Me And My Movie

This fall season marks both my 50th birthday and the 20th anniversary of establishing JABberwocky Literary Agency.  To celebrate, I screened a film at the Museum of the Moving Image for a select group from virtually all phases of my life.  I didn't name the film in the invitation, though the invitations included references to enough of the catch phrases immortalized by the film that it wasn't exactly a state secret.

Here, slightly edited, are the program notes I prepared:

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When Jerry Maguire opened on Dec. 13, 1996, I sat down to see it projected (in 35mm, on part of the screen) on the Imax at the Loews Lincoln Square.

I was expecting to like it.

I didn’t realize that I was about as close to my autobiography as Hollywood is likely to get.

The “expecting to like” is easy; it was Tom Cruise in a Cameron Crowe movie, with a decent coming attraction.

Tom Cruise and I have very special relationship.  Top Gun is extra special to me.  That movie wasn't the first film I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, which was the best movie theatre in Manhattan.  But it was the first movie I saw at the Astor Plaza after starting at JABberwocky.  Before, I was visiting the Astor Plaza.  After, I was living there.  And over the thirteen years that separated Top Gun from Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise had a misfire or two (Days of Thunder, Interview with the Vampire), but for the most part, he was hitting it out of the park every time up to the plate.  Rain Man, The Color of Money, Born of the Fourth of July, The Firm, A Few Good Men, Mission: Impossible.  Even Cocktail and Far and Away -- if you think they worked (and I did, at least at the time I first saw), they worked because of Tom.  The films were generally hugely successful at the box office.  They were also more often than not hugely successful artistically.  The directors or screenwriters included the likes of Barry Levinson, Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Ron Howard, Oliver Stone, Tony Scott and Sydney Pollack.  All have made significant contributions to cinema.  And the co-stars?  Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Brad Pitt.  These movies garnered a lot of Oscar nominations for people besides Tom Cruise, whose artistic contributions to cinema over a long career are, I think, under-appreciated.

And then Cameron Crowe.  25 years later we still reference the classic scene in Say Anything of John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box to woo his girlfriend.  And in 1996 when Jerry Maguire was open, that classic scene was much nearer in the past.  There was a frisson to a new Cameron Crowe film.  But Say Anything was good on many levels, including the overall quality of the performances.  Not just John Cusack's defining performance, but the best performance from John Mahoney.  Forget Frasier.  Has Mahoney ever been better than Lloyd Dobler’s nemesis, the father who doesn’t want Lloyd dating his daughter.

For both Cruise and Crowe, their movies were often my soundtrack.   Working with music supervisor Danny Bramson, Say Anything and Singles were full of great tunes.  Bramson's one of the best at this. He also helped pick the music for the very lyrical Bull Durham soundtrack.  Rain Man had one of Hans Zimmer’s best scores.  The Color of Money was full of great tunes.  There were the soaring trumpet solos in John Williams’ Fourth of July score, and the jazzy piano of Dave Grusin’s music for The Firm.

So Tom Cruise was going to be in a Cameron Crowe movie.

Which was not just my soundtrack, but my life.

Jerry Maguire and I -- it turned out we were both agents who’d come to have issues with our bosses.

I’d been working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.  Scott  Meredith died.  The people with the clients and the money walked out the door to start their own agency.  A rich guy purchased Scott Meredith and had lots and lots of bad ideas, and I made a very conscious decision that I wasn’t going to just agree with them all.  Working for Scott hadn’t been fun; I didn’t need to bend over backwards to work for another bad boss.  A year-and-some after the agency was sold, did I know the day I was fired, twenty years ago this month, that I was going to be fired?  No.  But when the office was being renovated in the summer of 1994, I wasn’t entirely joking when I told people I got a fax to have at home just in case the boss had other plans for me.

After Jerry wrote his mission statement, he knew there might be repercussions.  He knew just about the moment he hit “save.”  He didn’t know Sugar was taking him to lunch to fire him, but deep down, he wasn’t shocked by the news.

The phone jockeying that followed?  That was me, twenty years ago this month.  My boss, he didn’t care about my clients.  If he wanted my clients, he wouldn’t have fired me.  But boy, did I spend a lot of time on the phone in October 1994.  I had a $300+ phone bill that month.  Because even if I wasn’t competing with my boss, I was competing with the Scott Meredith guys that had broken off 18 months earlier, and any and every other option besides me that any of my clients might have had.  Jerry Maguire’s a movie.  In real life, I doubt there’d be the crying gymnast picking up the wrong line.  But in its essence, every moment Jerry spends on the phone that afternoon is entirely real.

