The Boston Me Party!

I'm always excited to be at Boskone.  I wouldn't have my current life if not for getting sample copies of OMNI Magazine in the Boskone Dealers Room in the late 1970s, which got me hooked on sf/f and ultimate led to the current version of me.

This year is even double extra super special with a Ruby Snap cookie on top, because my client Brandon Sanderson is the Guest of Honor, and we will be doing some program items together.

List of items below, with rooms, times, descriptions, and fellow panelists.  And hopefully not the email addresses for the fellow panelists.  I have one item with my client Walter Jon Williams, will be doing a demo for the Crafty Games Mistborn: House War board game, and of particular interest, will be part of the rare opportunity to hear an author, agent and editor discuss together what makes a successful writing career, as I'm joined by Brandon Sanderson and editor Moshe Feder, who made the decision to push Tor to offer on Elantris.

The Death Star

Friday 16:00 - 17:00, Marina 2 (Westin)

*Spoiler Alert!* Destroying the Death Star, in one of the most iconic battle scenes in film history, was the Rebel Alliance's main goal, and gave our story its happy ending. A single point of weakness brought down this architectural and technological giant. Join us as we discuss the Battle of Yavin, and ultimately the defeat of the Death Star. We might even weave in a little Rogue One!
40th Anniversary: Star Wars: A New Hope

Mary Kay Kare, Deirdre Crimmins, Joshua Bilmes, Julie Holderman (M) , Brendan DuBois


Indie Pub Your Backlist

Saturday 10:00 - 11:00, Marina 2 (Westin)

Do you have old stories that were published ages ago, now lingering in drawers, gathering dust — not getting read? Independent publishers can be a great resource for letting your stories see the light of day again, and drumming up interest from new readers. We'll discuss ideas on revitalizing your backlist and finding indie publishers for your unpublished early gems.

Walter Jon Williams, Joshua Bilmes (M), Richard Shealy, Juliana Spink Mills , Craig Shaw Gardner


_Mistborn: House War_ Game Demo

Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Harbor I - Gaming (Westin)

Game on! A semi-cooperative resource-management game, Mistborn: House War is set during the events of Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first novel in the bestselling fantasy series by Boskone Guest of Honor Brandon Sanderson. Join agent Joshua Bilmes for an early look at this exciting new board game — launching this spring!

Joshua Bilmes, Brandon Sanderson


Guest of Honor Brandon Sanderson: Building a Career

Saturday 13:00 - 14:00, Harbor III (Westin)

Even a prodigiously talented author doesn't become a success alone, or overnight. Boskone 54's Guest of Honor, Brandon Sanderson; his agent, Joshua Bilmes; and his editor, Moshe Feder, discuss how they have worked together to sculpt and craft the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author, "Brandon Sanderson," that we know today. All three luminaries share their stories of navigating the shoals of the publishing world as they built friendships and careers within the speculative fiction industry.

Brandon Sanderson, Joshua Bilmes, Moshe Feder


Contracts and Talking Terms

Sunday 10:00 - 11:00, Burroughs (Westin)

Literary contracts can be tricky to navigate. We'll reveal what's behind those mysterious clauses and terms hidden in plain sight. When is a deal too good to pass up — or too good to be true? Discover what's okay to publish, learn to avoid legal landmines, and ask questions about what you most want to know.

Joshua Bilmes, Victoria Sandbrook, Kenneth Schneyer, E. C. Ambrose (M), Michael Stearns

Barcelona

I haven't blogged in a while, but I thought I would do a post about my Barcelona trip, rather than 58 tweets.

Why Barcelona?

I discovered two years ago when I did the Eurocon in Dublin the week after LonCon that Eurocon isn't a great professional convention.  In Dublin, so much so that I decided to just put the bill for the whole stay as a personal expense so I could enjoy Dublin guilt free.  But, Barcelona is the heart of the Spanish publishing business, so when I saw the next Eurocon would be in Barcelona, I eyed it as a chance to see Spanish publishers on their home turf with more time to talk and learn than in the 30 minute appointments that we have in endless succession at London Book Fair.  And to visit Spanish bookstores, and with our agents for the Spanish market.  Any bar-con or schmoozing that Eurocon presented would be an add-on.  And then it turned out that Eurocon dovetailed nicely with a European tour that Brandon Sanderson had on his schedule, so we worked the itinerary that Brandon could be in Barcdlona for Eurocon, an opportunity that the convention and his publishers, Ediciones B, we're happy to take advantage of. It all worked out very nicely.

Now that I have employees and an iPad, I do a lot less personal preparation for a trip like this than I used to.  Krystyna Lopez, the head of foreign rights for the agency, was joining me, so she and her assistant Rebecca took care of slotting the publishers and arranging the schedule. I just kind of show up and go where I'm told.  I ended up buying a couple guide books a few days before the trip, but hardly looked at them.

So Krystyna and I get to Barcelona at 6:30 AM, and...

For one, the US is not a very welcoming country.  Getting into the US is an ordeal even for citizens with forms and lines and a general belief everyone is a criminal.  Getting into Spain, Italy, the U.K -- much smoother.  They put out a welcome mat, we put out a "Beware of Dog" sign.  

We decided to aim for the Aerobus. It was waiting and ready, and it wasn't yet 7AM, so why pay for a cab.  Good call. The bus runs often, gets into town quickly, had good free WiFi.   In a bit, the subway will also go out to the airport, but for now, the bus is a good choice if you've packed light and aren't too far from where the bus stops downtown.

And the four days I've had in Barcelona? I had no idea what to expect, and the first four of our seven days in the city have been amazing.

General impressions

Walking: it's both a great walking city and an awful one.  The awful last -- by the time you get the yellow signal as a pedestrian, you're already dead.  New York, it means most people can start at the yellow and have time to cross the street. Here, three quick flashes, time to cross one lane, and the cars are ready to bear down.  Almost all the intersections, the crosswalk is set back from the corner, which is fine if you're going on a diagonal route and awful if going in a straight line because every corner means adding time. Street signs are often hard to find, like London usually on the buildings, but with less consistency and visibility. And because most of the corners are rounded and the buildings set back in a circle, it's harder to see what's at any given corner, including the street sign.  Also, very few of the buildings have numbers on them.  And traffic moves. You can't jaywalk because it's rare to have cars backed up and not going anywhere.  So you detour to the crosswalk, and patiently wait for the light. Amd yet, it's also a city with lots of wide thoroughfares with pedestrian promenades and benches and bikeways.

Dining: Most restaurants have lunch hours that may not start before 13:00 and dinner hours that may begin at 20:00.  But there are also all sorts of cafes and patisseries and convenience stores and the like that are open. Meal hours are regimented, but you will rarely need to go far in the downtown areas to find someplace to get something to eat. And there is a variety of food today. This is the biggest thing for me in comparing with Paris. There, after a late movie in bustling Montparnasse, actual dining options were about non-existent, bistros that were open only for drinks after 9:30. My late night dining was from a train station vending machine.  And all the bistros had similar menus, the patisseries the same baked goods.  Barcelona, coming back from movie after midnight, I could find a few places still serving food and some 24 hour stores, even though I wasn't walking through the central part of downtown. There are some ubiquitous food items, but variety as well. And while there is no lack of paella, I can go not too far afield from my hotel and find Indian, Thai, Asian, Russian, Italian, and more.  Bottom line, I've had many dishes that I've never had at the fancy meals required by the business engagements, but also gone to a burger place, Indian, and had grab and go pizza.  I chose to come to Barcelona, which didn't require having one type of food for an entire week.

Activities:

Day one, I walked down to the inner harbor area and Las Ramblas, the major tourist shopping thoroughfare, and then up to Parc Gaudie with views down on the city.  Wonderful dinner hosted by Ediciones B, the Spanish publishers for Brandon Sanderson.

