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.
Showing posts with label adam troy castro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adam troy castro. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Monday, December 31, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Chiconic Fatigue Syndrome
I've had supporting memberships for World SF Conventions, WorldCons as they are known, dating back over 30 years. When I was just becoming an sf fan and devouring a goodly chunk of sf/f (Analog, Omni, Asimov's, the occasional F&SF, novel after novel) voting in the Hugos was a major temptation. Reading the progress reports and looking over the program books instilled a certain sense of community, of belonging to a larger community even though I was just a high school kid in a small town in New York City. Imagine how nice it is to have a job where I now get to attend WorldCon as part of it! And ChiCon, the 70th WorldCon, is the 18th I've actually attended.
The experience of attending WorldCon as a pro is very different than the WorldCon I dreamed of 30 years ago, however.
I get to be on panels, I don't so much get to attend them.
This year, I thought all my panels were reasonably successful. The one on business advice for writers at 3pm on the first day of the con when everyone was settling in had the kind of crowd you might expect when half the convention hasn't even picked up its membership badges yet. Having the "getting an agent" panel at 9am the next morning wasn't ideal either, it's WorldCon and people go to parties and who wants to have to wake up for a 9am panel? I was also on a panel on e-books.
I grew up wanting to vote on the Hugos and waiting around ten years to finally attend an actual Hugo ceremony.
Alas, I have learned over 26 years in the business that I am rife with internal conflict about awards. I love for my clients to be nominated for awards, I love for my clients to win awards, I just wish that this could all happen without my ever having to attend an award ceremony or banquet or dinner ever ever again. So much bad food, so many bad speeches, the occasional bad table full of bad conversation partners. And more often than not, the person you want to win -- doesn't !!
This year's Hugo Awards were not bad as such things go. Connie Willis can be a great toast"master" but sometimes there can be too much Connie, because when you have someone as good as Connie you want to take advantage. John isn't Connie, he wasn't uproarious, but there also wasn't too much of him. They made an interesting decision to have John do most of the presenting which may have saved a good 15 or 20 minutes of time introducing presenters for 12 more awards.
Alas, they did not take the equally radical decision of doing away with the clips for the long-form and short-form dramatic presentation awards. Each took ten minutes to present, all told, which is an eternity. Around 16 awards all told, if every one of those takes ten minutes and you add in the other stuff you're looking at a three hour ceremony. If you don't think the Hugo Awards should go on for three hours, and they most certainly should not, you have to do away with the damned clips for the dramatic presentation. If you're going to leave in the ciips, then I want people to read one-minute excerpts from the nominated pieces of fiction. Believe it or not, the Hugos are supposed to be a literary award, so none of these damned clips for the dramatic presentations.
My guy won! Well, one of my guys. Though the glory is in both instances reflected since the nominations were not for literary work represented by the agency, we had our client Jim C. Hines nominated for Best Fan Writer, and our client Brandon Sanderson is one of the masterminds of the Writing Excuses podcast that was up for Best Related Work. And Jim Hines not only won, but in the voting breakdowns we see he won quite quite handily. And then he did something very well, and said he would recuse himself from this category in future years, so he won't become like Locus and take home a statue every year for twenty or thirty years.
There wasn't any of that music playing at the 30-second mark, so the winners could give thank you speeches that went on pretty much just as long as they pleased. This can be unfortunate. But... I'll take this approach over the Oscars and their 30 second limits. Yeah, there were some over-long thank yous at the Hugos this year, there were also some really touching and moving speeches like Jo Walton's accepting for Best Novel, and John Picacio for Best Professional Artist, that were only possible because people had the time to speak passionately and from the heart.
I am a bad person. During an award banquet, usually held in a brightly lit hotel ballroom, I will quietly read a text-rich magazine (fewer page turns) during the speechifying. In the darkened ballroom for the Hugos, the iPad was quite delightful, and I think I read 15,000 words of a submission. Lest you think I wasn't paying attention -- I assure you I can read a good 40-50,000 words in the time the ceremony occupied, so that's 25K of paying attention to the ceremony. I had the brightness all the way down, and had the cover held tight over the screen. With all the people that have their phones out to tweet and text and whatever, as we are wont to do in the modern age, I hope I wasn't upsetting the atmosphere of the room.
Just to say, was it just me, or was the dealer's room a little quiet and mono-cultured this year? Something seemed to be missing.
The parallel con that I attend now vs. the con I dreamt of attending as a wee lad consists of a lot of time spent in meals and meetings with clients and editors. Since my business has grown, some of those meals have to breakfasts, which are always way too early for my tastes. I hate paying for overpriced booze at hotel bars. On days when I have a breakfast, a lunch and a dinner on my schedule, and then visits to the party suites filled with M&Ms and Doritos (this year, prawn-flavored Walker Crisps on account of the 2014 London bid) I am certainly eating too much, especially since there isn't a lot of time for exercise during a WorldCon. Oh well! I did find an Argo Tea cafe a few blocks from the hotel and did a couple meetings there, I don't actually like tea or coffee and Argo is really really big on the tea, but it's nice to get out of the convention hotel. There was also this little sunken park on an ancient golfing burial ground a couple blocks from the hotel, and we did a couple meetings there on a nice bench under a nice shade-giving tree with a wonderfully designed fountain providing that nice relaxing burbling sound of water.