I’m not sure if it’s me or Jerry who headed off to our own businesses with a bigger stock of naiveté. I talked to an accountant enough to understand I’d have self-employment tax weighing down on me whether I was actually making any money or not, but my “business plan” was a sheet of my Scott Meredith memo paper where I roughed out that I needed $24-25K in commission my first year, that I knew where half of it would come from, and that I would come up with the other half.  But honestly, I never thought much about doing anything else.  And while Jerry Maguire and I both settled into home offices, for me the home office was all I needed.  Jerry Maguire needed more. He had a much bigger income potential because he was representing big-time athletes, not a bunch of sf/fantasy authors that were little known outside their fields.  But he had champagne tastes.  He needed the fancy suits and the fancy cars and the ability to look rich and act rich and compete with Bob Sugar.  I was fine settling into my one bedroom and moving furniture around to make room for a desk (cheap do-it-yourself from Staples), a filing cabinet, and a hand-me-down copier from my parents.

So Jerry Maguire might have been nominated for five Academy Awards: Picture, Actor (Cruise), Supporting Actor (Gooding Jr. who won), Screenplay (Crowe) and Editing. It might have spawned a sea of catch phrases that are as or more enduring as Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box in Say Anything.  That’s not why we’re here watching Jerry Maguire today.  There are other favorite films of mine that have probably aged better which are even more iconic.

Here is why we’re here:

When I sat in the Lincoln Square on that Friday night in 1994, having paid full tariff for a Manhattan ticket at a time when my first choice was always the Saturday bargain matineee in Queens, my story was unfolding in real time with Jerry’s.  I laughed a lot.  Too much; I earned some weird looks from people in the row behind me who couldn’t fully appreciate the jokes, because who else but me really could?  But I squirmed a little bit.  I wasn’t sure how the health insurance bills were going to be paid, or when or if I’d ever get a big offer coming across my fax machine.  I was two years into starting a business that spent five years working its way out of neutral.  I was still hoping to have Jerry Maguire’s happy ending.  And today, there’s no better way to say I had that happy ending than to be able to share Jerry Maguire with you.
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And what would I say after seeing Jerry Maguire again this weekend?

I own DVDs and BluRays, but I don't do them.  They're there for decoration.  I live in New York City, there are lots of movies to see, and I don't sit in my apartment to do them.

Which means there are films I love that I see over and over again because they're easy to see.  As an example, if I wanted to see The Shining, I could do that lots between Kubrick retrospectives or midnight showings or whatever.  Jerry Maguire isn't one of those films.  I haven't actually watched it in a while.

And in my notes above, I underestimated it.  The movie has aged pretty well, and is even more iconic than I remembered.  The number of little bits of dialogue in this film that have taken on a life of their own goes so far beyond just "show me the money" or "you complete me."  I don't know how many of them Crowe made up and how many he'd heard and used, but so much of the movie is in popular culture 18 years ago because it's in this movie.

In 1996, I could most appreciate the movie's tonal accuracy for the stuff at the beginning.  I was two years off from my own phone jockeying.  Which still feels accurate from a twenty-year remove.  But now I can appreciate it for so much more, especially at the end of the movie.  Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s Rod Tidwell has his big game and gets his big contract.  It's very Hollywood, with Tidwell taking a big hit and being knocked out and doing this whole dance and the terms of his contract are revealed as a surprise on an ESPN interview show.  But if you cut away all the Hollywood trappings, every emotional beat is right.  Jerry Maguire, walking around the stadium after Tidwell's big game, is pretty much feeling the exact same beats that I felt a year ago, watching Brandon Sanderson win the Hugo Award for "The Emperor's Soul," and then hanging out with Brandon that night going for a celebratory late night nosh.  It was so dead-on right that I found myself tearing up at the ending.  I hadn't expected that.

So Cameron Crowe's screenplay is a masterpiece.

It doesn't get the emotional beats of being an agent right just by chance.  It doesn't fill itself up with cultural references just by chance.  These perfect words don't write themselves.

