In the evolving world of publishing, the roles of the author, agent and publisher are all having to evolve.
What should our role as agents be?
There's one school of thought I know I don't agree with, which says that an agent should never be a publisher. One statement of that position from a British agent can be found here, and in the US one prominent agent who's expressed his firm opposition to melding the roles is Robert Gottlieb, the head of the prestigious Trident Media Group. That's some of what he discusses in this guest blog post on the Publishers Weekly site.
My VP, Eddie Schneider, reacted very strongly to a news article in Publishers Lunch Daily this week (also the source for the above link) about a literary agency that wants to go into e-book packaging. I thought I'd invite him to guest on my blog, and italicized are his comments below:
I'm sure many of you involved in book publishing in some fashion (agent, editor, aspiring author) heard the news Monday that Dystel & Goderich (DGLM) have decided to become an e-book packager.
Here's their announcement: link
This bothers me enough that I decided to do my first ever guest post on Brillig to comment.
I think the decision to help an author self-publish a book, after failing to place it with a real publisher, is rooted in hubris. Yes, we agents hopefully have good taste, and there are client projects we all feel should have sold but didn't, but to turn around and put them out into the marketplace anyway, shows disrespect toward the editors who should be among our closest colleagues, takes up time and energy best spent elsewhere, and detaches us from reality, which can't be good.
It's really disappointing to see such a high-profile agency go this route. DGLM seems to have the support of their clients, if the comments on their site are any indication. They also seem to be trying to do their best to be forthright about everything.While it's possible that an agency, especially a larger one, could successfully keep these concerns separate (and good luck keeping it that way), it is a conflict of interest for most.
I'm not a member of the AAR, but if I were, I would move to make an active effort to kick out any member agency who serves as first publisher to their clients' books.
Good luck to everyone at DGLM. Many of you have been doing this for much longer, and with greater financial success, than I have. Maybe the rest of us will be shown the error of our ways.
If anyone reads this post, and thinks I'm the one in error (or agrees...), feel free to comment via rock with note attached, or in the comments section.
Eddie
I don't disagree with Eddie on this. There are times I've rolled about in my own mind on this question. There's a book we absolutely love, we can't find a publisher, we're sure they're all wrong... And yet I haven't actually gone ahead and flipped that switch and said "darnit, nobody else wants to publish this fine book we're going to go do it ourselves."
And yet we at JABberwocky are in fact e-book publishers, with a growing list of authors and titles. Albeit all reverted backlist titles first published by major publishers and now back in the author's hands, some of the books in fact published, reverted, resold, published again, and then back a second time. We're trying to occupy some kind of middle ground that may or may not actually exist between being full-fledged publishers of electronic books and saying we can't and shan't be publishers at all. I dealt with some of our thinking on the whole e-book program in this blog post when we had our first e-book go live.
Is there a distinction, or is it a distinction without a difference, to object as Eddie and I do, to an agent who "serves as first publisher to their clients' books"??? I see in my mind a very real difference between what we are doing, what Robert Gottlieb says we should/shouldn't do, and what Dystel and Goderich have decided to do. But even if I'm right to see that different today, will it still exist tomorrow?
As Eddie says, let us know what you think. I'm not sure the rock with attached note is such a good idea, but otherwise...
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Doomed to Repeat It
So as Borders makes its way through the bankruptcy process, they've gotten the OK to terminate their relationship with Starbucks to have Seattle's Best Cafes. The filings to get out from under say how the royalty rates are too high and make it difficult for Borders to make money on the cafe operations, so it would be better for Borders to take back the operation.
Hmmm. If you substituted the Borders website and Amazon for cafes and Seattle's Best, you'd be getting a strong sense of deja vu.
Borders went with Seattle's Best because they had, over time, a very big problem that they just weren't running their cafes very well. B&N had that relationship selling Starbucks coffee and desserts from Cheesecake Factory from cafes with attractive menus and bright fixtures with everyone in their very nice and consistent uniforms. Borders kind of slowly scraped over time toward having some vague degree of consistency in their wares, but overall the cafes just never looked as nice. Borders would sell Kim & Scott's pretzels at all of their stores but they wouldn't be branded as Kim & Scott's pretzels. Since Borders couldn't run the cafes well, farming out the business to Seattle's Best and having some degree of consistency and a recognizable brand and all that sort of thing seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Just like, since Borders was late to the internet and a distant third and not running things very well, farming Borders.com off to Amazon was kind of a good idea at the time.
