An important message from Bill Compton

Reduce.  Reuse.  Recycle.

The Ethicist

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14FOB-ethicist-t.html

Excerpted below, from the NY Times Magazine for Sunday June 14.  This is the first issue with a smaller trim size as the Times continues to try and cut costs in non-journalism areas.  

I've flown to Europe many times, and never been recognized by a flight attendant.

THE ETHICIST

Signature Act

By RANDY COHEN

I am a flight attendant. I was working a flight from Europe when I recognized Michael Connelly, my favorite author, on board. I told him I was reading his novel “Brass Verdict,” and he kindly offered to autograph it. The catch: it is a library book. Must I return the signed book to the library, or can I replace it with a new copy in a suitable jacket? J. T., ST. SIMONS, GA.

You may keep your trophy if you follow the procedure you propose and meet any other costs of retrofitting the replacement for library use. As a general matter, a library should not be regarded as an ad hoc bookstore, but on those rare occasions when you need a particular book at 35,000 feet for so glamorous an encounter, there’s no harm in it. (I’d act similarly if I met the ghost of Jane Austen on the D.C. shuttle.) I am a bit disconcerted by Connelly’s writing in a library book, knowingly or unknowingly, but whether he defaced or embellished it is something for literary critics to adjudicate.

UPDATE: J. T. bought a new copy and a heavy-duty clear plastic cover, but the original cover was affixed too firmly for her to remove. She threw herself on the mercy of a librarian, who told her, “Don’t do it again,” helped her install the new cover and let her keep the autographed copy. No charge.

British Cinema

I saw 3 movies while I was over for London Book Fair in April.

In The Loop (Sat. evening Apr. 18, 2009, Odeon Kensington #4, 1.5 slithy toads) was a British movie that had gotten some decent reviews.  I decided to go in part because I'd walked by the Odeon Kensington on every trip to London without ever actually seeing a movie there, and I decided it was high time.  In that regard, I was able to peek in to the big screen (#3) and see that it is a very nice and very big balcony theatre that will be worth keeping in mind for the future.  I wasn't sure I should go because this was a late show on the same day as my castle walk, and I was tired.  And in that regard, In The Loop did not help keep me awake.  It's a political satire spun off from a British TV show.  A cabinet minister puts his foot in mouth about the war in Iraq.  The media minister scolds him.  Efforts to improve situation only make it worse.  Minister is exiled to DC to a study committee on the war.  Only makes things worse.  The media minister curses up a storm wherever he goes, he's modeled after some minister in the Tony Blair cabinet but maybe for us in the US think of a minister who's Dick Cheney talking about Pat Leahy or Rahm Emanuel with his famous temper and then taken not just to 11 but to 18 on the dial.  Most of the laughs (and not just to me but also the handful of other people in the audience) are from this one character's abundantly foul language.  Otherwise, I don't want to say it's bad, but it's not very good either.  It's just a little flat, the occasional chuckle or wry observation but badly in need of something more.

I've had good luck seeing movies at the Odeon Covent Garden, what used to be the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue.  In fact, I believe the very first movie I ever saw in London was the delightful comedy East is East in 1999 at this theatre, and Arlington Road is another film I quite liked which I saw here.  So let's add The Damned United (Sun afternoon. Apr. 19, Odeon Covent Garden, Aud. #1, 3 slithy toads) to that list.  This is a sports movie with an excellent pedigree that is unlike any sports movie you might have seen in the US in the past 30 years.  Michael Sheen, who plays David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Tony Blair in The Queen, here plays Brian Clough, a British football (i.e., soccer) coach who gets his dream job taking over the Leeds  United team from his arch-rival, well-played by Colm Meaney.  The script is by Peter Morgan (also Frost/Nixon, also The Queen) and director Tom Hooper did the highly regarded John Adams mini-series for  HBO.  So as I said, good pedigree, and I should also single out Timothy Spall who adds wonderful supporting work as Clough's right-hand man and Jim Broadbent is in the cast as well.  So we all know this script, new coach takes over from arch-rival and it leads up to the big game where the new coach goes up against the old coach and wins dramatically.  And since I wasn't familiar with Clough's real-life story (and this movie is adapted from a novel based on Clough's story by David Peace, said novel all over bookstores in the UK), I kept waiting eagerly for the movie to tick off all of the sports movie cliches I am so fond of and so used to.  The big moment when the new coach goes up against the inherited players and makes the team his own.  But you know what, that's not what happens.  Clough fails miserably, the holdover players mutiny, management sides with the players, and several weeks into the season Clough is booted off the job and forced to beg his right-hand man whom he'd abandoned to take his dream job to re-up on their pairing.  It's not really a sports movie at all but rather a fascinating character study of a man in need, who has to have someone or something to balance his insatiable drive and lacking that drives himself off a cliff.  It's an excellent movie.  I don't know if it will come to these shores, but if it does you should seek it out.