The acting.  This I knew. Strangely enough, both Jay Mohr and John Mahoney have the same initials.  Both are better known for stuff on TV.  Both give their best performances in a movie directed by Cameron Crowe.  Ione Skye?  Renée Zellwegger?  Again, both probably have their iconic roles in a Cameron Crowe movie.  Cuba Gooding, Jr.  Same thing.  Lili Taylor is hiding out in Say Anything.  Donal Logue (Harvey Dent on Gotham) is hiding out in Jerry Maguire.  Cast long enough, any movie you do can have someone important doing an early role, but Crowe -- he seems to keep doing it.

What a darned good movie.

Royalty Season, Spring

We are settling in after our move just in time for the arrival of royalty season.  In fact, some German royalties from Heyne, which were the first buds of the season or sprinkles of the monsoon or flakes of the blizzard arrived almost simultaneous with the move.

And I realize in six years of having Brillig, I've never spoken much about royalty season.

First, royalty season in the publishing industry doesn't arrive at the same time for everyone.  It isn't like spring or fall, but rather more like the last frost.

When I was at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the early years of my career, royalty season arrived on February 1 and August 1.  Random House was due to send out reports the last day of January and last day of August, and they were very nice about it.  They didn't entrust their big checks to the Post Office in order to get another day or two of float, but rather would messenger them over, though late in the day so the check couldn't make it to the bank for that day's deposit.  Carl Sagan -- Random House author.  Norman Mailer -- Random House author.  Margaret Truman -- Random House author.  All of the many Scott Meredith clients published by Del Rey -- Random House authors.  The Mists of Avalon -- Random House.  Blade Runner -- Random House.  2010 Odyssey 2 -- Random House.  So when Random House reported royalties, that was when we had royalty season.

At JABberwocky, the vast preponderance of our authors are published by the Berkley Publishing Group part of Penguin, which reports on/about March 31 and Sept. 30.  Charlaine Harris, Jack Campbell, Simon R. Green -- all NY Times bestselling authors with many many books, all Berkley Publishing Group.  Along with some of our Roc authors.  And DAW, with many of our other authors, usually sends statements along a few days after Penguin in April, and a few days before in September.

I think Scott Meredith had the better of it, because the Random House statements were a bit off from everyone else's.  It wasn't one super big season, but rather helped to spread it out a bit more.  For us, it's not just Penguin on March 31 and Tor on April 30 but most of our big German and UK statements that want to come in then along with lots of miscellaneous others.  Just about everything comes in between March 20 and May 10, and between September 15 and November 10.  Less than a third of the year with two-thirds of our royalty paperwork.

So that is royalty season.

This is going to be a series of posts, and if that's the introduction let's put up Chapter One now as well, which is to talk about what I saw when I looked at royalty statements at the start of my career.   It was a lot different, if also in some important ways not so different at all, from what I see now.

One very important thing to keep in mind in this entire discussion, so I will say here and repeat often in different keys:

Most of the books publishers send to bookstores can be returned to the publisher for credit.   So a book that is sold might not be.  To protect against paying royalties to authors for copies that bookstores might return, publishers are allowed to hold a reserve against returns.  We sent out 30 copies, we will reserve 10 or 20 that we feel have a reasonable chance of coming back.  So I am going to use "sold" in quotes here, because it was very much the case twenty years ago that the number of copies on a royalty statement was the "in quotes" version.

For Penguin or for Kensington, the number might be the number of copies "sold" in a given accounting period.  That number came on a little 5x7 (maybe, don't have any at hand) piece of paper that came off of a computer.  And there wasn't much more than that one number to look at.

Random House gave multiple numbers, the number of copies "sold" over the six months and the total number of copies "sold" to the end of the period.  Their number came on a big oversized piece of computer print-out paper which made it seem especially important and true.

Berkley gave their numbers on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper which made them easier to file.

DAW gave many numbers, since they did things by hand on a piece of paper that would be passed down from royalty statement to royalty statement like a revered scroll..  That paper would have rows, and the rows would have the date of the period, the number of copies sold to the end of the period, and then the next row either gave that number followed by the new number, or the number of copies "sold" over the six months which you would add to get the new number, kind of like one of those Scrabble score sheets that comes with the fancier sets.  The first number was always "too early to tell."