In both cases, however, the better solution would have been to run things better within Borders.
But even after the Seattle's Best conversions and the money spent fixing up the cafes, the cafes were better but still not as good. There was still less variety than at a B&N cafe, still not as attractively presented, and some stores were never converted, and even those that were it dragged on over several years. And of course those conversions were one part of the endless rounds of store remodels, and ultimately even this seeming good thing in the remodel process was maybe not so good after all.
Smooth move.
There may also be another few dozen Borders locations closing, as many as 20 superstores and 30 mall and/or airport stores.
And these, Borders would actually like to keep open.
The problem here is that these are stores that are very profitable and well trafficked in very good locations or stores that have really really good leases. Under the calendar that's in effect for the bankruptcy, Borders had x months to decide if it wants to keep or reject store leases, clock will be up in September. While there are some buyers circling around a substantial portion of the business, there's no way a sale can close in time for the new buyer to take over the leases before that September deadline.
And Borders is still a little tight on cash until a buyer is found. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, a company has to find a lendor who will float cash for the company to operate during the reorganization. This is called "debtor in possession" or DIP, and the company that's giving the DIP money is first in line to get paid back ahead of everyone else. For Borders, the DIP financing was on the low side because of the challenging circumstances facing the company, and this is exacerbated because Borders lost a lot of money in March and April, maybe somewhat less in May, but they've burned through a lot of their DIP money.
And because these are good stores, like the Penn Plaza location in Manhattan or downtown Boston, in good rentable locations, the landlords aren't rushing to compromise with Borders and extend the deadline for rejecting leases. All the other locations, there's a signed piece of paper that in most instances is pushing the September 2011 deadline into the opening weeks of 2012. Not these.
So there are these 50 stores with millions of dollars in inventory in them, that Borders might have to vacate in September, like it or not, on account of the interaction of these various factors. If you are going to vacate the stores by September, you need to start liquidating the inventory by the end of June, to allow July and August for the going out of business sales and a couple of weeks in September to clear out. And in order to do that, you need the court to approve the sales and the liquidators to put in their bids for the honor of running the sales right about now.
With its back to the wall, Borders is struggling to get the DIP lendors to give them more time, or to find some way of getting the extension papers signed by the landlords, but with no certainty of getting anywhere with either, they have to put in their filings and motions to approve the sales. They think maybe it will end up being closer to 15 stores than 50 that end up having to shutter, but who knows.
The manager of the Borders store in downtown Boston has said it's 100% certain his store will close. The closest major bookstore would then be the Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center, around two miles away. That's practically like having it another city. If you're wondering if there's any effect on the ability of people to buy books as a result of losing these stores, I can't think of any better example.
Hmmm. If you substituted the Borders website and Amazon for cafes and Seattle's Best, you'd be getting a strong sense of deja vu.
Borders went with Seattle's Best because they had, over time, a very big problem that they just weren't running their cafes very well. B&N had that relationship selling Starbucks coffee and desserts from Cheesecake Factory from cafes with attractive menus and bright fixtures with everyone in their very nice and consistent uniforms. Borders kind of slowly scraped over time toward having some vague degree of consistency in their wares, but overall the cafes just never looked as nice. Borders would sell Kim & Scott's pretzels at all of their stores but they wouldn't be branded as Kim & Scott's pretzels. Since Borders couldn't run the cafes well, farming out the business to Seattle's Best and having some degree of consistency and a recognizable brand and all that sort of thing seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Just like, since Borders was late to the internet and a distant third and not running things very well, farming Borders.com off to Amazon was kind of a good idea at the time.
In both cases, however, the better solution would have been to run things better within Borders.
But even after the Seattle's Best conversions and the money spent fixing up the cafes, the cafes were better but still not as good. There was still less variety than at a B&N cafe, still not as attractively presented, and some stores were never converted, and even those that were it dragged on over several years. And of course those conversions were one part of the endless rounds of store remodels, and ultimately even this seeming good thing in the remodel process was maybe not so good after all.
Smooth move.
There may also be another few dozen Borders locations closing, as many as 20 superstores and 30 mall and/or airport stores.
And these, Borders would actually like to keep open.
The problem here is that these are stores that are very profitable and well trafficked in very good locations or stores that have really really good leases. Under the calendar that's in effect for the bankruptcy, Borders had x months to decide if it wants to keep or reject store leases, clock will be up in September. While there are some buyers circling around a substantial portion of the business, there's no way a sale can close in time for the new buyer to take over the leases before that September deadline.