My final UK movie would be a treat no matter how the movie was because it was playing on the main screen at the Empire Leicester Square.  This is one of the nicest movie theatres in the world, I feel safe in saying.  It's a somewhat small scale version of Radio City, with a huge huge screen and wonderful sightlines and excellent sound.  There are multi-colored lights in the auditorium that cycle thru so you can just admire that while you wait for the movie, and then as the film is about to begin the lights in the auditorim give way to a twinkling firmament above the screen.  I love going to this theatre.  It is a true Cinema Treasure.  The movie was State of Play (Wed. eve. April 22, 2009, 2.5 slithy toads).  This is a well-acted and well-made thriller with a frisson of old-time All The President's Men excitement and lots of appeal to a newspaper sentimentalist such as myself.  The ending starts to tie itself up in a few knots too many.  But Russell Crowe good, and Ben Affleck, and Helen Mirren, and Rachel McAdams, and Jeff Daniels.  I could find quibbles, and I'm giving this only a moderately favorable rating instead of a very favorable one, but bottom line is that it is well-acted, it does entertain, and I would say to see this when it comes out on video.

If I were in London today, my ambivalence about seeing Terminator Salvation would resolve, because any movie you have even the tiniest desire to see, when  you can do it on the big screen at the Empire you want to do it because the evening will be a special occasion regardless.  I love the Empire.

The Comeback Kid?

It's time for a progress report on Ron Marshall, who took over as CEO of Borders in early January, and who has been trying very very hard since the start of the year to dig out from under the hole dug by his predecessor, George L. Jones.  I had a very ambivalent relationship with Jones, whom I felt made some good decisions and some bad decisions and some interesting decisions but at the end of the day wasn't running a tight ship, wasn't solving the biggest problems quickly enough, and was rearranging the concept store deck chairs while the company's cash position was sinking like the Titanic.  I urged his firing in March 2008, and the only sad thing about the announcement of Ron Marshall's arrival was how long it took to make the change.

I am happy to say that I like pretty much everything Ron Marshall has had to say since he came on board.  He seems to be executing on what he's saying in his interviews and conference calls.  He's solving problems that need to be solved.  And I can only hope he's doing things quickly enough in these difficult economic times to put a real turnaround into effect.

To give credit where due, he is building on some initiatives left in place by George Jones.  It looks like Borders is trying to leverage the new employee computer system that was introduced in 2008.  And I felt in 2008 and continue to feel today that Borders was placing some good and right bets on the JABberwocky list, with Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson both enjoying more consistent support from Borders.  Part of the credit for that goes as well to sf buyer Morgan Burns, who will now be tending a new sf/fantasy blog called Babel Clash at the Borders web site.

So let's look over some of the things Ron Marshall has done:

He's chopped middle management at the store level.  This is something the liberal in me doesn't like to like, because there are hundreds of people who've lost jobs as a result of this.  But it's the kind of hard decision that has to be made.  Every Borders had a variety of management positions, like a sales manager or an inventory manager, because that was the way it had been done at Borders.  And that wasn't a problem in the 1980s when Borders started to march across the country and generally had little competition and state-of-the-art inventory and was opening good, high quality, well-trafficked stores in good neighborhoods.  But over time, Borders had hundreds of stores, and some of them were still big and well-trafficked but others were not.  Yet all of them still had the full assortment of middle management positions that Borders always had, and to be quite honest I was sometimes surprised to go to a mid-level or lower Borders and meet a bookseller who had one of these titles because I could look around the store and see there wasn't a lot of inventory for an inventory manager to manage.  He also dropped some middle management positions at HQ.  I'm pained by this, but I have to give this a thumbs-up.

