurt by the cash crunch in 2008 when title counts were reduced chain wide. The presence of a rare find like a Hot Blood anthology could no longer make up for the missing 2nd Deathstalker novel that sold three weeks ago and still hadn't been reordered.

The corporatizing of Borders hurt. These stores once had character, personalities distinct to their neighborhood, visibly so when you walked in the front door. As more and more of the front of the store was sold off to paid publisher placements, and as the stores themselves were renovated with the new hardcover facings taken away and/or becoming "FOS Bay 07" on the chain wide weekly displays, the titles that gave that character to the stores were forced into the section where if lucky maybe the store had an extra endcap. With the title count reductions in 2008, many of the books that gave character but sold eight copies a year over the entire chain were removed completely.

And oh, those remodels. These are two of the stores that I saw in at least four incarnations. The original, the original with diagonal lines removed, the navigability/mixed hc-mm genre shelving, then the booting out of the music and movies, then the filling out of the space. At one point in time half the sf/f at White Flint was put in upstock, which didn't make things easy to find, so up the road to the BN the customers would go. In the final remodel at 18th and L, the old lettering Borders sign was taken down and replaced with a sign with the new logo. This offended me as a Borders purist. More to the point, while that new sign did give brand consistency it did not sell an extra piece of merchandise, and it cost money which Borders did not have. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I do not think Barnes and Noble has spent energy swapping out signs with it's original somewhat more ornery lettering, and even though I am not a BN purist, I still find this stores and smile when I walk in because I know the stores with the old lettering have more history behind them.

And oh, those remodels! Let me say it again. Every dime Borders spent on those remodels made the stores less interesting to me, less attractive, less fun to visit, had me spending less time in the store. That has always worked well enough for BN because the business has always been thus. Borders built it's business on a different kind of customer, and slowly replaced it with people wanting to use "40% off any one item" coupons.

I last visited White Flint in December, and 18th and L just a two weeks ago. They were so much quieter than once upon a time they were. I was at 18th and L right about noontime, and it was busy-ish but not like the lunch hours of my recollection.

That said, both stores were still selling decent quantity of books. Both had better selections, and better selected selections, than a typical BN. On some titles, White Flint could still outsell the BN a mile up the road.

Why are they closing? Too big. The White Flint store was over 40,000 square feet. When they took out music and movies, they had enough space left to put in a boxing ring and spectator seating. They did shuffle and move and fill out the space, but they were doing a nice business for a 27K store maybe even with steep rent, but there was no way they could ever do 40K sq ft of business. The 18 and L store was around 37K, same problem.

Store #85 at Pentagon City has faded as much or more as either of these stores, but maybe three years back Borders was able to give back space to the landlord. That store remains open.

Can you tell that I will miss these stores, not so much for their faded presents but very much as once upon a time they were.

The List

2011-02-16T23:13:00.002-05:00

As you can imagine, I spent a good chunk of time looking at the list of Borders that will be closing in the next six to ten weeks following the chain's bankruptcy filing this morning.

I'll have more to say about some individual locations or other specifics, but a thing or two worth noting:

First and most important, a store's fate didn't depend on sales alone. Which might be my biggest sadness about the list. My hope had been the Borders would close a third of its stores doing 20% of its business, but it just ain't so. The rent and square footage ended up saying as much about a store's profitability as the quantity of books it is selling. So here in New York City, there's a store in Glendale, Queens that is still remaining open, in a failed attempt at an upscale shopping mall. So failed that the shopping center itself was just sold at a bankruptcy auction. Hence, the Borders survives. Why? Well, along with the movie theatre the Borders is one of the few traffic generating assets in this failed mall, the rent has probably been dropped to a pumpkin slice and iced mocha at the Seattle's Best cafe, so Borders can keep it open as long as they make payroll. This means the effect on book sales is likely to be bigger than I'd have wished. Yuck!

That being said, there are so many of these stores more than once over many years that have clearly never lived up to expectations, and have clearly been drains on the company even during the good old days. From Kips Bay in Manhattan to Friendship Heights in DC to Century City in LA to a good half dozen of the stores closing in the Chicago area, Borders is finally free of stores that never worked to their rent rolls and expectations, and a company that is free of those many dozens of bad eggs is a better, stronger company on many levels.