And Borders is still a little tight on cash until a buyer is found. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, a company has to find a lendor who will float cash for the company to operate during the reorganization. This is called "debtor in possession" or DIP, and the company that's giving the DIP money is first in line to get paid back ahead of everyone else. For Borders, the DIP financing was on the low side because of the challenging circumstances facing the company, and this is exacerbated because Borders lost a lot of money in March and April, maybe somewhat less in May, but they've burned through a lot of their DIP money.
And because these are good stores, like the Penn Plaza location in Manhattan or downtown Boston, in good rentable locations, the landlords aren't rushing to compromise with Borders and extend the deadline for rejecting leases. All the other locations, there's a signed piece of paper that in most instances is pushing the September 2011 deadline into the opening weeks of 2012. Not these.
So there are these 50 stores with millions of dollars in inventory in them, that Borders might have to vacate in September, like it or not, on account of the interaction of these various factors. If you are going to vacate the stores by September, you need to start liquidating the inventory by the end of June, to allow July and August for the going out of business sales and a couple of weeks in September to clear out. And in order to do that, you need the court to approve the sales and the liquidators to put in their bids for the honor of running the sales right about now.
With its back to the wall, Borders is struggling to get the DIP lendors to give them more time, or to find some way of getting the extension papers signed by the landlords, but with no certainty of getting anywhere with either, they have to put in their filings and motions to approve the sales. They think maybe it will end up being closer to 15 stores than 50 that end up having to shutter, but who knows.
The manager of the Borders store in downtown Boston has said it's 100% certain his store will close. The closest major bookstore would then be the Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center, around two miles away. That's practically like having it another city. If you're wondering if there's any effect on the ability of people to buy books as a result of losing these stores, I can't think of any better example.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
evolution in action
So I think it's safe to say that the main beneficiary of the ongoing disappearing act at Borders has been Amazon or other internet outlets for buying books (and probably not borders.com as one of those!).
Nielsen Bookscan gives breakdowns on sales in retail/brick and mortar channels as against sales in discount & other which includes primarily Amazon and bn.com. (Target and K-Mart are also in that line but for the typical new release sf/f hardcover these outlets aren't a factor.)
So we can look at the breakdown on launch week for those two lines and see where books are being sold. This also separates out e-book sales. Whatever people are doing there, wherever they're buying e-books, we are able from this to look solely at market share for new books in print format.
January 2010, launch week for Simon Green's Good, Bad & The Uncanny
Retail market share 54%
March 2010, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Fealty:
Retail market share 44%
April 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead & Gone paperback
Retail market share 43%
May 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Familly
Retail market share 39%
[and this is a book that would have been competing with mass merchandisers like Target and K-Mart as well]
January 2011, launch week for Simon Green's Hard Day's Knight
Retail market share 54%
these are all books that came out before the Borders implosion, a January 2011 release like Simon's would have been the last one for
March 2011, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Jack Campbell's Dreadnaught
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family paperback
Retail market share 40%
OK, if you want to you can poke holes left and right in the argument I'm making. The only direct year-over-year 450-Borders-operating-normally vs. 200-Borders-in-bankruptcy comparison I'm making is with Elizabeth Moon, and one comparison is a point, not even a line and hardly a definitive trend. It's an anecdote. I don't know exactly how many of the copies that sold a year ago sold at the 250 Borders that disappeared over the year following.
But I've been in the business for 25 years, and I consider the year-over-year drop in retail market share for Elizabeth Moon to be jaw-dropping. It's not like people couldn't buy cheaper hardcovers on Amazon a year ago. It's not like the economy's in dramatically different shape now than a year ago, it's pretty shitty in both instances. And somehow or other, brick-and-mortar booksellers are losing huge market share to internet, and I'd suspect that it's the biggest such drop in percentage terms since Amazon arrived in business fifteen years ago, almost has to be since if you lose 10% of your market share every year for fifteen years you don't have any business left to lose. And the one big difference between brick-and-mortar and Amazon now vs. last year is those 250 Borders that went up and vanished, and it just seems to me to be abundantly clear that most of those shoppers haven't decided to drive an extra mile to find a B&N.
Let's just say I'll keep an eye on this!