He's made it very clear that Borders cannot shrink its way to success and that his ultimate goal is to get the Borders customer re-engaged with Borders and buying merchandise at Borders.  This might be a difficult thing to accomplish when most retailers are seeing drops in same store sales, but at least he knows that he has to get an upward sales trend going.  Thumbs up.

He's increased the frequency of reordering.  Big big big thumbs up for this.  He is addressing a core problem Borders has had in the past ten or fifteen years.  It had been the custom at Borders that each publisher would see a backlist order from Borders once every month or so, with some frontlist titles maybe ordered a bit more often and some of the deep deep backlist being ordered only every two or three ordering cycles.  This was fine once upon a time when Borders was state-of-the art, but B&N had leapfrogged Borders in replenishment by the early 1990s, and Borders kept doing things the same way it always had been.  B&N was supposed to carry a book, they'd have a fresh copy on the shelf within a week or ten days after it had sold.  Borders was supposed to carry a book, they'd sell that copy and could go three weeks or ten weeks before it was replenished.  Now, Borders will place orders every two weeks or every four weeks, which means it is much more likely that Borders will have the books customers want on the shelf when customers want them.  About time, don't you think?  Borders also had this habit of going overboard in early reorders sometimes.  If books are looked at more often, they may not need to guess so much on how much a six or eight week supply would be for an early reorder, and so Marshall thinks they may be able to have fewer returns while ordering more often.  I'm not so sure about that, but maybe.

The music/DVD section that's been a drain on Borders as sales in these categories have shipped is being diminished.  The chain is being divided into four tiers of stores.  The top tier that can still sell music/DVD (as an example, Manhattan stores that tourists may frequent) will continue to have a good selection.  The bottom tier will have only a few hundred top titles in the category.  The space that's cleared up will be given over to expanded children's, bargain, wellness, and other top performing book categories.  George Jones had been taking down space in these categories as well, but Marshall seems to be doing it right.

In February 2008, Borders introduced its new concept store, which was designed to have fewer titles and more face-outs.  They liked this so much they decided all stores should carry fewer titles.  Then they announced their big cash crunch a little bit later and hacked at inventory even further.  This was a bad thing.  It's been an ongoing problem that the worst Borders had really bad depth but this was balanced out by the deep selection at the best Borders.  This cutback in titles cut away at the depth at top stores and made them less attractive and certainly didn't make the bad stores any better.  It killed some of the JABberwocky backlist, like the Hot Blood anthologies edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett that saw small but steady sales at the best Borders locations.  It wasn't helpful to Emissaries From the Dead by Adam-Troy Castro which I would say is the quintessential example of a book that was published in early 2008 and gone from Borders by late summer that would previously have been kept on at least at the top half of their stores.   This book seems to have become a sleeper hit based on sales trends over the past two months (and it deserves to be; it's an award-winning and very very good sf mystery by a very very talented writer) and the fact that you can't buy it at Borders is a bad bad thing for me, the author, and for Borders.

Ron Marshall recognizes that you can't be a bookstore selling lots of books to dedicated readers without carrying books, and he says that depth of stock issues will be addressed.  There are some signs of this.  Tanya Huff's Blood Books are back at Borders, and there are books like The Sleeping God by Violette Malan or Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell that are hanging around at Borders (at least at some stores) which would certainly be gone if they were applying the same criteria that saw Adam-Troy Castro given the hook a year ago.   I don't know if they'll reverse course to the point of returning the Hot Blood books to their top 50 or 100 locations for horror or picking up Adam-Troy Castro again, but at least the attitude is that a Borders should carry books.