However, every store has to contribute to overhead. With fewer stores there are still certain fixed costs that don't go away. The surviving stores have to make an even stronger contribution to overhead in order for the company to have any good chance of moving forward in slimmer shape. Considering the problems Borders has had in recent years, this is sadly not a sure thing.

There is no one type of store that seems to have survived better than some other type. There are new concept stores from 2008 that are gone (Southbury, CT). There are stores in major urban locations (18th & L, DC). There are stores in weird rural locations (Colleyville, TX). There are Waldenbooks replacement stores (Southbury, Milford CT). There are stores in fancy downtowns (Los Gatos, CA). There are new stores and old stores. The problems at Borders weren't limited to this thing or that thing, but to anything and everything.

There's still no recognition that the company needs to use the strengthened cash position it could have coming out of this filing to strengthen its supply chain, speed replenishment, and update reordering and inventory systems to match B&N. The bankruptcy filing still lists things like "strengthen Borders Rewards Plus" and "start selling related non-book items" as the major focus areas of the turnaround plan. These things aren't going to cut it, if they don't deal with the supply chain.

Personnel? Let's say you're a good GM who's been working at a store selling lots of books with too high a rent, and there's some other store that's surviving because the rent is cheap even though the store itself is managed like shit? With all the tumult, are there people who are going to try and be sure the bad GMs are the ones who end up exiting, and the better GMs will somehow find their way to the stronger remaining stores? Of course there are also a lot of hourly employees who are out of work now, many of them wonderful people. I think here of the clerk at the LA/Howard Hughes Plaza Borders who helped track down copies of some Peter V. Brett books when we did drive-by signings in the area last August. There are a lot of great people like that.

Recovery: Borders needs to make May Day into Borders Day, or something. Somebody needs to work on having a major event with the best author they can possibly find at every surviving Borders store as a way to get some people into the store, make people aware publicly and in a very big way that the surviving stores are in business. I doubt there's anyone working on this.

The closing list emphasizes the folly of all the money Borders spent on remodels. If the store was losing money, did it really matter if it was losing it selling music and movies instead of bargain books? There's so much mis-deployed capital investment represented here.

This is a terribly sad day for me, made at least tolerable because it's the necessary and too long in coming capstone to an event that was becoming inevitable. Several of the earliest Borders stores I ever visited are soon to leave, many of them stores I used to love to visit, that once were truly marvelous stores to shop. There are business concerns I think about, this is real shitty timing with regard to the paperback releases of Oath of Fealty by Elizabeth Moon and The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett as an example. But my thoughts are less there right now, than with the long-time friends I am losing.

Threes

2011-02-09T08:31:00.003-05:00

First, let it be said that the episode of Glee after the Super Bowl was simply dreadful. I've watched some Glee, and it can achieve real heights. This contrived boring uninteresting filled-with-bad-musical-numbers of songs-nobody-would-care-about episode was nowhere near anything good. A shame.

I saw three theatrical pieces in DC this past weekend.

Black Watch is a play I've been wanting to see very badly. It played in New York a year-and-a-half or so ago to rave incredible reviews and multiple extensions. It's two week tour stop in DC at the Shakespeare Theatre was the main impetus for heading down. It wasn't quite like the Shakespeare-shaped cookie cutter in the gift shop wasn't more interesting than the play, but closer than I'd have expected considering the reviews, that's for sure. The Black Watch is a Scottish military regiment which dates back to the 1880s and which served in Afghanistan. This play is too many things and not enough of any of them. It's framed as a journalist interviewing members of the regiment after their experiences in Afghanistan, but it doesn't have any characters. It has mouthpieces to tell the history of the regiment, or a little about the war in Afghanistan. Because it doesn't have characters, it can't get across a "war is hell" message near as good as a Full Metal Jacket. Because the history of the regiment isn't intrinsically interesting to a non-Scottish audience but is very important to the National Theatre of Scotland, whose production this is, it isn't sure whether to tell lots of history or little pieces of it. The staging is kind of all over the place. There's a lively but pointless scene where one member of the regiment is lifted off his feet multiple times so different kilts or hats can be put on him to symbolize different parts of the regiment's history. It's different, at least. The setting makes decent use of the steel box shelter unit which I'm told is used in the military theatre. At the end, everyone marches around the stage in something that seems to be the "war is hell" moment where members of the regiment falter and get back up, but it's a gesture. And it goes on way too long since the production is done with seating on both sides, so it's like every piece of the action has to be done twice with the company facing both ways. It's better than I'm making it sound, lively and passionately done, it kept me awake. Still, I left thinking as much on the pointlessness of my two hours in the theatre as I did on the pointlessness of war -- the majesty of the fighting arts either, for that matter.