And if you're looking at this and wondering if/how Borders can come up with a plan to reorganize, I don't think you'd feel encouraged.
Nielsen Bookscan gives breakdowns on sales in retail/brick and mortar channels as against sales in discount & other which includes primarily Amazon and bn.com. (Target and K-Mart are also in that line but for the typical new release sf/f hardcover these outlets aren't a factor.)
So we can look at the breakdown on launch week for those two lines and see where books are being sold. This also separates out e-book sales. Whatever people are doing there, wherever they're buying e-books, we are able from this to look solely at market share for new books in print format.
January 2010, launch week for Simon Green's Good, Bad & The Uncanny
Retail market share 54%
March 2010, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Fealty:
Retail market share 44%
April 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead & Gone paperback
Retail market share 43%
May 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Familly
Retail market share 39%
[and this is a book that would have been competing with mass merchandisers like Target and K-Mart as well]
January 2011, launch week for Simon Green's Hard Day's Knight
Retail market share 54%
these are all books that came out before the Borders implosion, a January 2011 release like Simon's would have been the last one for
March 2011, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Jack Campbell's Dreadnaught
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family paperback
Retail market share 40%
OK, if you want to you can poke holes left and right in the argument I'm making. The only direct year-over-year 450-Borders-operating-normally vs. 200-Borders-in-bankruptcy comparison I'm making is with Elizabeth Moon, and one comparison is a point, not even a line and hardly a definitive trend. It's an anecdote. I don't know exactly how many of the copies that sold a year ago sold at the 250 Borders that disappeared over the year following.
But I've been in the business for 25 years, and I consider the year-over-year drop in retail market share for Elizabeth Moon to be jaw-dropping. It's not like people couldn't buy cheaper hardcovers on Amazon a year ago. It's not like the economy's in dramatically different shape now than a year ago, it's pretty shitty in both instances. And somehow or other, brick-and-mortar booksellers are losing huge market share to internet, and I'd suspect that it's the biggest such drop in percentage terms since Amazon arrived in business fifteen years ago, almost has to be since if you lose 10% of your market share every year for fifteen years you don't have any business left to lose. And the one big difference between brick-and-mortar and Amazon now vs. last year is those 250 Borders that went up and vanished, and it just seems to me to be abundantly clear that most of those shoppers haven't decided to drive an extra mile to find a B&N.
Let's just say I'll keep an eye on this!
And if you're looking at this and wondering if/how Borders can come up with a plan to reorganize, I don't think you'd feel encouraged.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
selective reading
The Wall St. Journal had an article this week about the slow return of guns to the shelves at Wal-Mart. (no link, since hides behind their pay wall.)
Ordinarily an article like this would meet with my scorn and approbation. I am not a gun person.
But there was a sentence in the article that I enjoyed very much reading. It said that Wal-Mart -- and for all its power Wal-Mart has struggled a bit in the US in recent years, trying to broaden its appear without particular success and then struggling along with its customers during the economic difficulties of the last two years -- was starting to return things like guns and sewing cloth to its stores because it came to realize that these slow-moving items were more important to generating customer traffic with its core customers than they had appreciated.
And this made me feel better about one of my passionately held beliefs about Borders, that the major blow to the chain came in spring 2008 when the company reduced title counts at its stores. How can I possibly think that dropping titles that might have sold so few copies would be the killing blow? But I did, I do, I always will, and it's that sentence in that WSJ article this week that sums it up. No, the books hardly sold worth a damn, but the customers who did buy deep into the catalog were important customers.
Some differences which I think made this effect even more important to Borders. I think the customers who didn't buy the books still kind of noticed them, and that their presence enhanced the overall impression of the brand, more than is the case for these items Wal-Mart is returning to the shelves. And more important, there are still guns and sewing cloth to sell so Wal-Mart can turn back the clock and stop selling them. The deep catalog advantage at the best Borders was built up over a fifteen or twenty year period, and many of the books Borders stopped selling went out of print and bye-bye without Borders to sell them, making it harder to just put them back on the shelf after a year or two away. It's also one thing for books that don't sell a lot of copies to justify continuing to sell them here or there as a matter of happy inertia, and another thing to decide to get back in the business of selling books that don't really sell all that well.
Bottom line is that when George Jones was saying on conference calls in the quarters following the reduction in title count that he ordered that same store book sales were down by 13% and we think a few points of it is from overdoing the drops in title count, I think he was underestimating the real impact of what he had done.