Day two, publisher meetings during the day, and Brandon Sanderson signing at Gigamesh, a giant specialty shop for all things nerd, with 350+ people on line to meet Brandon.  I stayed til 9:30, then went to see a British film, Ken Loach's I Daniel Blake, on the large screen of an art house.  I don't consider any trip complete without seeing a movie!

Day three, another wonderful meal at lunch time, with the agent I've worked with in Spain for thirty years, dating to the start of my career at Scott Meredith. Preceded by publisher meetings, followed by a Brandon Sanderson signing at the major FNAC downtown, and then our taking Brandon out for dinner. Another excellent meal, location recommended by the editor of Planeta's Minotauro imprint. That signing had an attendance cap, and was lower key than the event at Gigamesh.

Day four, I took advantage of a free morning to walk around the parks near parliament, then along the actual beach, before heading inland for lunch with Aliette de Bodard, whose work we have in our ebook program via John Berlyne and Zeno Agency. Another nice meal. Then over to Eurocon to see two Q&A sessions with Brandon Sanderson. 

More I could say, but an early wake up call to day trip to Valencia to see our client Mark Hodder.

Pre-Rejection Rules!

Chuck Wendig just did a Terrible Minds post telling authors not to "pre-reject" their work, i.e., to finish their novel, say it's not good enough, and then dump it into the drawer or the trunk on top of all the other not good enough thing.  And maybe I'm reading too much into what Chuck says, or maybe I should understand that it should be implied that Chuck is taking a position really far on one side as a counterweight and not as an actual "position" position.  But as I'm reading his post, he doesn't say it's ever right to take a manuscript and put it into the pile inside the drawer inside the trunk.

And that's wrong.

I'm going to reject his thesis in two ways that are flip sides of the same coin, the you coming to me, and the me taking your manuscript to the world.

In both instances, I note the old, true and wise saying "you've got one chance to make a first impression."

If I as an agent look at three or four bad books by an author, I am not likely to sign up to look at another.  I'm not saying "never."  It's possible to see that an author's on a growth and learning curve which I want to encourage.  But even for that to happen, the books do need to get to a point where they look interesting.  It can't be 60th percentile work or 20th percentile work.  You need to be in the 80th or 90th or 95th percentile.

You can't count on sending me everything you write, even the things that not even you think are good enough, and expect me to be around for long enough to get to the thing that's finally good.

I'm not saying you need to be perfect.  There are many authors on the JABberwocky list that sent me multiple novels before we found the one we could market.  One of the things I'm good at is spotting that little something extra in an OK novel that helps me figure out which authors have a higher ceiling they can reach and which are capping out at OK.  As examples, both Brandon Sanderson and Peter V. Brett sent me other novels that pre-date their "first" novels.

There's a way in which Chuck Wendig could be right.  The majority of my clients, I expect, have this stage in every novel they work on where they hate the book.  And then they grow out of it.  If you're a new novelist and you have that stage and it goes on too long, maybe "pre-rejection" will be a bad thing.  

However, it is more often the case that the new novelist is inclined to be generous in appraising their own work.  On the whole, if an author writes a first or third or eight novel and decides one or all need to count as practice, that judgment is probably correct.  

Hence, I think there is nothing wrong with coming up to Joshua Bilmes, an agent that can help get your book out to the world, and saying "out of everything I've written, this is the first book I think is good enough to send out." You'll be joining a long line of distinguished authors who have practice novels sitting in a pile in a drawer in a trunk in the attic.

And now the flip side of my coin:

Sometimes, there is nothing I hate more than the OK first novel.  There's an ill-defined boundary between selling an OK first novel that is good enough to have people saying "this is only OK, but I'm really eager to see more" and "this was OK, but I was hoping for better."  In one of those scenarios, the OK first novel can launch a career which the first novel never comes to define.  In the other scenario, the OK first novel can kill a career at birth.

My goal as an agent isn't to sell a novel for an author.  It's to launch a career and sell many novels and establish a career.  Because there is only one chance to make a first impression, we can be hurt when we sell the wrong first novel.

I read Matthew Woodring Stover's Heroes Die before he'd sold his first novel.  That's a long time ago; Heroes Die is now old enough to have a driver's license, and it's 20 years or more that I might have read an early draft of it.  In my recollection, that book is right up there with Peter V. Brett's Warded Man or Brandon Sanderson's Elantris as a great fantasy debut, and I would encourage all of you to try it.  Odds are pretty good you will be eager to continue with the Caine series.  There's just one problem with Heroes Die.   It wasn't the first impression.  There were two other novels by Matthew Woodring Stover that came out before it which weren't as ambitious. There's a line in Bull Durham about Nuke LaLoosh wanting to "announce my presence with authority," and I think Heroes Die would have announced this author's presence with more authority than Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon.  

So I must reluctantly give advice contrary to Chuck Wendig's.  If you think you've written something that isn't ready to send out, pre-reject it.  Do yourself that favor.  Because writing is hard.  And I want to work with authors who are self aware, and who want to be better than OK. 

Ebook-olution in action

Two interesting developments in the e-book marketplace in recent days.  One of which shall be used as a springboard today, this being the announcement that Richard Curtis has sold his e-Reads business to Open Road.  Like myself and several other leading agents in sf/f, Richard is an alumnus of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, around twenty years prior to my time there.  He started e-Reads in 1999 when the e-book business was barely in existence, and interestingly, I've traveled in some familiar circles with agents with an interest in the e-book business.  My boss for 15 months at Scott Meredith after Scott died was Arthur Klebanoff, who founded Rosetta Books a couple years after Richard founded e-Reads.

The reason Richard Curtis gave in the press about the sale was that there was a perceived need to do more marketing of the e-Reads list, which would have meant stepping up the investment in the business, and that it seemed better to find a company that could do that rather than to make that investment or seek the investors that would make that investment feasible.

In some ways, Richard Curtis' decision has no bearing on what JABberwocky does with its e-book program.  e-Reads was a separate enterprise from Curtis' literary agency, publishing books by authors who weren't all Richard Curtis clients, designed to make money as a separate entity.  JABberwocky's e-book program is a service to JABberwocky clients, where we take our standard commission of 15% on most of the books in the program (we only take 50%, which is the Open Road model, if the author wishes to have us pay all conversion costs and limit us to recouping those costs solely from within the e-book program) rather than the 50% cut that often prevails with smaller e-book publishers or the 75% cut that often prevails with larger.

And one of the biggest limitations to our e-book program, though not to ours alone, is that we under-market it.  We have one staff person who devotes a good chunk of time to the e-book program, and especially as we have vastly increased the number of books in the program, most of that time has been spent on dealing with authors on sign-up issues, with the conversion house on the file conversions, with our cover artists and cover copy writers, actually getting the books up, and dealing with vendors.  (The vendor issue is a second limitation, which we will look at in another blog post.)

Since we are taking such a small cut, smaller than pretty much any other e-book publisher, I can forgive myself the under-investment in marketing, but it is nonetheless my hope that eventually we can devote more time and energy to this, either by re-tasking as we slow the pace of new books into the program or as part of an overall expansion at JABberwocky.

These are things our marketing person might do:

Send out review copies of our books.  Many of our titles predate the explosion of websites dealing with sf/fantasy, and those sites might cover our releases more or even review some of the books, which came out long before the websites themselves started.

Coordinate more sale pricing, including analysis of the effects of sale pricing.

Help willing authors (and not all are willing to put too much promo energy into their twenty-year old books) to do guest blog posts.

Maybe set up a separate Twitter account or other social media devoted to the e-book program.

Improve the website we have for the e-book program.

Have a small budget to begin experiments with on-line advertising using Google AdWords, Facebook, or other programs.

Videos.

There's lots more that could be done, and I could easily spend close to $50K a year on salary, benefits, and other expenses for a full-time marketing person, even at entry level.