The historic Ford's Theatre in DC has been nicely renovated, with a new lobby area that makes it much more suitable for use as an ongoing theatre and living museum instead of just a museum of the Lincoln assassination, which is still marked in his box. I went there to see Horton Foote's The Carpetbagger's Children, which I might have skipped if I'd known it was a monologue play. I don't like monologue plays. A good play play, you can feel like you're observing some version of reality. If the actors break the third wall at some point, it's an acceptable device. But to have people just talk and talk and talk like the audience isn't there but who then are they talking to is just an artificial device that in real life would be associated with mentally ill people regaling on a crowded subway train. But as monologue plays goes, this one was actually pretty good. The three actresses are telling different pieces of the same story, about a northerner and his kin living in a small Southern town after the Civil War. The actresses are very good, all veterans of the DC stage and frequent nominees or winners in DC's Helen Hayes Awards for theatre. It's a real story, and not quite just people droning on as bad monologue plays can be. I once read that acting is about listening, and I don't know if it's because the scripts are better or the actresses really really good, but there's more interaction even when silent between the actress who's telling her story at any given point and the two others that are on stage. Usually, the staging of a monologe play has no idea what to do with the other characters in the pieces, and here they actually have a purpose. Count this as a pleasant surprise, at least in this production.

I liked Tynan some, would have liked it more if I wasn't so so tired the night I saw it that I was having trouble staying awake for no particular fault of the play's. This is a one-man show which is playing at the Studio Theatre about the British critic and later writer for The New Yorker Kenneth Tynan, who long kept a diary from which this pleasantly acerb play is drawn. It's a one man show, quite nicely acted by Philip Goodwin, and I felt pleasantly educated by the experience of seeing. I do wish, as I'd said, that I'd been a little more awake, but my long day beforehand of shopping by and at the Potomac Mills, including a visit to Borders #262 in Woodbridge, my 234th visited, left me beat.

after the fall

2011-02-02T23:34:00.004-05:00

One of my clients was wondering what effect a Borders bankruptcy might have on major publishers.

At least there, the answer is "not as big as you might think." Let us say Borders was 12% of the company's business, and that Borders was not paying for two of the biggest holiday months, so that this would be more like 1/3 of their annual billing with Borders than 1/6 of it. So that ends up being around 4% of your expected income where you've actually paid for and printed and shipped books and incurred all of those costs and you're stuck with the bill. Now, that's a big hit. A very big hit. It could take your expected profit and narrow or shrink it, maybe even put you into a loss situation for the year. But it's an absorbable hit, especially when you realize that most of the major publishers are part of huge international conglomerates with publishing operations in lots and lots of different countries. And this isn't the first time a major player in the industry has gone bankrupt. Borders UK went belly-up 14 months ago, and a major distributor in the US went belly-up several years back.

There are other effects. There are some books that went to press with the expectation that copies would go to Borders, and now those books might be sitting in the warehouse instead. Moving forward, there will be fewer Borders stores, the number circulating is that 150-200 of around 450 may close in a bankruptcy filing. Some of those sales will be lost. However, it's important to keep in mind that the stores that are closing, many of them will be stores that have not been doing a lot of business in recent years, maybe a few like the Borders on Park Ave. in Manhattan that does a decent business but with too high a rent, but if they close 35-40% of their stores, those stores are likely to be closer to 20% of the actual business Borders has been doing. So that would be something like 2.5% of the business that will disappear or migrate to other bookstores or sales channels. There are some stores that don't have a B&N anywhere nearby, Kris Rusch talked about how her one hour drive to a Borders would become two hours to a B&N, so if that Borders were to close there would clearly be people who wouldn't drive two hours to buy a book. But in other instances, if the Borders in Commack closes people are all driving out there anyway, most of them can drive another mile, mile-and-a-half to the B&N in Commack.