There are also plans to get booksellers more involved in hand-selling and recommending books to customers.  Interestingly enough, the new computer system has been given a facelift that will give booksellers tools to do this.  This makes me very happy, that when Ron Marshall says Borders should be doing something I can go into a store and see that the company is giving the employees good tools to do it.  If you ask for a book by a particular author, there certainly won't be tool-related excuses for a bookseller not to say "oh, bummer, we don't have this book by the author, but we do have..." or "that's right over here, and we've also been finding that people who like books in this category have really been going for that other book as well."

The one thing that saddens me is the company's plans to trim the mall store business down to under 100 stores.  Like the dump of middle managers, this may be necessary.  But I can remember the days when big shopping malls often had two or sometimes even three bookstores in them, and with B&N's B. Dalton outlets down to 50ish and Waldenbooks maybe down to 80 (which could include airport stores) we may enter an era when a mall has a big superstore or 16 books at the CVS and some cookbooks in the Williams Sonoma and nothing in-between.  That won't be good for the book business.

Borders is in a hole, but I think it can survive, I think Ron Marshall is doing things that enhance its chances of surviving and thriving, and I am very glad.

Hunger and Sugar

Hunger, seen Saturday April 11 2009 at the IFC Center, Aud. #3.  3.5 slithy toads

Sugar, seen Saturday April 11, 2009 at the AMC Empire 25, Aud. #5.  3 slithy toads.

I saw these two films prior to heading off for London Book Fair, almost 2 months ago.  Sugar is still hanging around here and there, such as at the Cinema Village in New York City.  Hunger, you'll want to keep an eye out for on DVD.  I'd certainly recommend renting both.  Hunger is the better movie, but Sugar the more enjoyable.  I've been meaning to blog about both, but as you can tell from the small # of posts in May, it's been a busy time in the weeks since I got back from London, and the blog often feels the brunt of my busy-ness.

Hunger is about a 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland led by Bobby Sands.  But while about Bobby Sands' hunger strike, the film makes an interesting and even courageous decision to NOT approach the story directly from Sands' point of view.  Rather, the first chunk of the film takes us into Sands' story by way of a couple other prisoners participating in a "blanket" strike, where the prisoners refuse to wear prison issue and go into their cells with blankets instead.  And more.  Not for the squeamish, we get to see quite vividly how you can avoid using a bathroom by smearing your feces on the wall and building mashed potato culverts to put your urine out into the cellblock hall.  Quite, quite vividly.  The purpose of all of this is to attempt to get the Thatcher government to recognize the IRA prisoners as political prisoners instead of garden variety criminals.  The authorities do not take well to this, and there are scenes of great brutality and power as the guards attempt to assert authority and give the prisoners haircuts or clean their cells.

Sands embarks on the hunger strike as a way of escalating the stakes, and the second half of the movie is devoted to that hunger strike.  He sticks to it until the bitter and fatal end, and the movie has a Kubrickian chill in depicting how the hunger strike plays out.  If you could imagine a wasting body inserted into the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the old man star child of that film being turned in bed and his bed sores treated with ointment, his parents looking on, that's about what you're getting in Hunger.   And to me, there's no better praise for the movie than to say that it's one of the most Kubrickian pieces of cinema I've seen since Kubrick himself.  Its structure as a play in three acts is reminiscent of 2001 and Full Metal Jacket.  The art and set direction, the symmetry of things, the use of music through most of the film, it's all Kubrick.  I think it very safe to say that your attitude toward Kubrick's work may well be indicative of your interest in Hunger.

There's only one flaw in the film which keeps it from getting the last half toad.  The middle act of the movie is an extended sequence in which Bobby Sands discusses his plans for the hunger strike with a visiting priest at the prison.  On the one hand it's a brilliant scene with rich,  vivid and provocative dialogue.  On the other hand, it's a godawful indulgent scene that drones on and on.  And on and on.  And almost set me into a deep and lasting slumber for what was to come.

This isn't a film to see again and again, either.  Kubrick has a chill to a lot of his work but also a kind of brute genius that makes me want to see his major films once every five years.  Hunger is a brilliant work with almost all the same ingredients, but once is both a must, and enough.