Ordinarily an article like this would meet with my scorn and approbation. I am not a gun person.
But there was a sentence in the article that I enjoyed very much reading. It said that Wal-Mart -- and for all its power Wal-Mart has struggled a bit in the US in recent years, trying to broaden its appear without particular success and then struggling along with its customers during the economic difficulties of the last two years -- was starting to return things like guns and sewing cloth to its stores because it came to realize that these slow-moving items were more important to generating customer traffic with its core customers than they had appreciated.
And this made me feel better about one of my passionately held beliefs about Borders, that the major blow to the chain came in spring 2008 when the company reduced title counts at its stores. How can I possibly think that dropping titles that might have sold so few copies would be the killing blow? But I did, I do, I always will, and it's that sentence in that WSJ article this week that sums it up. No, the books hardly sold worth a damn, but the customers who did buy deep into the catalog were important customers.
Some differences which I think made this effect even more important to Borders. I think the customers who didn't buy the books still kind of noticed them, and that their presence enhanced the overall impression of the brand, more than is the case for these items Wal-Mart is returning to the shelves. And more important, there are still guns and sewing cloth to sell so Wal-Mart can turn back the clock and stop selling them. The deep catalog advantage at the best Borders was built up over a fifteen or twenty year period, and many of the books Borders stopped selling went out of print and bye-bye without Borders to sell them, making it harder to just put them back on the shelf after a year or two away. It's also one thing for books that don't sell a lot of copies to justify continuing to sell them here or there as a matter of happy inertia, and another thing to decide to get back in the business of selling books that don't really sell all that well.
Bottom line is that when George Jones was saying on conference calls in the quarters following the reduction in title count that he ordered that same store book sales were down by 13% and we think a few points of it is from overdoing the drops in title count, I think he was underestimating the real impact of what he had done.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Statement Night Fever
One of my clients anxiously sent me a link to a recent Business Rusch post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch regarding royalty statements. "Is this something I need to worry about?"
Well, let me give some perspective from my end...
In some ways, yes, because e-book royalty reports are particularly susceptible to problems right now.
E-book sales may be somewhat more receptive to problems because
(a) the publishers are reliant on third party royalty reports which are of varying qualitfy. As an example, Amazon's Kindle platform for the general public won't as yet generate an author-sorted royalty report. Why should they, because it's for authors who are putting up their books so they're by that author. Well, not quite. We use this platform, other smaller agents and publishers use this platform. Lack of author sort means we have extra steps as we get more things on Kindle to sort everything by the correct author. Extra work means a temptation to shortcut. What kind of reports and sorts do they provide big publishers, who might have over 10,000 titles they need to properly allocate to the correct royalty account.
(b) the reports lack the audit trail of having physical copies go places. Everything is an electron. If you think it's tough to audit a publisher's records for print sales where they have physical books that can be tracked, imagine if a major publisher tries to audit Amazon's records. The amount of computer forensics that would need to be done is staggering.
(c) the business is still relatively new, and any time you have something new you have kinks to work out. As an example, the Penguin royalty reports and Harper royalty reports are designed to give each ISBN its own royalty statement page, and for the first several years of e-book sales each e-book format had its own ISBN, which meant five or seven pages reporting sales for different e-book formats. That's a staggering amount of paper being generated. Now they are doing "only" three e-book ISBNs instead of five or seven, but anything put into e-book prior to Fall 2009 will still have the several ISBNs assigned. Even for the more recent books, a title that might once have just had a one page royalty statement for a mass market paperback will still have that one page, plus three e-book pages, plus a summary page. Better than eight pages? Yes! Better than one page? Hell's bells no!!
So yes, we've found some major e-book reporting errors. One of our books was somehow assigned the same ISBN for one e-book format as a Dean Koontz book, and our author received credit for thousands of e-book sales that belonged to Dean Koontz. It took us multiple tries to get the problem corrected, to the point where we even asked the author "hey, we told them about this six months ago, they still haven't fixed it, they must be saying it's correct, so do you want to keep $5K of Dean Koontz's money, or having tried to fix this from the publisher side shall we now go and let the Dean Koontz people know about this." Our author was very ethical, and told us to inform the Koontz camp. In another instance, this same publishing conglomerate had two books with the same title by different authors and gave our authors e-book sales to the other book. We had to threaten an audit before they finally got down to brass tacks of looking at it. How did we notice this? Well, when you look at the royalty reports for a series of books and see e-book sales of 7K, 6K, 1K, 6K, and neither I nor the author are getting angry e-mails asking why there isn't an e-book of the third book in the series, you get to thinking maybe there is an e-book, maybe it too sold 6K, and you wonder where those copies are hiding.