Even right now, I went into the Borders in Kips Bay Manhattan on Wednesday night, and it certainly didn't have that dying bookstore look that I've seen before, like in the final years of Wordsworth in Harvard Square. Borders is paying cash for important books they need to have to keep the business going, Ingram is still supplying on terms unknown. I don't think unsecured debtor publishers will get zero cents on the dollar.

Right now, we're in that time when nobody knows exactly what happens. The Kips Bay Borders is theoretically getting 4 copies of one Del Rey book I have in March, 3 copies of another. Will they pay cash to Random House, or get them from Ingram, or not actually get them? If there is a bankruptcy filing, this store will almost certainly be on the list of those closing, so will they still get books intended to arrive two or three weeks after the filing, or will they cancel them? Multiply this out by lots and lots of books and you can see how much uncertainty there is. So we worry. We should worry. But this will not likely be the end of the world.

This is not to say there are not smaller publishers in the world or publishers without a cushion or publishers who do a much bigger share of their business with Borders who will feel this much much much harder than the average publisher. And yes, some of them may end up going under as an aftershock if Borders goes under.

Also, there will be some books, the Goblin books by Jim Hines are an example of books that are carried at Borders and not at Barnes & Noble, and there will be particular books that might die if Borders dies. However, if Borders does not die completely but does live on with 62% of its current store base which does 80% of its current business, those books may not die. This may not be as bad as when Borders entirely dropped titles in spring 2008 when it first developed liquidity issues. And even then, keep in mind that books die on a regular basis when B&N or Borders decides to cut a title loose.

Part of me thinks I'm being too rosy in this blog post. Let me emphasize again, there are some books and some authors and some publishers that will get hurt very badly, that are already hurt very badly by what's happened already, perhaps fatally. And if 200 stores close, there could be thousands of employees who lose their jobs, just as hundreds already have at the 50 stores Borders closed in the last six months and at the warehouses that have been closed and in positions that have been made redundant at all levels of the company. At the same time, as I've said for a long time, publishing has been dying for as long as I've been in the industry, just shy of 25 years, and the industry still lives. It will still be around, whatever the fate of Borders, six months or six years from now.

If Borders closes 200 stores, plus all the stores already closed... I'm trying not to be a piler-onner. There are clearly a lot of bad real estate decisions. But some of those bad real estate decisions, I'd have made. Borders #228 in Manhattan, I'd have signed that lease twelve or fifteen years ago. New retail development in an underserved area of Manhattan, no bookstore in the immediate vicinity as we reckon such things in Manhattan, adjacent to a big 15-screen Loews movie theatre I'd have signed that lease, darned tootin' I would have. And it was a nice store, with a nice selection when it opened, a perfectly delightful place to go shopping. And I can't tell you why that store never did a particularly good business. Never. The problem isn't the lease, per se, but how long of a lease it was, that the store's been open more than ten years doing not such a good business and probably not making very much money even in its best of days, and the only way to escape the lease is to go bankrupt. There are other decisions that seem more questionable. Clearly they overpaid for the Park Ave. location. The King St. San Francisco store that closed in the fall, that store I don't know where they were thinking they'd find customers. All those decisions have been compounded by an inventory system that didn't give bad stores a chance at redemption, and by spending lots of money to remodel stores that never had better days and never were (the philosophy at Sears which hasn't spent tons of money remodeling stores thus earning demerits from many who write about such things does have its merits). But if a bad decision is only bad with the benefit of hindsight, let us admit that that decision, at least, wasn't bad at the time.

More Shoes Dropping

2011-01-31T13:55:00.003-05:00

So sneaking out the news on a Sunday night, Borders put out an official press release to say it's not paying publishers for January, and now starting to skip rent payments as well. This follows a press release last week to say that they had a contingency-riddled commitment to new financing.

It's going from sad to worse. Borders is so poorly managed right now that it can't even go bankrupt right.

As I mentioned on New Year's Eve day, you have to pay your landlord before you pay anyone else, because your landlord is the one person who can change the locks and keep you from accessing your inventory. And if things are so bad you aren't paying your landlord, then you should have just gone into Chapter 11 long before, but as I suggest here that poses ego issues and money issues to some very rich people who've made some bad bets on Borders. Because of those rich person egos, Borders has engaged in a long drawn-out process that has pissed off employees, publishers, landlords, pretty much anyone whose help you'd need to get you through a crisis.