Absent making that marketing investment, our e-book program generally relies on reflected marketing for its success.  Simon R. Green, Tanya Huff and Jack Campbell all do very nicely with reverted backlist and/or collections of short fiction that are included in our e-book program. That is almost certainly because they have books being marketed and distributed by Big Five publishers, have had this for many years, and can rely on an audience that comes along from the Big Five books to discover ours.  In the next tier would be Rick Shelley, a deceased author who had fifteen books published by a Big Five publisher and who writes in an established sub-genre, military sf, that has loyal core readership.  Thereafter, the success of our e-book authors kind of tracks the success of their print books, and considering the nature of our program this isn't a surprise.  But it is limited; we don't have a good way other than word of mouth or reflected marketing to bring someone to a higher place.

Clearly, marketing would be a good thing!

But where is that marketing money going to come from?

Forget about what the JABberwocky cut is, but the total annual royalty revenue from our entire e-book program is under $100K.  Even if you say that we could increase overall revenue by 50% if we had better pricing, and then by another 50% if we had better marketing, the total royalty revenue might just scrape past the $200K mark.  No matter how you look at it, we'd be spending an enormous percentage of gross royalty earnings for the e-book program on the marketing, so where's it going to come from?

If I took a poll, I wonder how many authors in the JABberwocky e-book program would choose to give me another third of their income in exchange for having dedicated marketing, and would feel like they would come out ahead in that process.  Their sales would need to increase by 70% in order for them to break even.

And for the authors at the lowest end of our earnings scale, would it be worth their time and energy to self-publish their own e-books?  We make their decision to have us do it a little easier by taking a small cut of their earnings.  But a lot of our e-books earn less than $20 per month in gross royalty revenue.  How much time do you want to take to self-publish your e-book to save $250 or less over a year vs. having someone else do it?  Can all of those authors even find someone else to do it when the cost of setting a book up for an e-book can be $400, which can take several years to recoup?

Even though I want to spend more on marketing, it is magical thinking to say it will automatically pay for itself.  You can see why Richard Curtis would say he wasn't up for doing that.

From the perspective of the aspiring self-publisher, you must reflect on the fact that marketing expense is a real expense that comes from somewhere.  I am sure we can find examples of self-published authors who managed to succeed by word of mouth alone, just like we can find examples from Big Five publishers of little under-the-radar novels that went on to become something big.  But otherwise, someone has to do the marketing, and it has both a cost and an opportunity cost (what else you could be doing with the money).  When you realize that many people have day jobs, have children, have family or social or volunteer obligations, you can see why many people don't want to do that.  They want to have a publisher put some time and money into marketing their work.  Even if it's going to be one of those Big Five publishers that is very likely to under-market, it will likely be better than they can do on their own.

From the perspective of even the very successful author, let's look at a JABberwocky client like Brandon Sanderson.  He self-publishes his own e-books, and has the staff and support capability to do it.  At the exact hour of this writing, his self-published Kindle edition of The Emperor's Soul and of Legion are both in the 5000s on Amazon.  He makes real money at this.  Before we placed print rights with Emperor's Soul with Tachyon we had a long talk on the cost-benefit of different publication models.  We did this for his Hugo-winning novella The Emperor's Soul, we did this before selling two new Mistborn novels to Tor, and we will continue to do that.

Because even though Brandon Sanderson is underpaid for his e-book royalties, as all authors with the Big Five are, the low royalty rate isn't the only thing the Big Five offer.

Let me demonstrate this very clearly:

In 2013, Brandon Sanderson had two major NY Times bestsellers published, The Rithmatist and Steelheart, and these were among the things that his Big Five publishers did to support those books: outing to the Random House sales conference; major events at BookExpo America including booth signings, official autograph sessions, and the audio tea; national author tours; ads in magazines like Entertainment Weekly, and not just a couple but in a dozen or more; a reciprocal campaign with DC Comics; tens of thousands of books put into mass merchandisers like Walmart, Costco and Target; books on the most prominent "stepladder" displays at Barnes & Noble; other placements in endcaps, section tables and elsewhere that have been running for one book or another almost non-stop for the past nine months and with the release of Words of Radiance in two weeks may end up running for a year or more; a major promotion at dozens of Hudson Books travel locations.  I don't know the exact costs for many of these things, but can any of us doubt when you look at all of this that the publishers have spent well into six figures marketing Brandon Sanderson over the past year?

So we chose a hybrid model for The Emperor's Soul.  Tachyon Press doesn't offer the size of marketing spend that the Big Five can do, but it markets very heavily toward a different part of the sf/f audience than the usual Brandon Sanderson crowd.  And this was a very successful book for Tachyon, even without having e-book rights.  Brandon Sanderson has something for his self-publishing pipeline.  We send a message to the Big Five that we have alternate ways to do some things, and gives us some leverage there.  But should Brandon Sanderson test what would happen if he withdrew from the Big Five ecosystem entirely, and never had a year like 2013 with all that third party marketing investment behind him and his work?

Even though I love marketing and want to do more of it, I am extremely dubious of the Open Road business model.  When I look at the cost of marketing vs. the likely return for my own little e-book program, how can Open Road justify itself?  As they say on their website "Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media."

To be sure, Open Road can gain benefits of scale in its marketing.  If I have a marketing person who markets 100 books by 20 authors and Open Road has 4200 books by eight hundred authors...  At the most basic level, any website they are in contact with for marketing or any social media anything they have for marketing can be used for many more authors.  It doesn't take much more time to us an email to Pat's Fantasy Hotlist to pitch ten giveaways instead of one or two.  Another benefit of scale:  shortly after we transferred several Simon R. Green titles to Open Road, they were able to get a Kindle Daily Deal for Simon, and in all likelihood we at JABberwocky could not have.  Amazon pays more attention to Open Road because Open Road is bigger, has deeper pockets, many more prominent authors.

However, you also start to come up against limitations of scale.  The acquisition of e-Reads will bring Open Road's catalog to over 4,000 books.  If they scale up their marketing by 30% because e-Reads scales up Open Road, they can.  But ultimately, the marginal cost of hiring an additional publicist, an additional sales person, an additional whomever, is going against the marginal author and the marginal book.  So they have to make choices just like the big publishers do.  Even at JABberwocky, we have to make choices.  When I first went to London Book Fair in the late 1990s, I could include every JABberwocky author in a catalog that I could put together myself, and which was a few dozen pages at most.  The current layout for our 2014 catalogs is over 100 pages divided between a main catalog, YA/middle grade catalog, and special mini-catalogs for our two biggest clients.  How can we feature important backlist which we feel is undersold in the translation markets, major #1 bestselling authors, ongoing bestselling series a level or two down, deserving new clients, and still have room to mention the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print?  The bigger we make the catalog, the less impactful it becomes for everyone, and the added expense of going from 100 pages to 120 pages would be allocated against the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print.  The expense cannot be justified.  I and the Big Five and everyone else could choose to allocate things differently and say to ourselves the new marketing spend is dedicated to the top of our eco-system, but that isn't how economics works when trying to run a profitable business

The bigger Open Road gets and the more selective it has to become, the more it becomes like the Big Five publishers, only with a better e-book royalty rate.

So we will look closely at how well the Simon R. Green titles do, because we are very curious to see what happens to the sales revenue for those titles.  If Open Road can't increase sales revenue by at least 50% from what we can do on our own, there isn't any good reason to consider having other of our books with Open Road or with other third-party vendors rather than keeping as much by our clients within the JABberwocky program.  If Open Road can increase sales revenue considerably, then we want to have more books with Open Road or other vendors.