At the same time, please keep in mind:
1. There have always been problems with royalty statements. Twice in my life with different publishers distributed by different publishing conglomerates, I noticed that there were no Canadian royalties being reported for two straight royalty periods. Once I will forgive, because maybe there's some lag in the big publisher getting the reports to its distribution clients. Two periods in a row, that's a problem. Or there are games being played with the reserve against returns. Or sub rights money that hasn't shown up. Or the royalty rates have been set up incorrectly.
2. As hard as it can be to find e-book problems because of the paper trail/audit trail issues, they can be found if you look carefully, no different than that it's hard to notice the Canadian money is missing because it isn't there to be noticed. You find that series of books where one book in the series has a number that doesn't belong with the others. You find numbers that don't seem to dovetail with the Kindle Store ranking you've been assiduously checking.
3. Sometimes there are innocent explanations for things that seem impossible. Real world examples, Barnes & Noble put a mixed Tanya Huff "Valor" book floor display into all of their stores last summer ahead of the hardcover release of Truth of Valor, and in Fall 2009 when Charlaine Harris had nine books at once on the NY Times bestseller list stores were taking in stunningly huge quantity of her books for the 2009 holiday season. I could go into stores that sticker books many many months into 2010 and still see large numbers of Charlaine Harris books from October 2009, I can go into B&N stores now that still have 2/3 of the Valor books they got for that special floor riser promotion last summer. Going back twenty years, the Scott Meredith agency represented The Stud by Jackie Collins, and almost like clockwork we'd get one statement when lots of copies went out tied to the release of one of her newer books, and then see negative or small numbers the next time out. So yes, you can have royalty statements that report sales less than your Bookscan number for that period, the first question you need to ask is whether that holds if you look at the full year of reports, instead of just the one six month period.
Some of the examples above were offsetting errors, and sometimes an error is made in the author's favor. That said, the errors do over time trend in the publisher's direction, kind of like how you play the slot machines long enough over time the casino will win.
The message to take from Kris' post isn't that the game has suddenly changed and authors must enter full-blown panic mode because authors are now being cheated like they've never been cheated before. The message to take is that you need to be very confident that you and your agent are looking carefully over your royalty statements. Your literary agent can get several hundred pages worth of royalty reports, some maybe even a few thousand pages or more. You don't want to assume even the best agent can look as closely at those as you can look at the few pages or few dozen that might belong to you.
Well, let me give some perspective from my end...
In some ways, yes, because e-book royalty reports are particularly susceptible to problems right now.
E-book sales may be somewhat more receptive to problems because
(a) the publishers are reliant on third party royalty reports which are of varying qualitfy. As an example, Amazon's Kindle platform for the general public won't as yet generate an author-sorted royalty report. Why should they, because it's for authors who are putting up their books so they're by that author. Well, not quite. We use this platform, other smaller agents and publishers use this platform. Lack of author sort means we have extra steps as we get more things on Kindle to sort everything by the correct author. Extra work means a temptation to shortcut. What kind of reports and sorts do they provide big publishers, who might have over 10,000 titles they need to properly allocate to the correct royalty account.
(b) the reports lack the audit trail of having physical copies go places. Everything is an electron. If you think it's tough to audit a publisher's records for print sales where they have physical books that can be tracked, imagine if a major publisher tries to audit Amazon's records. The amount of computer forensics that would need to be done is staggering.
(c) the business is still relatively new, and any time you have something new you have kinks to work out. As an example, the Penguin royalty reports and Harper royalty reports are designed to give each ISBN its own royalty statement page, and for the first several years of e-book sales each e-book format had its own ISBN, which meant five or seven pages reporting sales for different e-book formats. That's a staggering amount of paper being generated. Now they are doing "only" three e-book ISBNs instead of five or seven, but anything put into e-book prior to Fall 2009 will still have the several ISBNs assigned. Even for the more recent books, a title that might once have just had a one page royalty statement for a mass market paperback will still have that one page, plus three e-book pages, plus a summary page. Better than eight pages? Yes! Better than one page? Hell's bells no!!