In the midst of this, they still aren't engaging the main long-term problems with the business. Their salvation plan if people help them is to do more with Borders Rewards Plus, gain internet and e-book marketing share, change the product mix to alleviate the digital migration in books, reduce costs, and invest in IT to improve customer experience. For almost all of these things, they're late to the party. And I don't see the supply chain discussed anywhere. For fifteen years, the top people at Borders have been immune to the idea that you can't be in competition forever taking eight weeks to do what your competitor does in eight days, but that's been the story of Borders existence, late not just to that but to the internet and to e-reading and to everything else.

Publishers are not persuaded by this. Why should they be? There's that definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over with hopes of a different outcome. So the $125 million in "junior debt financing provided be certain vendors and other lendors" isn't going to happen.

There's also a requirement to have financing arrangements with vendors, landlords and other financing parties. Not gonna happen.

And finalization of a store closing program to identify underperforming stores to be closed as soon as practicable. And this is a problem. Borders has only 12 leases expiring in 2012, and of the 508 superstores open for business around a year ago, 369 had leases that were ending five or more years in the future. If the business was going well, or if the economy wasn't in a spin where leases can today be renewed at lower rentals in many instances, people would look at all of these long leases and think the people at Borders were geniuses. But when things are going bad, they tend to go really bad. And since Borders isn't certain to be paying its rent tomorrow anyway, no landlord has a big huge interest in working with Borders to protect rent that's due a year or five years from today.

The word from Publishers Weekly is that some publishers are so discouraged they might try to make a fuss if Borders goes to court with debtor-in-possession financing, which is the credit line you get when you go bankrupt to keep you afloat during the reorg, which is given priority over all other loans for repayment. If you're refused that financing, you can't keep going during Chapter 11, and would have to liquidate.

I'm not sure there's anything left to save in a Chapter 11. If I thought there were good solutions that current management or any management at Borders could execute which might keep 200 or 350 or some number of stores profitable moving forward, I'd want that very very much as would everyone in the publishing industry. But when I'm looking at how miserably this final descent into bankruptcy is being managed, when I'm looking at the competition from the internet and e-books where Borders is so far behind the curve, when I'm looking at the continued failure of management even today to recognize the core realty that the company has to upgrade supply chain and replenishment and inventory consistency/brand identity... And all that doubly and triply so because the non-bankruptcy of the company the past five weeks has so damaged relations with anyone and everyone.

And I'm not even thinking about the customers. Unless Ingram is still supplying Borders during all of this, the shelves are going to start to look empty and depleted and who'll be left wanting to shop there...

I have a stock certificate from when Borders had a stock split in 1996, and those few dozen shares will soon be suitable for framing. The original shares from pre-split I'd sold off long ago and recovered costs. It's not worth the effort to send the certificate by registered mail to the broker to sell.

I've been to 233 Borders locations (for Australia, I counted any store which Borders originally opened, but not stores like the one by the WorldCon hotel that opened subsequent to the sale of the operations Down Under), 216 of those are US superstores. I'm torn between wanting to accumulate a few more notches in my belt before they disappear, or finding something morbid about it. Borders had somewhere between 540 and 550 total US superstores opened, if you look at stores that relocated and which need to count twice, we might be talking about 570 or 580, something like 475 in operation now and 25 more already scheduled to close, so I've visited not quite 40% of the total US store base. If I can perform death watch at another 20 stores, I can lay claim to a pretty clear 40% inclusive of relocations.

quick newsy notes

2011-01-25T14:27:00.003-05:00

Even though Barnes & Noble likes to brag about how wonderfully they're doing, the cost-cutting bug hasn't skipped over. Here Publishers Weekly discusses the impact on small presses of B&N's recent layoff of some four dozen staffers, including several long-time buyers and merchandisers which include the company's director of small press and vendor relationships. Holding to the truism that companies don't like to mayke announcements of bad news, there is no B&N release on the layoffs, their latest is to wax enthusiastic about periodical sales for the Nook.