There wasn't a lot of mentoring or training at Scott Meredith, so it took me a long time to learn that all these numbers, from all these different publishers, no matter how official looking the sheet of paper was, were utter bullshit.

Why?

Well, the number was the result of an equation, and the equation itself was hidden.

The equation used to generate the number was:

(actual copies net after ship and return) (minus) (reserve against returns) (equals) (your number)

And all we got was (your number), either as a total at the end of the period or as the difference between (your number) in one period and the immediately prior period.

You'd walk into bookstores and see a book all over the place and wonder why (your number) was so small.  Well, (your number) was maybe a half or a quarter of the actual number of books the publisher had put into the marketplace.

A book would come out, not appear to sell, and when you got the second royalty statement (your number) went up.  Not because there were more copies, but because the hidden reserve against returns was reduced by more than the hidden copies shipped less copies returned.

It would take around four royalty periods, or around two years, before the magic number that appeared on the royalty statements was close enough to the actual performance that the statement could be considered reliable.

I got in the habit of calling my debut novelists when their first statements came out to tell them, very excitedly, that I had their first royalty statement, I would be sending it to them, and when they got it they could put it in the trash or use it for toilet paper or do pretty much anything except pay much attention to it because it was utter bullshit.

Now it's different, and we'll move on to that in the next post, tomorrow.

The Carl and I

So while the rest of the world is having this Carl Sagan moment with the debut of the new Cosmos TV series, inspired by Sagan's original series from 35 years ago, let me tell you what Carl taught me.  It's something different from what everyone else is saying...

When I started work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in February 1986, I got to be Carl's literary agent.  Well, not really, or not exactly, but each desk at the agency had certain clients assigned to it, and Carl was assigned to my desk.  For Carl, this didn't mean very much. It meant that I was the person in the office who got to type out a transmittal letter for each check.  Yes, this was the 1980s.  This was done by hand on a typewriter, that we had gotten $568.76 for French royalties to Cosmos, and after our commission and 2% to Alan Lomax and some percent to the ex, here is your check for $352.32.

This was a pain in the neck, but it was still a thrill to be even that close to someone like Carl Sagan.  Cosmos was still a big deal and still selling lots of copies along with Broca's Brain and The Dragons of Eden.  His novel Contact had come out the year before and was a very very big deal.

But there was just one thing.  Carl hardly published a word during the entire eight years I was at Scott Meredith.  One collaboration about nuclear winter, A Path Where No Man Thought, and one with his wife, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.  But by and large, Carl spend those eight years allowing himself to become forgotten.

So here's the first group of lessons that Carl taught me.

Writers might write at their own pace.  And rather frustratingly, neither the writers nor their publishers may know exactly what that pace is until their careers are underway.  First novels are never written on deadline.  Second novels usually are.  And eventually we all find our way to realizing that this author can write two novels a year, that one three novels every two years, this one a book every 14 months.

Celebrity isn't good for writers.  Even the best-intentioned writers realize that you can't tour, be invited to be GoH at four conventions a year, do guest blog posts and interviews, to to WorldCon and World Fantasy, and keep up the writing pace you had before all of those things were part of your routine.

But tied in with that...

If, as Neil Gaiman put it memorably some five years ago, "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch," and George doesn't owe it to anyone to have his next Song of Ice and Fire sung, the reader isn't GRRM's bitch.  Some things we choose to wait for.  Others we choose to forget.  There are enough authors that we choose to forget that even publishers sometimes seem to be long on the uptake when they're publishing an author like GRRM or Patrick Rothfuss or Peter V. Brett whom the readers are willing to wait a little bit extra for.

And Carl Sagan ... well, he was one of the authors that the world was clearly willing to forget.  And I never saw any sign that Scott Meredith was willing to have that discussion with Carl, even though it seemed pretty evident to me kind of quietly observing in the background.

And the world was willing to forget other Scott Meredith clients.  Norman Mailer spent my several years at Scott Meredith making that transition, and getting monthly checks from Random House all the while.

Getting back to A Path Where No Man Thought, my name appears nowhere in the acknowledgments, but I had an important task for this book Carl wrote with Richard Turco.  I had to clear all of the permissions for his epigraphs and other extended quotations.

This annoyed me.

Maybe it was just that it was a pain in the neck to do all this work, and as someone still in his mid-20s, it's safe to say that I wasn't enamored of this sort of work.