Sugar is a baseball movie that really isn't about baseball.  It comes from the writing/directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who attracted considerable attention a few years ago for a film called Half Nelson that I only half-liked.  It was about a school teacher played by Ryan Gosling with a lot  of problems and baggage besides his work, and it was worthy but flat.  I was interested in Sugar from the first reviews of it I read coming out of Sundance in 2008, but also ambivalent.

Happily, this one wasn't flat at all.  The central performance by Algenis Perez Soto as a Dominican baseball player who comes to the minor leagues in the US is totally winning.  Soto is a charmer, totally engaging.  There are some small scenes of big grace.  My sister and I both liked one where Soto visits a diner in the US, is unable to order eggs because of his inability to know what kind of egg is which, and gets the assistance of a kindly waitress who brings him a plate full of eggs in different varieties with a quick English lesson to go along with it.  I enjoyed some of the scenery.  Soto's minor league team plays in a stadium in the shadow of a bridge across the Missisippi, and there' s something about the play of the big bridge and the minor leagues that I cottoned to.

This so-called sports movie takes an interesting turn when it leaves sports behind.  Soto's Sugar decides that he isn't going to cut it and abandons his A-level minor league team to seek  friend in New York City, and the last third or quarter of the movie turns from sports to immigration assimilation drama.  Soto's absolute charmer of a performance takes the viewer along because we care about him more than the balls and strikes.  However, the downgrade on the toad scale for me in this movie comes about because I didn't feel as if the lead character's pivot from lifelong pursuit to total abandonment of baseball was sufficiently justified by what was on the screen.  This didn't bother my sister as much, because she feels from working with latino kids as a school teacher that there's a kind of macho that totally justifies what the character does without it needing to be spelled out, and she and I have agreed to disagree on that.

But we would both recommend Sugar.  It's charming, approachable, likeable, and worth the ride.

BEA 2009, Pt. 1

BEA, or Book Expo America, is the big trade show for trade publishing in the United States, and was held in New York City a couple weeks ago.  I'll do some posts over the next several days either about or inspired by the event.  Here are some photos I took (or in some cases, mis-took, because they're blurrier than we would want; I guess I'm not a professional photographer).

The first comes from inside the Javits Center, where a nice Sookie Stackhouse display was at the front entrance to the Penguin booth.  Very nice views of the current DEAD AND GONE hardcover and the True Blood Season 2 tie-in edition cover for LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS.  I am very fond of both.  And then there was the big, bold, beautiful True Blood billboard on W. 39th St. at the intake into the Lincoln Tunnel, and isn't that a nice way to start and finish the day heading to and from the Javits Center each day.

The next very blurry picture was taken at the Prometheus Books booth.  The wonderful Pyr SF line edited by Lou Anders is part of the Prometheus empire, and they had a big poster up for GEOSYNCHRON, the concluding novel in the Jump 225 trilogy by David Louis Edelman.  Prometheus was also giving out copies of the new premium-size mass market edition of CROSSOVER by Joel Shepherd, so the JABberwocky list was well-represented in this corner.

  

At the Severn House booth, it was nice to see the forthcoming historical mystery ANGEL OF THE GLADE by Scott Mackay on their display shelf.    And there on the right, I'll also mention Marcia Talley's new book, because Marcia Talley is a wonderful person whom I've known by way of Charlaine Harris for many many years.  It always brings a smile to my face when I see Marcia, and it brings a smile to my face to see her book at BEA as well.

Finally, this was a very special BEA because it's the first time in all my years in the business that I had an author officially at BEA, with an official signing in the official signing area and on a panel and totally getting the full royal BEA treatment.  So we have a picture of Brandon Sanderson participating in a panel with 

Jonathan Tropper for authors of books that had been mentioned in the Editor's Buzz panel the day before, and then we have a picture of Brandon doing his official signing of copies of new novel WARBREAKER while his editor Moshe Feder is standing up in order to take a picture of Brandon's very long signing line. Brandon also had an ALA autographing and did an interview for BookSpotCentral.  He and I met up with the people at Macmillan Audio and recorded some video that will be used to promote the audio release of The Gathering Storm.  We discussed possible comic book adaptations of Brandon's work with a couple of comic book publishers.  