The news from Borders is that publishers are supposed to indicate next week if they will trade their accounts receivable for a promissory note. And there were more layoffs at HQ. They raised some cash by selling their Day by Day calendar kiosk business to Calendar Club. Can't be much, though, because the kiosks are a seasonal business, and the business can't be much more than selling the rolodex of contacts to talk to about leasing space next year. Somebody I know who works at a Borders says they're on skeleton staff and still supposed to take out 80 more hours from the store payroll, and there's a big push to sell the Borders Rewards membership upgrades. I wish this process wasn't dragging on so long, annoying customers, employees, publishers, pretty much all of the so-called "stakeholders" as Whole Foods likes to call them. I suspect there are some ego issues involved. The very rich Bennett Lebow doesn't want to admit he made a mistake putting money into Borders last spring. Nor does the very rich and often full of dumb ideas William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital. They have too much at stake in a Chapter 11 filing, they're not afraid to have collateral damage in trying to avoid the filing. They're rich enough they can lean on a bank to refinance Borders, but the bank has to do something to make it seem like there's a good reason to put cash into the business hence the hard sell on the fig leaf of having the publishers share in the sacrifice. So it drags on.

The Queens Public Library is no longer buying books. They decided it was more important to keep staff and hours at the branches then to buy books to put into said branches, so until their funding renews maybe in July they've put a stake in the book buying budget. Ain't that cheery!

Passages

2011-01-16T14:18:00.004-05:00

I'm starting to feel like one of those people who needs to check the obituaries first thing each morning.

Susannah York. She played Lara, Superman's Kryptonian mother (Marlon Brandon's wife) in Superman: The Movie, which is one ofd my favorite movies of all time. She was also in Images, which is one of the more interesting efforts by Robert Altman. The prof who taught my intro film survey in college was a big Altman fan, and in this film she played a possibly crazy housewife maybe or maybe not seeing images of men maybe or maybe not threatening her. It's a weird movie, hard to follow. Blessed with stunning musical score by John Williams and beautiful photography by Vilmos Zsigmond.

And then a few days before that, Peter Yates. When I finally caught up with Bullitt, with its famous San Francisco chase scene, a few years ago, I wasn't impressed. I thought the movie was on the long and slow side and a little implausible. There's that chase scene, but there's also a neverending scene at the San Francisco airport that doesn't make sense. But Yates also directed Breaking Away, a perfectly pleasant and well above average example of the coming-of-age sports movie. I liked, it doesn't linger. More importantly, he made Eyewitness, with William Hurt in his first role after Altered States, Sigourney Weaver, Morgan Freeman, James Woods. One of my first Christopher Plummer films in a non-Sound of Music role. And as I recall, a pretty good and nifty little movie that I'd like very much to see again in my adultage. The Dresser is an exceptionally well-acted British art film adaptation. I didn't see much from Yates after that, but for Eyewitness alone he's in my heart. Weird connection, Yates directed For Pete's Sake, which was the opening movie at the Loews Astor Plaza. William Hurt was in Altered States, which was the first movie I saw at my beloved and much sorely missed Astor Plaza, as well as in the underrated The Village which closed the Astor Plaza. And then the two hooked up for Eyewitness, which with Altered States is one of the first movies I have any real adult memories of.

Yates did both more and less than Irwin Kershner. Kershner did The Empire Strikes Back. Need I say more? I mean, Empire Strikes Back only gains in stature to me, when you compare it to all the Star Wars movies that came before or after. Kershner went on to do some less great films, like Never Say Never Again. His Entebbe TV movie was a good example of its sort. But if that was all he did, it was quite quite something.

Leslie Nielsen. Airplane would have been enough, that was and is and always will be a classic comedy, AMC Cinemas is showing it for a weekend matinee and an evening performance in a few weeks, and it will hold up. But he went on to do Police Squad and the Naked Gun movies and so much more. Also in Forbidden Planet.

I'm a little late to say something about Bob Guccione, who passed in October. Most people will think of him as the Penthouse dude, but to me he was the publisher of Omni. The path to my today started with the free samples of Omni I got at Boskone in 1979, which introduced me to Orson Scott Card and George RR Martin. And Omni in its heyday was a great magazine, filled not just with good fiction but with columns by important people and interviews with major figures in science and good articles and really in its best days just a pleasure to read in so many ways. Omni lasted less than 20 years, but it was hugely influential in the fields of science and science fiction. Ben Bova was the fiction editor at the start, Ellen Datlow at the finish, and Robert Sheckley in-between.

I commented separately upon Blake Edwards.

It used to be a rare and stunning and surprising thing when major influences on the culture of me passed away. Now, not so much.