But that creates another problem.  Third party vendors will exercise more selection over the books they choose to include.  They will happily take our best and most successful authors, but the JABberwocky e-book program then becomes a little like the health insurance marketplace, subject to adverse selection risks.  We have fixed costs that now have to be allocated against our least successful titles only.  That makes it hard to justify even as a service, and ultimately could force us to stop offering the service for the authors who could most benefit from it, or to increase the subsidy.  (Or, to turn it into e-Reads, scale it up as a separate entity, and be able to offer it as a package.)

This blog post has come rather far afield from a discussion just of e-Reads or just of the marketing of e-books, but I've also tried to approach it with some real rigor, and to give an understanding of how an easy real world question like "JABberwocky should spend more on marketing" which is a simple and inarguable truth, just like it is for all the Big Five publishers we deal with, gets very complicated very quickly when put into the real world.  Not just for us, but for all the authors we deal with, who have many options themselves for publishing and marketing their books.  You'll also see, or I think you will, that I'm not asking and answering these questions from a pre-conceived agenda that there is only one way to do things.  The goal is to go where the evidence leads.  But it takes a lot of trial-and-error with different approaches for different sorts of authors and different sorts of books going down different paths to find all that evidence, so even the search for the best way to make money doing this ends up being a costly one.

I've hinted above at some of the benefits of scale which an Open Road offers vs. JABberwocky, and that is the thread I'll pick up on in my next post on these topics.

The Ghost of WorldCon Past

As I get ready to head down to San Antonio for LoneStarCon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention, some reminiscences of LoneStarCon 2 in 1997...

First and foremost, having WorldCons in Texas is good!  Both times in the life of JABberwocky that I've gone to San Antonio for a WorldCon, I have had a Hugo nominee on the ballot.  In 1997, it was Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population for Best Novel, and this year Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul for Best Novella.  I have to confess I wasn't expecting a win in 1997.  The competition was amazing, with Kim Stanley Robinson winning and novels by Lois McMaster Bujold and Robert J. Sawyer as well as Bruce Sterling to split the Texas vote.  (Several years later when Elizabeth was a Nebula finalist for Speed of Dark, I was rather more optimistic and told her at breakfast the morning of that I felt she has as good a chance as anyone and better have a speech ready, which was good advice!)  I'm not as up on short fiction as I used to be and can't handicap the field as easily this year, but I feel Brandon Sanderson has a good shot at winning for Emperor's Soul.

JABberwocky was very different in 1997.  It was just me.  In the early years of JABberwocky, I made just enough to get by and to have a little bit above break-even that I could afford to go to a WorldCon.  Now, there are six people at the agency, and I won't have to watch my pennies on the trip quite the same way.

A good example:  in 1997, I walked to LaGuardia to catch my flight, a little over four miles.  I also stumbled in the median crossing Astoria Blvd., broke my glasses and had to spend my earliest hours in San Antonio going to get them fixed.  And then continued for many years to walk to LaGuardia, without incident.  This year, I will take a car service.  In part because I now live a mile further away, in part because I will have a heavier bag since I will be gone longer.  But in no small part, because my time is now as valuable to me as my money, and it's a lot harder to justify walking to the airport.

There are some drawbacks, however.  In 1997, I didn't have a lot of clients at the convention.  I was able to take some time to sightsee, such as the sightseeing is in San Antonio.  I absconded to the movie theatre in the RiverCenter mall to see GI Jane.  This year, anything that I do like that, I'm going to have to do on the days before or after the convention gets underway.  I've got many clients to meet.  I've got a group of 20 for the JABberwocky dinner, which is the kind of event I never could have afforded in 1997.  I have an Important Dinner with an Important Client, his Brilliant Editor & Major Publisher.  Back in 1997, I wasn't Important Enough for such things.

In 1997, I was excited that I would get to place a first-time visit to a Borders!  Now, I will reluctantly try and get to the local B&Ns, just kind of because, and am instead saving my excitement because I might be able to pay first-time visits to two Whole Foods Markets.

In 1997, Eos had a big soiree at some restaurant on the Riverwalk to celebrate the arrival of Eos.  Now, Eos is Voyager, and if they are having a party, no one told me.

In 1997, there was a Bantam Books party at a Country Club.  It was outside of town and they hired vans to take people there.  I was expecting it to be in the 18th Hole restaurant thing at a Country Club.  Instead, vanloads of New Yorkers got out of the bus and discovered to their surprise that the "Country" in this club was country music.  This year, Bantam Spectra Del Rey Ace Roc DAW are having a combined party, the first major joint event of all the newly merged sf/f imprints.

I met Adam-Troy Castro on the plane out.  We ultimately became author and agent.

Those are some of my major impressions of the 1997 trip.  It will be interesting to see in 16 years what lasting impressions and memories I have of LoneStarCon 3.

The Tachyon's Soul

As a tonic to all of the Night Shade discussions this week, let's talk about something that involves another distinguished sf/fantasy press in the San Francisco Bay area, Jacob Weisman's Tachyon Publications, which is the publisher of the Hugo-nominated novella THE EMPEROR'S SOUL by Brandon Sanderson.

It's an interesting story, to me at least, on many levels.

For one, I'm old enough to have grown up in an era when we didn't have all of these internet magazines like Lightspeed and Clarkesworld and Daily SF and etc.  So just for that reason alone, it's hard to believe that it took a little over a year for Brandon Sanderson's THE EMPEROR'S SOUL to go from non-existence to Hugo finalist.  Unless you really hit the jackpot, writing a story in January and submitting it to the magazines that were pretty much the only places to go for this sort of thing in 1980, having a quick try on the first sale and having the story sneak in to the November of December issue -- it just couldn't happen.  Magazine lead times are so long.

And if anything, THE EMPEROR'S SOUL was compressed even further than that.

Brandon was touring Taiwan in Winter 2012.  He was inspired to write something by some stamps he saw at a museum.  During a break between drafts of A Memory of Light in February 2012, he wrote a few small things that could be fit into the available time.  According to a forthcoming review for one of Brandon's books, he is "inhumanly prolific" so he managed to write this 30,000 word novella in a relatively short amount of time, finishing toward the end of February.  He sent it off to Moshe Feder, the Tor editor who discovered and purchased Brandon's debut novel Elantris, for a look-see, and Moshe e-mailed on March 8, 2012 to say "What can I say? I love it!"

I was jealous Moshe had gotten first crack at it, so I got a copy myself.  As that upcoming review says, Brandon is "inhumanly prolific," so I was able to load up my iPad with an epub file of the new novella, another new novella, and a new draft of his YA debut The Rithmatist, and with a free afternoon on the weekend of March 10/11 2012, I headed off to the New York Sports Clubs on Park Ave. and 23rd St. in Manhattan and spent a few hours on the elliptical reading new Brandon Sanderson.

I didn't just love THE EMPEROR'S SOUL.  I thought it was something special.  It made me feel the way I'd felt a few months before when I'd had a break in my reading pile and read an issue of Asimov's with Kij Johnson's "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," a great novella that was on all the award ballots and winning many during 2012 (that was read on the bike in my building's gym, there's nothing like having good reading to burn the calories).

But what were we going to do with something that I was convinced was an award-caliber novella?

This made for some interesting conversations with Brandon in the next day or two.

Brandon wanted the novella out in 2012.  This is the opposite of the ideal approach for being on award ballots.  Too early in the year, maybe people forget.  Too late, maybe not enough time for people to read and word to spread.  But Brandon was worried that he didn't have a book-length work of his own to come out in 2012.  Alloy of Law had come out Fall 2011, Memory of Light was due January 2013, Brandon wasn't buying my "oh, the paperback of Alloy of Law will be out in 2012, that's a book!" arguments.

That made it very hard to consider the magazine route.

As or more important in deciding against the magazine route, Brandon was itching to be doing some e-books of his own.  Even if a magazine purchased the story ASAP and could have it out, it wasn't going to pay a lot of money, maybe $1500 or $2000, and it wasn't going to allow a separate e-book.