I should have taken pictures at the JABberwocky dinner, where Brandon joined myself, my JABberwocky associate Eddie Schneider (celebrating his first anni on the JABberwocky team, Peter V. Brett, the publisher of Recorded Books, our man in China, our summer interns, and World's Biggest Bookstore bookseller Jessica Strider and her husband at Rachel's.  A good time was had by all.  It was my first time going to Rachel's, and I will happily go there again.  It's convenient to the theater district and the food generally received high marks.

Genius? Or Mad Man?? (aka My Life in Technology, Pt. 2)

This can be considered as the next post in the series I began way too long ago with My Life in Technology Pt. 1.

There are a couple of movies that have extra resonance to me because of my job.  One is definitely Vampire's Kiss, in which Nicolas Cage plays a literary agent who thinks he is becoming  a vampire.  It's one of Cage's classically manic performances, this one good Cage manic instead of the bad Cage manic from the very dawn of Cage's career.  Hard to believe it's 21 years now since this opened.  One of the classic scenes for a literary agent is when he's tasked to locate some old short story contract for one of the agency's most important clients, and the task -- well, shall we say it gets to him!

This is not an atypical problem.  The longer a literary agency is in business, the more the contract files should grow, and the more the number of actual important active contracts should grow as well because you sure hope in this business that your backlist is getting deeper and more important as they years go by.

So once upon a time you have one contract for Brandon Sanderson, for his first two book deal with Tor.  Then you start to sell some of the books in translation markets.  Then you do a second deal with Tor.  And you start selling more books in more places overseas.  Then you do a deal for the Elantris jewelry and the Mistborn miniatures and slowly the contract file begins to get very big.  Big contract files are bad, because it takes forever to find when you suddenly need very badly to find the agreement for the German edition of Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians.  So you end up splitting it into 2 files, one with the Tor contracts and one with the translation contracts.  Or 3 files, and put the merchandising deals into a different file, or 5 files for those 3, and then the European deals in a different file than the Asian ones and the audio deals in a different file than the jewelry ones.  This is kind of better, except with all of those different files... does the Russian contract go in with Europe or Asia, or what if the Czech contract for Mistborn gets put in with the audio contracts by mistake.  It's easier to find the right contract, but that assumes the right contract is in the right file and you still have what was once a little single contract that is slowly becoming 8" of contracts.

But I believe this is how it has always been done.

Recently I've gotten to thinking if there isn't a better way.  We now have a wonderful database program in Filemaker with a wonderfully robust Deals Database.  We have a serial # field set up, so every time we do a new deal the deal has a serial #, and that becomes a tool that helps a little bit to track the deal as the contracts go back and forth and the payments come in.

And I've had this crazy notion that we should file our contracts by Deal #.  

Which is not how it has always been done, which scares me.

And because the deals we have from before Filemaker don't have serial #s, we would have to enter all these old contracts in at least a stub entry form into Filemaker.

And if we ever stopped using Filemaker that could be a problem.

But it just seems to me it would be so much quicker over the fullness of time to find the Deal # and then go right to that contract in the file than to do things the way it has always been done/

We'd want to have backups and redundancies.  We already enter the serial # for new deals in the master deal word processing file for each author.  We could set up layouts to generate sortable summary sheets by title and author that we could put into binders.  We'd have at least 3 layers of redundancy with the printout, the database and the word processing file.  I don't think -- I don't think -- that we'd be in a situation where we'd have 862 contracts in the file by Deal # and suddenly find we didn't know any of the deal #s any more.

Anyone who comments that we should scan all of our contracts and have them as searchable PDJPEGFTIFGIF files and send them to Yucca Mountain six times a month for back-up, that's a wonderful idea, I thank you for your suggestion, etc.  I know I could lose all my hard copy in a fire or something, but the idea of having all of these contracts as electrons on a keychain drive petrifies me to death.

So it seems to me in the 21st century that doing things that I should break with the past and switch the contract files around and not keep doing the way it's always been done because that's the way it's always been done.  I'm around 85-90% leaning toward making this big break.  But  I'm kind of thinking it's still a really really bad idea because we wouldn't keep doing things the old way if it wasn't the right way as well.  Would we?