But I also couldn't figure out why the Scott Meredith Agency was doing this work for Carl, and not getting paid a dime for doing it.  Carl had his office at Cornell.  He had secretaries, he probably had a team of work-study students at his disposal.

So agents do things for their clients sometimes.  But even today, I'd still argue pretty strongly that this shouldn't have been one of those things, that this was someplace where the agent needed to say "no."

I don't think Scott's hands-off and indulgent attitude toward authors who were falling out of the conversation was helpful to anyone.  Nobody reads Carl Sagan any more.  This might seem hard to believe for all the hosannas showing down on him as this new Cosmos series comes on the air, but it is true.  His Bookscan sales are essentially non-existent.  And Norman Mailer's most enduring works were all published by the time I started at Scott Meredith in 1986.  Maybe nothing Scott said would have changed any of this, or maybe not.   Going just by age, Sagan was in his fifties and Mailer his sixties during the time I was at Scott Meredith, and it's hardly pre-ordained that a writer's best work is by then in the past.  Nor do I think it entirely coincidence that Carl Sagan managed to deliver A Pale Blue Dot to fulfill a contract obligation to Random House after Scott's death in 1993, and not before.

Carl was also one of the only authors who tried to escape paying commission on existing contracts for existing books to the Scott Meredith Agency after Scott died.

So that's my Carl Sagan story.  It's different than most of the others going around this weekend, but I will say that he's certainly had a lasting influence on me.

Ralph

Ralph Vicinanza was one of the leading agents in sf/fantasy/horror and a leading agent for foreign rights. Like me -- and like many other leading agents in the genre -- he was an alumnus of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. He passed away quite unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm in late September. I did not have time to properly salute him at that time. A memorial service was held in New York this past week to celebrate his life and accomplishments, and this is a second chance I will take. 

If you want to know who Ralph was...

Stephen King came down from Maine for the occasion and spoke.  Ralph handled King's foreign rights for some thirty years and credited Ralph for the idea of serializing The Green Mile. 

John Crowley spoke.  The author of the wonderful Little Big, a dear fantasy novel to me and a novel whose closing lines have long comforted me when I think of loss.  John was grateful to Ralph, because he always felt that he was, in Ralph's eyes, every bit the important author that Stephen King was. 

Malcolm Edwards, the head of the UK's Orion Publishing Group, came over to speak.

Robert Silverberg worked with Ralph longer than just about anyone, from Ralph's earliest days on the Scott Meredith foreign desk, and was out from Oakland and his usual eloquent self. 

Other speakers included: clients Steve Baxter and Diana Finch; Ralph's longtime colleagues Chris Lotts and Chris Schelling, who was one of the first editors to buy a book from me; longtime publisher of Ace, Susan Allison; and a couple who met while working for Ralph.  And Connie Willis sent remarks. 

It's quite humbling, really. 

The stars weren't all on stage. George RR Martin was in the front row a few seats over from Ellen Datlow. People from Orbit, Del Rey/Spectra, Tor were in the crowd. Ralph's Hollywood partner Vince Gerardis with the writer Christopher Lofting. Peter Fritz, whose German agency has represented my clients for my entire near 25-year career. Many agents, including John Silbersack, Ellen Levine, Matt Bialer and Eleanor Wood, fellow SMLA alums Russ Galen and Richard Curtis. Several of Ralph's proteges. I shouldn't name names because I haven't the space to name them all.  Current Asimov's editor Sheila Williams and former Asimov's editor (& current Realms of Fantasy editor) Shawna McCarthy.  Longtime SF Book Club editor Ellen Asher. Around 120 people in all. 

Very, very humbling. 

We found out over the course of the evening that Ralph entered publishing after deciding that he wasn't going to make a good Jesuit priest. He worked handling foreign rights at Scott Meredith for several years, and after realizing his efforts were insufficiently appreciated, he left to become the head of foreign rights at Blassingame, McCauley and Wood.  [An old agenting hand Lurton Blassingame was the agency's patriarch. Kirby McCauley and his sister Kay were the second part, Eleanor Wood the third.] That broke up when Kirby had some problems; everyone at the memorial knew the problems were drug-related, nobody actually stated the "d" word or the "c" word; Silverberg described a dinner with he, Ralph and the McCauleys where Ralph decided he would break off on his own. Silverberg's support of the move was important to getting the new agency started. Ralph further developed his prowess in foreign rights, thriving on the Frankfurt Book Fair stage and letting the London Book Fair come to him at Clairidges, his hotel of choice. Many of his closest acquaintanceships were formed over Scrabble, in person and online.  The impact he had in the field personally and professionally is seen in the people who spoke and all who came Tuesday night.