Nor, in all likelihood, would Brandon's regular publisher, Tor.  The big publishers will occasionally pick up something first published in e-book, and maybe be persuaded to leave the e-book rights behind, but as a rule they won't buy books where they don't have e-book rights.

We were waiting on publication that summer of Brandon's novella LEGION from Subterranean, but we didn't like that option here, of trying to have two Subterranean novellas in such quick succession.

And that was when I pushed back a little, and decreed that the novella was simply too good just to be done as an e-book by Brandon himself.  Maybe none of the familiar things we were doing was the right thing for THE EMPEROR'S SOUL.  Maybe, this was going to be my first Tachyon Publications book.

I confess, I was being a little selfish here.

I wanted a Tachyon Publications book so very very badly.

And I never had one.

I'd chatted with Jacob Weisman at the Tachyon table at WorldCon or World Fantasy for years and years.  I'd watched the quantity and quality of books at his table grow.  Not the literary quality, but the physical quality.  The gorgeousness of the covers, the attractiveness of the design, every year he was in business a trip to the Tachyon table had become more and more of a visual feast.

The problem for me was that "literary quality" thing.

For all the success JABberwocky has had over the years, it was somewhat reflective of its owner's tastes.  This is changing, because Eddie Schneider has a more literary bent in his reading tastes than I do in mine, and since adding Eddie to the staff in 2008, he's building a roster of authors with a very different profile.  But I've always been a bit more of a plot person.  I'm the kind of person who usually reads two lines of the fiction in The New Yorker and then starts flipping pages to look at cartoons en route to the "critics" section of the magazine that follows the fiction.  My own tastes have intersected only occasionally with the Nebula Award ballot, and never with the World Fantasy Award ballot.

Which wasn't Jacob Weisman's thing with Tachyon.  The sad fact was, I'd spend years looking longingly at this beautiful array of Tachyon books from all the best authors in sf/fantasy, and then I'd go thinking about the JABberwocky catalog which is usually in my bag just in case there's someone to give to at these conventions, and it was like the Mars and Venus thing.

So, heck no, Brandon Sanderson was not going to take an award caliber novella and put it out himself and deprive me of the one chance I'd had to actually give something to Jacob Weisman that I could suggest he buy -- well, let's not say "with a straight face," let's say "with a sincere and firm belief that he would and should want to buy it."

So on March 14, I e-mailed Jacob, and I told him I had an award caliber novella by Brandon Sanderson, it gave me the same feeling I had when I was reading the Kij Johnson story, and would he maybe want to take a look.  And oh, by the way, Brandon really wants to keep the e-book rights, and he really wants to have this out before the end of the year.

The rest, as they say, is  history.

Jacob asked me to send it along and promised me he'd read it quickly.  He did.  This was very important to me; it was one thing for me to know and feel in my heart of hearts that this was an award-caliber piece of fiction.  Having Jacob Weisman agree to publish it -- that was the guy with the table full of beautiful books by all the authors who kept getting nominated for all the awards telling me it was.

We agreed that it was kind of late to absolutely promise 100% for sure that it could be out in 2012, but we'd all do our darnedest that it would be available by World Fantasy,  Which made things a little more complex, since World Fantasy was in Canada, which meant longer shipping time and tighter deadlines.

He agreed that Brandon could do his own e-book. Not without some concessions at our end; the size of the advance or giving some UK rights to Tachyon were particular areas where I had to fight less zealously.

And by March 23, 2012, we were looking at the artwork that Jacob and his managing editor Jill Roberts were thinking to use.

I'm still a bit amazed by it all, that something so good that hadn't even been a thought in January 2012 had become a brilliant piece of fiction by the end of February, sold to the perfect publisher -- as if fate itself were guiding our hands -- by the end of March, and was sitting at the banquet tables at the World Fantasy Awards banquet on November 4.

And most amazing of all, that on March 30, 2013, around 13 months after it was finished, it was being announced as a finalist for this year's Hugo Award.

Is it the best novella on the Hugo ballot this year?  I'll let you tell me that, and we'll find out together alongside the Riverwalk in San Antonio on Labor Day Sunday.

I will tell you that it is and always will be an award-caliber piece of fiction, and one that deserves reading.

Am I biased?  Well, not as much as you think.  There's nothing that can kill a book faster than bad word of mouth, and if you find me trying to sell you something, I'm going to try and sell you something I think you'll love.  Something you'll tell all your friends you love, not something you'll tell them to avoid.  Because what would have happened if I'd spent the past ten years trying to sell Jacob Weisman things that weren't really right for Tachyon?  I could have, easily.  But I respected the integrity of Jacob and the Tachyon Publications list way too much to do that.  When I finally stopped chatting across the table in some hotel function space or convention center hanger that I sure hoped I'd have something for him someday and finally said "I have something," I think that counted for something.

Which, to digress -- some people say of agents, and rightly so, that we are the people who won't submit your book to all the places you'd send it yourself, that we are standing in the way and working for ourselves when we ought to be working for you.  Well, yes!  Because someday, you may want to be the author who benefits when I put my reputation on the line and say that this is something you should want, and want badly.

So when I write this blog post today, when I spend 1900 words telling you about THE EMPEROR'S SOUL, you'll know how much this novella means to me.

You can check out review quotes for the book on our website.  Many of those quotes have live links to the original review.

You can order the novella directly from Tachyon.

Or you can order it from some big book retailer.

If you buy the print edition from anywhere, Brandon has this thing, he talks about it on this blog post, where he will send you a free e-book edition!

Or, you can just buy the e-book from some different big book retailer.

Hey, listen!  Audio here.

For our friends in the British Commonwealth of Nations:  Kindle (click link to find reasonably priced marketplace used copies, omnibus edition with Legion due this summer), and WH Smiths/Kobo.

There are arrangements made or in process for translated editions of the novella in Taiwan, Spain, Germany and other markets.

Obviously, we owe a lot of thanks to all the people at Tachyon, not just Jacob but Jill and everyone else there, for their work on this novella.  And to Moshe Feder, who so often provides edits for Brandon beyond what he has to do in his role as an editor for Tor.

Recaparama

I guess it's that time of year when we talk about the year that was...

On the business end of things:

When you're a literary agent, your work often comes ahead of the reward.  With the time lag between a book selling and the royalty reports coming along, a book that sells in January might not bring a royalty until November or with reserves against returns until the following May.  So in 2009 and 2010, we were getting paid for when there were 8 or 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the bestseller lists in 2008 and 2009.  We were getting paid a lot.  It was also a bit like a one-legged stool, a bit unstable because so much of the income was coming in just a couple checks each year.

In the years since, the business has become more stable.  The Charlaine Harris business is still huge, not as big as when there were 9 books on the bestseller list but still big.  Other authors have gotten bigger in the past few years, Brandon Sanderson or Peter Brett or Jack Campbell.  Not so much bigger as to totally make up for that whole "not having 9 books on the bestseller list at once" thing, but bigger.  So even if my total income is down, I'm happy because the overall business is somewhat more stable.

But 2012 and 2013 are definitely inflection years.  The business is more stable, but because the income isn't just from two checks a year.  So 2012 starts with me, Eddie and Jessie still working out of the living room of my old apartment.  By February we are looking for a real office.  By May, we are in one.  By June, we have added another person to the staff with Brady McReynolds on board to handle foreign rights.  By September or October it becomes obvious we don't have enough people to do everything we need to be doing and we end the year with two 2-day part-timers.  New office, new staff, all of these things cost money, and we're making less of it in 2012 than in 2011.