I don't understand people who travel to these conventions and decide they can't leave the hotel or convention center. Yeah, you want to do your business, but you're in Chicago, a world capital, one of the major cities of the US, get out and see the world! In my early days of attending WorldCon with way fewer clients I could do some of this during the days of the convention and not feel too guilty, now I have to add on a day or two but I did get around. Especially the Wednesday before, 15+ miles of walking around Chicago to take in 3 Whole Foods, 2 Costcos, and a Cubs game. Not the usual tourist stuff, but it was 15+ miles of walking around and seeing the city and the weather was gorgeous.
It was my first time at Wrigley. I enjoyed it a lot. The park is full of atmosphere and history. Strange in some ways, they have an organ but all of the music seemed to be a little bit of organ music grafted on the same rhythm track for every song that sounded like some special kind of Christmas music. Definitely strange. The stadium got really really loud, I could hardly hear the person next to me. The game to most people was an afterthought, so many people going to see Wrigley and not that many who cared whether or not the Cubs won. The concourse had the feel of a carnival midway, which is definitely not the feel you get from most of the modern stadiums.
Thursday night Adam-Troy Castro had a launch event for his new book at the Magic Tree children's bookstore in Oak Park. Previously I had gone to Oak Park to add the Borders there to my list of conquests, a Borders conveniently near to the River Forest Whole Foods. I did visit the Whole Foods, but I also walked around and saw other parts of the neighborhood. I need to make an Oak Park day the next time I'm in Chicago to admire more of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses, maybe even visit the Hemingway birthplace and museum.
I'm going to stop here, there's more I could say but maybe I'll do another WorldCon post later, or maybe not.
Monday, June 29, 2009
A Bookscanner Darkly
A week or so ago, another agent I know, Andrew Zack, blogged about a negative experience he had with Bookscan. A book he had on submission was rejected by at least one house because the author's prior sales on Bookscan were not very good. This frustrated Andrew because the actual sales were much better than what the Bookscan numbers were saying. There is nothing more frustrating to an agent than to have a book you like rejected for a not very good reason. Here at JABberwocky we had a manuscript by Fred Durbin rejected by one house because marketing vetoed it even though everyone on the editorial side was enthusiastic, and I found this rather an odd thing to do because a chunk of the book had just been serialized in Cricket Magazine, which to me you'd think maybe the marketing people would think was a nice hook.
I've known Andrew for a very long time. He was one of the last young publishing up-and-comers to cut his teeth working for Donald I. Fine, and for some categories of work I'd unhesitatingly suggest him; I quite envy in particular the breadth of his non-fiction offerings. But I don't agree with his assessment of Bookscan at all.
There is one major problem with Bookscan, which is that a fairly full access for one user ID costs a small fortune. Several thousands of dollars, in fact, so the cost is really prohibitive for a lot of literary agencies. There are some ways to get some information for less; but if you want to really have fun with this you've got to pay big bucks. For me, for that kind of thing, cost is almost no object because I've always been fascinated with numbers. In college, before I had a career in publishing, I would always enjoy looking at the index cards used to track ordering activity at the Community Newscenter locations in Ann Arbor, and it's not like I stopped doing that sort of thing once I actually had a real professional reason to do so. Imagine how happy I am every Wednesday morning when I can have a week of actual POS sales data for the entire JABberwocky list delivered to my computer.
And yes, the information is flawed. It doesn't include Wal-Mart, which guards its sales data zealously. It doesn't include Larry Smith's table at a convention. It doesn't include a lot of grocery or drug store or similar channels, though they've kind of gone from 0 to 25 MPH in the past couple years first by adding a few supermarket chains like Kroger and Stop and Shop and this January adding Hudson News. It doesn't include a lot of non-traditional channels, so I was out of luck the same way as Andrew Zack when I tried to market a sequel to a book that was selling mostly through Motherhood Maternity. Maybe if you as an agent subscribe to Bookscan you can be aware of possibe situations like this and try to address them with a line in your marketing letter, but that may or may not work. It could just force a house that wants to reject to come up with some other "polite" but silly reason to say "no." Or maybe they'll believe Bookscan before they believe the agent. Agents do lie sometimes. A baseball free agency season hardly goes by when some GM isn't complaining about the mysterious other suitors Scott Boras claims to have, and I'm sure some editors feel that way about some literary agents.
But Bookscan is a tool, and like all tools it can be used right and used wrong. Right about the time I first got my Bookscan subscription, I noticed that the just-published Crossover by Joel Shepherd was selling pretty danged well for a book that had been taken by Borders but not by Barnes & Noble. I was able to go to Lou Anders at Pyr and point this out, and Lou was able to go to the sales people at Prometheus Books, and they were able to go to B&N and get them to take some copies of the book. And this helped turn CROSSOVER from a dubious proposition into a solid enough performer that it's now been chosen to launch the mass market program from Pyr. A lot of things had to go right for this to happen, but it all started with somebody paying attention to those Bookscan numbers.
And now this year, I was able to notice a sales spike for Adam-Troy Castro's Emissaries from the Dead after it won the Philip K. Dick Award, and I was able to make a good numbers-based case to Diana Gill at Eos and she was able to go to her sales people, and we've gotten some renewed support from Borders for Emissaries and its sequel The Third Claw of God. It's too soon to know if this will have the long-term payoff that I saw with Joel Shepherd, but again this is at least getting some good use out of the tool.
Of course it costs so darned much, that I'm not sure on strict cost-benefit terms that I can justify how much I pay in order to achieve these victories. It's a no-brainer for me because of the weird wiring of the Joshua Bilmes brain. But does it really pull my fat out of the fire near often enough to start saying cost should be no object?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)