Things not said:  Scott Meredith was not at all happy when Ralph left, and at least talked about suing him. I have some correspondence between Scott and his attorney on the subject, as well as of a letter Robert Silverberg wrote resigning  the Meredith agency.  In the late 1980s Ralph got a boost when another agent, Patrick Delahunt, left the field and ceded a client list which included Kim Stanley Robinson and Connie Willis to Ralph. I confess, I was jealous. But the thing of it was that Ralph was able to close the deal and keep the talent. For several years Ralph and Eleanor Wood shared office space in the Port Authority Building at 111 8th Ave., which Google is now buying. He was wise. He might have left Scott Meredith, but he continued for his entire career to work with the best of the cooperating agents overseas that Scott worked with, like Peter Fritz in Germany and the Lencluds in France. The Icelandic ash cloud hovered over the final months of his life. I know it was an unpleasant experience for me, there in London with two thirds of the appointments cancelled and no idea when or how I would get home until the 6th night of a weeklong trip, but I was sharing the experience at the Fair. The disadvantage of having the Fair come to him at Clairidges was that it made for a lonelier experience, and I was told after the Memorial that a man who was described by multiple speakers as thriving in Book Fair settings came to question them during and after the ashy strangeness of this year's London Book Fair. 

When Scott Meredith passed, hardly anyone made it to the funeral. Norman Mailer made the journey from Brooklyn to Great Neck. I would have skipped Scott's funeral if not for the fact that the VPs would have looked askance. 15 people, maybe, a third of those there for motives similar to mine. People traveled on short notice for Ralph's in September, and came from LA, the UK, Germany for this memorial. 

Scott never learned, never adjusted. Ten years after Ralph left, Scott still hated to pay for people to go to WorldCon lest they use it as a venue to plot their departures with Scott's clients. And the agency's foreign rights were still being undersold when I left the agency fifteen years and an owner or two later, and like Ralph I have had this vision of doing better, way way better, out of Scott's nest than could have been done in.  

Humbling.  We hope we can leave a mark like Ralph's in our trade, we fear we will be Scott. 

It was less humbling to have Ralph alive and competing with me, than not and looking down on me. 

My Life in Technology, Pt. 1

The world is full of so many marvels that we sometimes lose sight of just how amazing some of them are, and I've been wanting for a while to talk some about how my business has changed over the 20-25 years I've been in it.

It's 25 years ago this summer that I started my summer sojourn at Baen Books.  Honestly, I can't recall too much about the technology at Baen.  There must have been some computers somewhere because Baen was one of the first publishers to do a kind of fancy-pants royalty statement that told you how many copies were shipped and returned instead of just making up a number after a mysterious reserve against returns.  I think that was done very early on in Baen history, though I can't recall if it was done that way from the very start.  Most of my Baen work was old-fashioned scutwork.  I do know they had a very nice photocopier for back then.  & writing this just got me to thinking that we're just a few months away from the 25th anniversary of the first month of Baen Books, which included some very un-Baen-y Books like this one which I believe might have been donated from Simon & Schuster's Timescape line along with some quintessential Baen stuff like this.

When I started work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in February 1986, 23 years ago now, computers were around but still not prevalent.  This was a time when you still might be asked to take a typing test on an old-fashioned typewriter in order to get a job someplace.  And for the most part, the Scott Meredith Agency was a computer-free zone.  There was one and only one computer in the office, a Kaypro that was mostly used for the occasional manuscript that was going out on multiple submission and thus might require many copies of the same marketing letter.  You knew it was special if you got to do it on the Kaypro.  This hung out near the foreign rights office and may also have been used by them for the foreign marketing letters. Manuscripts came in on paper, they went out on paper, and many of them in 1986 were still being prepared on a typewriter, and most of what we did was done on IBM Selectrics.  We even used carbon paper for a lot of things which Sue the bookkeeper doled out like Golem letting go of his precious.  Sue did all her checks by hand.  