But we've also had multiple clients move over from other agents to JABberwocky.  Ari Marmell with Jessie, the Ellery Queen estate which Joshua had to leave behind when he left a larger agency to start his own in 1994 is back in the fold.  TC McCarthy and Marie Brennan.  And Ben Parzybok.  The year ends with Joshua getting an offer on a first novel.  We sell audio rights to upwards of 300 titles.  The e-book program grows, and by putting some of the audio money to use on conversion and cover costs it may double in title count in 2013.  Brandon Sanderson doesn't have a new book-length work come out but he has two novellas appear, we sell two new YA series, Rithmatist and Steelheart, that will come out in 2013, and he starts work on the 2nd Stormlight Archive book, so what seems like a quiet year for Brandon is actually a very important one.  Peter Brett turns in The Daylight War, which goes on sale in six weeks and is going to be a major international bestseller in the New Year.  The first of the YA/middle grade novels that Eddie has sold start to appear in stores, I'm a little disapppointed that the brilliant Chasing the Skip by Janci Patterson was so under-published by the people who grabbed it in a pre-empt with such excitement (everyone reading this post should read this book, everyone) but Adam-Troy Castro's Gustav Gloom and the People Taker is launched to good success.  Even though it will never be 2008/09 for Sookie Stackhouse, the series conclusion in May 2013 will be one of the major publishing events of the year.  All of these things feed on themselves, without Brady on board Eddie maybe doesn't have time to take on the new clients Eddie is taking on.  So even though I am spending more money (money to update the databases that I thought we'd nicely updated not so long ago...) while my top line revenue is going down, I feel content.  I will not be content if we're doing all this work and adding all this staff and not seeing some top-line year-over-year growth in 2014 vs. 2013, but that's for two years from now.

Idle thoughts on the business:

Do I mind that Charlaine Harris is winding down the Sookie Stackhouse series?  No!  One of the reasons Charlaine is so successful is because she's always stopped writing a series when she thinks it's run its course.  I'm very excited about the new Midnight Pawn series she's working on now, about the Cemetery Girl graphic novel she and Christopher Golden are working on.  And that's not just agent-speak.  For all the success of the Sookie novels, my mom won't read them because they have vampires in them.  Charlaine is ending a series that has done phenomenally well, in part because it appeals across genre lines, but there are also a lot of people like my mom out there.

I've said over the course of the year that I didn't think the e-book business would continue jumping up by leaps and bounds, that e-readers were cheap enough a year ago that the biggest book buyers probably for the most part had an e-reader in their hands by January 1 2012.  There are signs that this is correct, publishers are saying digital growth is starting to moderate.  However, we're still feeling our way to an e-book future with a lot more change to come from this transition.  All of us can see Barnes & Noble, as an example, where growth in the Nook business is slowing when they want it to be growing because of saturation and the transition from e-readers to tablets.  Their best locations are at risk because they can't pay the rent that others can pay (interestingly enough, Borders had longer leases on their stores which hurt them when their business soured, but now the generally shorter lease terms for B&N are a risk) while their lesser locations are at greatest risk of becoming unprofitable even with smaller drops in sales.  Less obvious to readers but of crucial importance to writers and agents, the actual ability to sell English-language books in the US, the UK and Australia is still heavily driven by the commitment of a local publisher to publicizing books locally, but the growth in e-books and the power shift from local retailers to Amazon may make it harder and harder to sell books locally instead of to large conglomerates intent on a global strategy.  There've always been little dust-ups over territoriality that end up not amounting to much at the end, this may be a little different.

And just to mention again in a year-end wrap-up, 2012 was clearly a year in which we could see the ability of the internet to sell books, NPR for Tobias Buckell, iO9 for EC Myers, general blog touring for Myke Cole.  I was once worried about how people could find books without physical bookstores to find them in, but I am comforted to see that it can be done. New thing in 2012 that I've never done before, calling some clients about cover reveals that their publishers have offered for the client websites and kind of ordering them never never never ever never to do such a thing, if you know anyone in the internet besides yourself you find a good third party location to do reveals where they will be discovered most readily by people not already your fans instead of doing them within your own community, they may want to have an exclusive for a day or an hour after which you can do whatever you want on your website, but let someone else present you to the world.  Some publishers are better than others about arranging third party reveals on their own (and in general I find UK publishers to be ahead of US in this regard), authors seem to get it when I explain but often don't understand it instinctively on their own.

I never expected this to happen, but I've virtually stopped visiting bookstores.  I don't like Barnes & Noble very much, so many of their stores now have such awful selections, and they bore me.  Indies often don't have sf sections.  Just in general, if I could justify making a trip to a DC suburb to visit a B&N and a Borders and maybe a lingering mall store, I can't justify an hour or more of round trip transit time to spend 10 or 15 minutes visiting just a B&N.  So much of our business is now coming from e-book sales instead of sales in actual bookstores.  There's logic to it, but it leaves a bit of an empty pit in my heart.  It's as recently as ten or fifteen years ago that I could spend a day visiting bookstores, spending a half hour more more in each Borders and feeling something special about it.

On a personal front:

Which means, since I'm not visiting bookstores, that I have time to do other things, but it's a struggle for me to spend that time productively, or to think of the excuse when I'm visiting a new city to get out and see the world.  When it works, finding time to do a first-time walk on the Custis Trail to get out to West Falls Church for a dinner instead of taking the Metro, it's nice, but too often I can feel like I'm stretching for a reason/excuse to get out of the routine.

But the big news in 2012 was to have my parents moving back north, from a retirement community in south Florida to an assisted living facility in Connecticut.  My mother had a very bad health scare in the spring, bad enough that I spent my first days in London ahead of London Book Fair wondering if I might be leaving an empty spot at our tables.  It got to be as bad as it did because it was difficult for my parents to deal with it on their own, and once they got some help to get the process going it wasn't a difficult thing to treat.  But I and my four siblings had to have an intervention, as good a word as any, and tell my parents that things had to change.  Not an easy conversation.  Once my parents took the (not so subtle) hint they ended up moving within a few months.  Happily, my parents are now complaining about everything.  Why happily?  They are eating better and have more energy.  They have a zest and thirst to be doing more than they are.  In Florida, they were doing less and less and not really noticing it.  I'm very happy I have four siblings, with four of them the transition cost me around two weeks out of the office spread in bits and pieces over the year and we were all able to do different things at different times.  I don't know how anything would have happened if there'd been just one or two children to help out with things.

During Sookie's peak years, I was able to buy a very nice apartment which should be affordable come what may, short of all the wheels coming off everything.  I've taken advantage of the space to start hosting regular games events for people to play old-fashioned word games like Scrabble and Boggle and new-fangled things like Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride.  I can't tell you how much pleasure I get out of this.  I enjoy playing the games, having people over, the people who come seem to have a good time, I've always gone to conventions and looked enviously at all the intriguing games in the games room, now I own some of them or have friends to bring them and actually get to play them.  I still have insecurity issues, and I worry with each games event that I schedule that it will be one of those embarrassing things where it will be me, Eeyore, and one other person.  I'm also always very insecure that all my clients will leave, after 25 years without too much of that happening maybe I shouldn't, but that insecurity does drive me to keep trying and doing my best.

The apartment also has a large walk-in closet.  A few years ago I discovered Express sold these brightly huged crew-neck Ts that looked so much nicer than the typical tee-shirt for summer wear or as part of an ensemble.  This year they started selling brightly-hued jeans that look decent on me even though I'm heading toward 50 and struggling not to go up a waist size.  But then the more hues of jeans they have, the more hues of Ts I want.  And then I want brightly hued shirts to go along with the jeans and the shirts.  I'm starting to feel like Imelda Marcos with the shoes as I fill the available space in the closet.   As recently as 2004 and 2005, I was making less money than what I now pay any of my full-time employees, in the early years of JABberwocky in the late 1990s I was a little embarrassed to admit to myself that I was making less running my own literary agency than if I were an editorial assistant for a small publishing house.  So I know there are times you don't have money to spend.  But if you don't have to do Old Navy, just to say I've been much happier going to fancier stores, the ones they have at the "good mall" like Kenneth Cole or Armani Exchange, and hunting in store or on-line for the things that are on the sale rack.  And the thing that annoys me is that I could have maybe started buying better stuff on sale for $40 over lesser stuff for $20 years before I actually started doing it. Right now with sale items and a coupon I have three really nice snazzy pair of pants in my shopping cart at Express for $65 total, which is not much money for three nice pair of pants.  Bottom line, I enter 2013 feeling like I have the wardrobe I should have, spending less than even I might think.  Alas, I then decided to splurge on a really nice designer label suit to end the year, I don't think it's something I could have done for $200 at J Crew, it certainly cost more than that.