So yes, we've found some major e-book reporting errors. One of our books was somehow assigned the same ISBN for one e-book format as a Dean Koontz book, and our author received credit for thousands of e-book sales that belonged to Dean Koontz. It took us multiple tries to get the problem corrected, to the point where we even asked the author "hey, we told them about this six months ago, they still haven't fixed it, they must be saying it's correct, so do you want to keep $5K of Dean Koontz's money, or having tried to fix this from the publisher side shall we now go and let the Dean Koontz people know about this." Our author was very ethical, and told us to inform the Koontz camp. In another instance, this same publishing conglomerate had two books with the same title by different authors and gave our authors e-book sales to the other book. We had to threaten an audit before they finally got down to brass tacks of looking at it. How did we notice this? Well, when you look at the royalty reports for a series of books and see e-book sales of 7K, 6K, 1K, 6K, and neither I nor the author are getting angry e-mails asking why there isn't an e-book of the third book in the series, you get to thinking maybe there is an e-book, maybe it too sold 6K, and you wonder where those copies are hiding.
At the same time, please keep in mind:
1. There have always been problems with royalty statements. Twice in my life with different publishers distributed by different publishing conglomerates, I noticed that there were no Canadian royalties being reported for two straight royalty periods. Once I will forgive, because maybe there's some lag in the big publisher getting the reports to its distribution clients. Two periods in a row, that's a problem. Or there are games being played with the reserve against returns. Or sub rights money that hasn't shown up. Or the royalty rates have been set up incorrectly.
2. As hard as it can be to find e-book problems because of the paper trail/audit trail issues, they can be found if you look carefully, no different than that it's hard to notice the Canadian money is missing because it isn't there to be noticed. You find that series of books where one book in the series has a number that doesn't belong with the others. You find numbers that don't seem to dovetail with the Kindle Store ranking you've been assiduously checking.
3. Sometimes there are innocent explanations for things that seem impossible. Real world examples, Barnes & Noble put a mixed Tanya Huff "Valor" book floor display into all of their stores last summer ahead of the hardcover release of Truth of Valor, and in Fall 2009 when Charlaine Harris had nine books at once on the NY Times bestseller list stores were taking in stunningly huge quantity of her books for the 2009 holiday season. I could go into stores that sticker books many many months into 2010 and still see large numbers of Charlaine Harris books from October 2009, I can go into B&N stores now that still have 2/3 of the Valor books they got for that special floor riser promotion last summer. Going back twenty years, the Scott Meredith agency represented The Stud by Jackie Collins, and almost like clockwork we'd get one statement when lots of copies went out tied to the release of one of her newer books, and then see negative or small numbers the next time out. So yes, you can have royalty statements that report sales less than your Bookscan number for that period, the first question you need to ask is whether that holds if you look at the full year of reports, instead of just the one six month period.
Some of the examples above were offsetting errors, and sometimes an error is made in the author's favor. That said, the errors do over time trend in the publisher's direction, kind of like how you play the slot machines long enough over time the casino will win.
The message to take from Kris' post isn't that the game has suddenly changed and authors must enter full-blown panic mode because authors are now being cheated like they've never been cheated before. The message to take is that you need to be very confident that you and your agent are looking carefully over your royalty statements. Your literary agent can get several hundred pages worth of royalty reports, some maybe even a few thousand pages or more. You don't want to assume even the best agent can look as closely at those as you can look at the few pages or few dozen that might belong to you.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tourism Done Weird
Even as the success of JABberwocky in recent years has expanded the horizons of what I can afford to do, my world seems to be shrinking.
The multiple Borders bankruptcies fill me with a deep sadness not entirely because of the lost places to buy books. The entire business can become electronic but people will still want to read a good yarn and I will still have some role in that business. No, as much or more is the knowledge that these closures will make it harder to fight back against this shrinking world of mine.
It was 1993, I think, when I first headed out to Long Island on my birthday to visit Borders stores. And over the years, they've been my excuse to see the world. Lots of people went to WorldCon in San Jose. I saw the entire Bay Area from Los Gatos in the South to Fremont to Dublin to Berkley to Emeryville to Sunnyville to Milpitas. It came to be that way in areas around the country. I know the usual thing is to go and never leave the convention hotel or to leave and visit the museum that everyone goes to. Neither of those is for me, but yet I've seen the world.