The essential guts of the agency were the Green Cards.  3x5 index cards.  On the front we'd type the author's name, title of manuscript, and something like "short story" or "mystery novel proposal" or "SF novel".  On the back of the card went a little bit of description about the project, and then we used this index card to either type or hand-write the marketing history of the project.  When something sold, the basic deal terms were typed into the back of the card, and then when advances or royalties came in, the details of when the payments were received were typed on to the card.  If you ran out of space on one card, you'd get out a second green card and staple or fasten that to the original card.  For a book like 2001: A Space  Odyssey, you had quite a nice thick stack of green cards.  Then there were the white cards where we kept track of the authors who had sent in manuscripts to the agency's reading fee service along with an old-fashioned paper log on when those manuscripts had come in and when responses were sent out, and there were two sets of index cards maintained for keeping track of foreign sales, one by author and the other by country.  If money came in, that was noted on the green card and not on the foreign cards, though there would be a notation so we would know that the on-signing money or copies of the  book had come in.

Basically, think index cards.

We had five phone lines, and somewhat old-fashioned five-line phones.  No voice mail, no answering machine, none of that.

No fax.  We had a telex machine, and foreign offers and responses usually came in over the telex.  

Contracts were often still typed out, though some of the bigger publishers may have had early word processing systems even then but certainly not all.  A lot of them were done in multiple copies on a very thin onionskin paper to save on mailing costs.

Royalty statements were crude.  The most impressive-looking were the Random House statements that came in on big computer fold paper all very fancily printed by computers.  Penguin statements came in on little pieces of paper, and provided only the number of copies sold during that particular six month period.  This was rather annoying because if you wanted to find out how many copies a book had sold over five years, you had to dig out all five years of statements and add those numbers together, and back then it wasn't like most people (and certainly not Scott Meredith) had a spreadsheet program to add the numbers together or any other much better way of keeping track of it than to save every last royalty statement if you wanted to know your actual total sales.  DAW sent out handwritten statements that gave the total # of copies sold at the end of each period in a kind of ledger format where they'd fit twelve or twenty periods worth of data on the page, the first period always being filled in with a notation something like "too early to tell" and then the updated sales, and this was nifty because it was the only statement where you could get a historical glance at a title's performance.

However it was that the royalty statements came, they were almost all as fictional as the novels they were reporting on.  Because then as now as for many decades, publishers had the right to withhold a reserve against returns, and that number was almost always taken out without any detailing in order to arrive at the one single number that was put on the piece of paper you received.  Whether it was the handwritten ledger from DAW of the fancy-pants formal looking "We Have A Computer" statements on the big computer-fold paper from Random House, you had no way of knowing in the first royalty period if the 12,892 copies that were reported on your first statement meant there were 15,000 copies that had been shipped of 25,000, no way of knowing how many copies had come back, and how many copies the publisher was hiding.  It took even me several years to catch on to the fact that those impressive looking Random House statements didn't mean very much, and that I'd need to call clients and tell them "so I'm sending you your first royalty statement, but you may as well ignore it."  If that 12,892 copies went up to 19,528 on the second royalty statement, did this mean that they had gone from 25,000 shipped to 30,000, or from 24,000 to 25,829, or from 15,000 to 22,000?  Essentially, you had to wait maybe 3 or 4 royalty periods until you could be reasonably sure that the total # of copies reported on the royalty statement was somewhat similar to the actual # of copies that had been sold because by then the publisher would probably be down to only a 10% reserve against returns that was hidden in the background.  Maybe.  And it was only after that point that if the next statement showed sales going up by 3,200 copies or down by 569 that you might consider that to be an actual reflection of how your book had performed over that time.

So those fictional royalty statements would come in, the money would be typed in on the green card, the check written out by hand and put into a ledger book by hand, it would come to one of the agents to typewrite out an itemization letter that would go off to the client.

So we'll end Pt. 1 of this e-mail here, with a glimpse of SMLA technology circa 1986.  And I'll try over time to advance the narrative forward.  Let me know if there's something you think I should be talking about in this part of the posting that I've missed.

And spring has just forwarded; my Mac has advanced itself from 2AM to 3AM.  I hate the lost hour of sleep, but this does mean there will still be some daylight when I escape the office in the evening, which I am always very happy about.