So let's leave it at that.  I think I've covered the major events for 2012.

Pengdom House

I'm not a big fan of pontificating too much about things with too much uncertainty, and believe it or not there are a lot of uncertainties about Random House's acquisition of Penguin that make it a mistake for people to get too far ahead of themselves.

The first major uncertainty is government regulation.  In both the US and UK, the merger will give the combined company large market share in the publishing industry.  Will there be any divestitures required?  My guess is we're not looking at a lot, because 25% market share with four other decent-sized competitors is hardly a dominant market position.  But will the government look more closely at any particular categories?  As an example in sf/fantasy, the merged company would control Ace, Roc, Del Rey, and distribute DAW.  Which would be quite a dominant market share.  Our Bookscan account doesn't offer market share data, but it's out there, if anyone who reads this post has any light to shed on their position in certain genres it would be very interesting.

And the second uncertainty?  Well, quite frankly, not even the people at Random House know what they're doing with the new toy.  The people at the highest levels of Bertelsmann have crunched numbers and found a price that makes sense, but they haven't formed the committees that actually make everything come together.  Obviously the people at Random House like the Random House contract, but that doesn't mean there isn't going to be a committee to decide who actually has the better language on rights reversions, or termination in the event of non-delivery of a manuscript, or a gazillion other things.  There hasn't been a committee formed to see who has the better royalty statement format, and how you get the computers to talk to one another to eventually consolidate the systems.  I'm told on hearsay that Penguin has a 99-year lease that would go for at least another 80 years on its office space, and Random House has some kind of fancy condominium arrangement I think for its office space, and there hasn't been a committee formed to decide if they want to keep the offices separate or move people here or there or come to an arrangement with a new developer for 99 years of space in some new building.

We do know that Random House gives more editorial autonomy than in other large publishing companies, and I see no reason why they'd change that practice.  What this means is that they are happier to let the different editorial divisions compete for books than at other companies, so at least until we get to a situation where Ace and Del Rey both want the same book, or Viking and Crown want the same book, they'll let people go at it.  S&S is much pickier about needing to know if/who else in the conglomerate is also looking at something.

We do know that this won't be like when Penguin purchased Berkley 20 years ago, and then let the Berkley people come in and run things because they were very well managed.  I can't see Bertelsmann looking at Penguin and thinking "oh, let's buy them for their management expertise!"  Bertelsmann has been running book businesses for many many decades.

For JABberwocky, selfishly:

We like our Penguin contract more than our Random House contract, but I don't dislike our Random House contract, and I think over time as Peter Brett becomes a more prominent author for Random House and we're now selling Brandon Sanderson to Random/Delacorte with his Steelheart series, there's a likely move to be able to make our Random House contract better over time.    If you told me we had to move all of our Penguin authors to Macmillan boilerplate moving forward, I wouldn't be thrilled.  And as I mentioned above, who knows whose contract we'll actually get moving forward.

We do a lot of business with Penguin, too much in some ways, because I hate to have too many eggs in one basket.  Having Peter Brett become a breakout author for Random House and Brandon Sanderson the same with Tor has given me a lot more comfort than six or eight years ago, now we're going to have a very big Pengdom House basket and the Tor basket looking that much smaller.

When I started in the business, Penguin was this very strange conglomerate that did all sorts of things that the other big conglomerates were smart enough not to do, examples of this would be that Penguin would do big three-book deals, and dole out half the advance on signing, and all the rest on delivery of the manuscript.  Over time, bean-counters started to crack down on some of these things.  Penguin payout is more like other payouts.  The agita when I tried to suggest a client should get his Penguin delivery advance for a book he hadn't finished revisions on last year, oy!  Still, Penguin I would say is a somewhat less corporate place than Random House is.

I do most of my business at Penguin with their Berkley imprint, and Berkley has been an amazingly stable company.  I've been doing business with Ginjer Buchanan and Susan Allison for about as long as I've been in the business, and they've been working with the same people atop of them for as long as more.  I can tell you exactly when I read that Susan Allison would be taking over Ace, and that was in 1981 when I was still in high school and Jim Baen announced in the final issue of his Destinies "bookazine" that he was going off to get a Jim Baen Presents imprint at Tor and would be turning the reins over to Susan.  That's an amazing run.  They keep losing excellent junior people because the downside of good stable management is that you eventually run out of promotions and new titles to hand out to ambitious people.  I've also got to say, Susan's had a long run because she's razor sharp and deserves it.

Del Rey has been an amazingly unstable company, to be blunt.  When I started in the business, and when Random House was still an "independent' publishing company, if you can use that term for an arm of the Newhouse's Advance Communications conglomerate, it was still run by Judy and Lester del Rey.  Can we even keep track of how many people have been running Del Rey since it hasn't been the del Reys?  For many years, I had this impression that Del Rey was an imprint with a lot of senior people and not a lot of less senior people, "too many chiefs and not enough Indians."  I don't think that any more, Scott Shannon seems to have found the right people balance for the Del Rey and Spectra imprints.  But it's come with a huge human cost to people working at the companies.  The designated heir to the del Reys, Owen Locke, departed.   Editors like Jim Minz and Liz Scheier came in and out way too quickly, too quickly for their departures to be based on any profit & loss report card for things they'd purchased.  The consolidation of Del Rey and Bantam Spectra led to other departures.  This is hardly a full list of people to be in and out of Del Rey and Spectra, my apologies to all the many people I am not specifically naming (yes, Steve, that means you).  Elizabeth Moon has had five editors in ten years with Del Rey, it would have been much more difficult to "achieve" that "feat" at the Penguin sf imprints.

If I get a little queasy thinking on some of the less stable aspects of the Random House corporate structure weighing on Berkley, I think I'm excited at seeing Penguin benefit from some of the digitial stuff that Random House is up to.  Peter Brett and I had a marketing meeting on plans for The Daylight War in September, my general experience with publisher marketing plans is that they can spend a lot of time coming up with six pages that say "we will send out review copies and galleys" or, today, "review copies, galleys, and we'll do shit on Facebook."  The Del Rey plan here looked and felt different, leveraging different things like Suvudu that Random House has invested in over the years, with an awful lot of dedicated digital marketing people, with a lot of coordination and involvement with the editorial and other people at Del Rey.  I might be over-stating the import of this, because all the big publishers will do a lot of things for an author like Peter V. Brett that they see heading to bestseller lists that they don't do generally, but I'm not sure I am.  I felt like the plan was using more things that are actually embedded in what Random House is doing and has been doing, and that they went beyond what I see from other publishers for other of our bestselling authors.

I hope Random House will switch to Penguin's royalty reporting.  Random House has updated their royalty statements the way the TSA updates airport security, grafting layer after layer after layer on to what they were doing when I started in the business, it looks prettier in some ways but you have to keep flipping back and forth between pages to properly read, and they do not routinely provide across-the-board the information on copies shipped and returned the last six months, which is what you actually need, while providing a few lines of information on the total sales of the 1993 edition of your book that hasn't been in print or selling since 1996.   Penguin needs to do a little better job of purging sheets of paper on old inactive ISBNs from their reports, but otherwise they provide statements that are a model of clarity.   Information on copies shipped and returned is found easily, and there's summary information telling you that information in a big picture way before and during the current period and then in total following.