1999 wasn't just the first year of my visiting London Book Fair as I discussed here. It was also when I first went to Australia and was the dawning of the international expansion of Borders into those two markets. Some things like a day trip from Glasgow to Edinburgh I think would have taken place regardless, but not getting out to the Glasgow suburbs. Parramatta in Australia has the first government house and the first sheep farm, but it also had a Borders.
I feel foolish even writing this because I am talking about behavior that isn't what "normal" people do which is go to the museums, but in actual fact I know plenty of people for whom normal is the inside of the convention center and whatever you see in the cab to/from the airport. So I hold my head high and proudly proclaim I have seen the world one Borders at a time.
And now what? The joy of seeing the world one Borders at a time was the maddening inconsistency of the brand. You never quite knew what each new Borders would bring. Who would travel the world to see the boring sameness of each "new" Barnes and Noble? I like Costco, but so many of those are stuck far from the bus routes in the car required parts of town. Visiting the world one Whole Foods at a time would be very fattening. True joy is still finding there is a Wheaton IL where you can find a Borders and Whole Foods sharing a parking lit, and sadness knowing that this is no longer the case in San Ramon.
Even right here at home, I remember how I went six months without stepping foot in lower Manhattan after 9/11 because there wasn't anything to bring me there. Will it be that way again, the entire part of the world south of Houston St. no longer part of the world I inhabit?
I do like to see the world, and by that the suburbs where people live and the power centers and strip malls where they exist as opposed to the places where the impressionists and the cubists stare down from the white-walled galleries. I guess I will find some way of doing that still. I hope so. But I'm just not sure.
And yes, I am sad knowing there are fewer places in the world where Jig the Goblin and Guards of Haven can be found, but that doesn't leave the same emptiness in my heart as does the sense that each shuttered Borders from the Jam Factory to Colleyville and Watford to White Flint closes off a small part of the world
The multiple Borders bankruptcies fill me with a deep sadness not entirely because of the lost places to buy books. The entire business can become electronic but people will still want to read a good yarn and I will still have some role in that business. No, as much or more is the knowledge that these closures will make it harder to fight back against this shrinking world of mine.
It was 1993, I think, when I first headed out to Long Island on my birthday to visit Borders stores. And over the years, they've been my excuse to see the world. Lots of people went to WorldCon in San Jose. I saw the entire Bay Area from Los Gatos in the South to Fremont to Dublin to Berkley to Emeryville to Sunnyville to Milpitas. It came to be that way in areas around the country. I know the usual thing is to go and never leave the convention hotel or to leave and visit the museum that everyone goes to. Neither of those is for me, but yet I've seen the world.
1999 wasn't just the first year of my visiting London Book Fair as I discussed here. It was also when I first went to Australia and was the dawning of the international expansion of Borders into those two markets. Some things like a day trip from Glasgow to Edinburgh I think would have taken place regardless, but not getting out to the Glasgow suburbs. Parramatta in Australia has the first government house and the first sheep farm, but it also had a Borders.
I feel foolish even writing this because I am talking about behavior that isn't what "normal" people do which is go to the museums, but in actual fact I know plenty of people for whom normal is the inside of the convention center and whatever you see in the cab to/from the airport. So I hold my head high and proudly proclaim I have seen the world one Borders at a time.
And now what? The joy of seeing the world one Borders at a time was the maddening inconsistency of the brand. You never quite knew what each new Borders would bring. Who would travel the world to see the boring sameness of each "new" Barnes and Noble? I like Costco, but so many of those are stuck far from the bus routes in the car required parts of town. Visiting the world one Whole Foods at a time would be very fattening. True joy is still finding there is a Wheaton IL where you can find a Borders and Whole Foods sharing a parking lit, and sadness knowing that this is no longer the case in San Ramon.
Even right here at home, I remember how I went six months without stepping foot in lower Manhattan after 9/11 because there wasn't anything to bring me there. Will it be that way again, the entire part of the world south of Houston St. no longer part of the world I inhabit?
I do like to see the world, and by that the suburbs where people live and the power centers and strip malls where they exist as opposed to the places where the impressionists and the cubists stare down from the white-walled galleries. I guess I will find some way of doing that still. I hope so. But I'm just not sure.
And yes, I am sad knowing there are fewer places in the world where Jig the Goblin and Guards of Haven can be found, but that doesn't leave the same emptiness in my heart as does the sense that each shuttered Borders from the Jam Factory to Colleyville and Watford to White Flint closes off a small part of the world
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