So this isn't the answer to all of your questions, not even the publisher knows the answer to all of its questions.

Just in a big picture way, what does this mean?  Well, I'm never fond of mergers that reduce competition for my authors, reduce the number of markets that I can sell authors to (especially because there are plenty of good books that don't find a market when they should, every time a new publisher starts up they are often buying books other people rejected and finding success with some of them), increase the clout of the people at the other end of the bargaining table.  However, the fact that I don't like it when these things happen doesn't keep them from happening, the question is how you deal with what actually comes out the other side, and right now we have no way of knowing anything about that in much detail.

Lex Luthor's Lair

I don't have the tech savvy of E C Myers, who did this nifty little Acknowledgment Video for his debut novel Fair Coin, recently out from Pyr SF as part of their new YA line and well worth reading -- you can meet Mr. Myers at various events in the coming days as well.

But after a busy and wonderful day of actually finally housewarming my apartment, I thought I should put a few thank you things out into the world...

The biggest thanks in many ways have to go to my clients. Charlaine Harris, Sookie Stackhouse, and the True Blood folk kind of paid for the place, but I think it's a mistake to be too narrow in viewing the JABberwocky family. Because Charlaine wouldn't be a client today if it weren't for the general belief amongst authors in general that we do a good job for all of our clients, or maybe not a client today if back fifteen years ago when Charlaine Harris wasn't Charlaine Harris yet, but Arkham House and Elizabeth Moon and Simon Green were some of the key players making it possible for me to have the money to go to Malice Domestic every year in large part because I wanted to be there for Charlaine (well, and to visit all the wonderful bookstores in the DC area that are now two thirds of them closed). And I'm kind of cautious, so even today the fact that the agency is not just Charlaine Harris but is Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett, and Elizabeth Moon and Simon Green, and John Hemry/Jack Campbell, and many other people. The agency is a stool with many legs, not just one that would always threaten to wobble me into ruin. I can't name every single client here, but the thanks are to all of them.

And it isn't possible to do what we need to do without having people to help me do it all. Steve Mancino did that for four years. Eddie Schneider will soon surpass Steve as the longest tenured employee at JABberwocky. Jessie Cammack came looking for us, and once Eddie and I found her we weren't going to let her go. Lots of other people who've helped over the years, Joseph and Ronald and Armand and Kat and Brenna and Ethan and Mark and David, among others.

There's Adrian, the broker at Nestseekers who told me the apartment I really really wanted might actually become affordable, because for once in my life the real estate market was dipping as my income was increasing to where I could just find an intersection between the two. But then nobody wants to actually give a mortgage, but Yitz found the guy who would.

When I looked at the raw space, I had a vision of what I might do with the space, and one of the things I'm happiest about today is that the apartment, finally and arduously two and a half years after I purchased it, pretty fully realizes my vision of what it should be and would be and could be and what I wanted it to be. It really is my place, more than anyone else's.

But it doesn't happen that way without some help along the way, some little voices chirping in the ear with advice and suggestions and guidance and how-tos and where-tos. Ronald and Jennifer helped with the painting and recommended the contractor. Elizabeth Moon helped to fill in the idea for the display shelf at the end of the gallery. The guy from Horizon helped find the right shade of window treatment for the bedroom.

When my younger brother got married close to twenty years ago, I was the best man, and one of the groomsman was this tall lanky guy named Mason Rapaport. Mason, it turns out, does woodwork. Really gorgeous woodwork, which now that he's finally actually done something with his website, you can learn about here.

The killer app for this apartment was this very long, very wide, very tall entrance gallery that was going to allow me to bring a little bit of Lex Luthor into my life. The Lex Luthor of Superman: The Movie. So do I thank the director, Richard Donner? Or the production designer Jonn Barry? Or the set director Peter Howitt? Or the art direction crew? Whomever it was in whatever combination who had that gorgeous bookcase in Lex Luthor's lair, where Otis could wheel around Lex, or more pleasantly wheel around the ladder and leave Lex hanging? This entry gallery was going to enable me to have at least a little version of this bookcase complete with ladder that I could call my very own, plenty deep enough to hold three layers of mass markets, two layers of hardcovers, and still leave enough width in the entry gallery to leave room for a wheelchair with lots of space to spare. Look ma, it's my bookcase! It looks even nicer filled with books and with the lights on than it does empty posing for the photo.

Besides being a great thing for a literary agent, it stores so many books, it makes the whole business function better because we don't need to clutter the office with books, we don't need to ship extra books to a client in March because there's no room and then realize in May that we need to order more.

In any event, I knew that Mason needed to do this bookcase, and I didn't think to talk to anyone else.

If you are hanging about the northeast and want any kind of beautiful woodworking or other sorts of cabinetry (the "kitchen" section of Mason's website has a couple other pieces for my apartment) this is the guy to call.

Myke Cole refers to Peter V. Brett as his Professor X.

Myke first introduced me to the idea of getting nicer furniture when we upgraded my old apartment with some nicer stuff several years ago, we trekked out to Long Island and went furniture shopping, and my sofa and dining room set and recliner were all selected that day. And because I'm that kind of a guy, I treated Myke to a delightful picnic lunch of MREs to thank him for his time and support.

I enjoy MREs a lot more than Myke, kind of like I love to visit and mow somebody's lawn, because I do that once every two years and it's a delightful special treat.

Myke gave lots of good suggestions on the right color scheme.

He accompanied me on shopping trips to buy furniture and ceiling fans and other things to fill out the apartment.

He rented the van that moved the boxes of books from the office and then helped along with Eddie and Jessie to move and shelve those dozens of boxes of books.

If there is something hanging on a nail in the apartment, Myke banged in the nail and hung it, and he didn't almost die hanging the movie posters above the TV but it wasn't because I didn't try really really hard to get that to happen.

For the party Myke was my scullery maid and galley slave for the day, and if regulations allowed him to wear a cover indoors I'm sure he would have worn at least six different hats over the course of the day.

Even though Myke resisted my specific instructions to use the Swiffer duster instead of the Swiffer sweeper to dust the moldings, I must give him an extra special and very heartfelt thank you for all of these efforts. Which go above and beyond any rational definition of "what friends are for" or "sucking up to your agent" or any other reason or excuse or justification or whatever else you call it that one might give for somebody to do all of these things.

The brownies for the party came from the Sage General Store. Which is around the corner, and which makes some of the best brownies you can find in New York City. You can find them on the Food Network, not that everyone isn't these days. I ordered way too many brownies. However, they don't make their wonderful german chocolate brownies any more because not too many people wanted to buy those as badly as I. But since I was ordering a full tray, I was able to get some of them, and maybe the leftovers will last for a bit.

The cookies came from Nita's European Bakery in Sunnyside a few blocks from the office, which totally deserves its largely favorable notices on Yelp. I've been in Sunnyside for many years, it's only recently that I've started to habituate Nita's, as I have come to appreciate how their Italian cookies are just head and shoulders almost every other little bakery cookie that I have ever come across.

The prospect of getting yummy things from Sage or Nita's should encourage you to venture across the East River into Queens.

One of my guests said especially how much he liked the scroll that John Moore was kind enough to give, and which sat in its tube for too long before finding the right proper place to hang.

The party was nice because so many people came, childhood friend, college roomie, people from the synagogue, neighbors, clients, editors, publishers, family, from the Scrabble club. Not an abundance of people from any one place, but a wonderful mix of people from all the different parts of me all in one room for the afternoon. Thank you for stopping by!

If I ever get more tech savvy, maybe I can come up with a video that can attempt to list everyone.

The JABberwocky CES

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.

BEA Day 1

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.