An Anniversary Musing #3

Since we've just gone live with our own e-book editions of several of the books, a good subject for my next anniversary musing would be the Hot Blood anthologies and their siblings, edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett.

I can't take credit for starting the series. That goes to Kurt Busiek, a noted comic book writer who made a brief stop at the Scott Meredith agency in the late 1980s. He sold the first book in the series to Claire Zion at Pocket Books, and I picked up after Kurt left.

The history of the series is a good prism through which to view a lot of different aspects of the publishing business.

1. The importance of relationships. When I picked up the series and was selling my first books to Claire, I was thinking the books were doing well enough that the authors should get a little bit bigger advance. Claire, whom I hadn't done business with previously, automatically assumed that my request for a raise meant that I wanted to make a big splash with my first deal and get the advance doubled or some such. It took much longer than it should have been to sort this through.

When Claire left Pocket Books to go off to NAL, we quickly found out that our relationship with Pocket was largely a relationship with Claire. Even though the books were doing well, it tended to be a struggle after she left to negotiate each contract thereafter because there was forever this lingering sense that they were doing the books because they kind of should commercially but at the same time really wished they weren't and were always looking more for reasons to stop than wanting logically to continue.

1.a. Yet relationships will sometimes get you only so far. An author named Dave Pednau wrote a powerful story for, I think, the third Hot Blood books. It was called The Accusation, if memory serves, and dealt with the aftermath of a false rape accusation. This was not PC. Claire insisted that the story be pulled, her reason ultimately coming down to the fact that she was uncomfortable with the idea that anyone would ever suggest that anything like this would ever be used as a tool. It was a good story. Thought not much known today, Pednau was a fairly well-established thriller writer for Fawcett Books who was selling decent numbers of copies. But there was no arguing on the subject. We were forced to our dismay to dump the story in order to get the anthology accepted. Even worse, Pednau passed away in 1990. Were he alive longer, I think we'd have gone back and tried at some point to get the story into a subsequent book or one of our new e-books or something.


1.a.i. This was one of two occasions when I ran into difficulty with a project that went up against conventional wisdom on issues such as this. There was a huge panic in the late 1980s and early 1990s about child abuse rings going on in daycare centers, you can read the Wikipedia article about the McMartin Preschool case here. I tried to sell a book called The Child Abuse Industry which did a very good job of debunking the panic, but of course that would be anti-child. Never sold.

1.b. One of the things with anthologies is that people have different tastes and don't all cotton to the same stories. It was always interesting to compare notes on which stories in a book were my favorites vs. Mike and Jeff's vs. Claire's. Sometimes with other stories that didn't hit such hot buttons we had more success arguing with Claire over stories that she didn't like but which I or the editors liked very much. Another major problem came about with a Grant Morrison story that had to be edited at publisher command, a truly great story by a really great author, you'll especially know the name if you pay any attention to the graphic novel/comics business. We weren't able to be in business with Grant Morrison in the series thereafter, and this was a loss.

2. Some of the horror stories you hear about publishers really are true. Back in the day, the computers at B&N had a hookup to the computers at Ingram where you could see how many copies Ingram had on hand and on order of different books at the various Ingram warehouses. When Pocket put the first three Hot Blood books out of print, I could l see quite clearly that they were doing it even though Ingram alone had hundreds of copies on order, more than enough to pretty much cover the costs of a decent-sized reprinting. This was one of my earliest experiences of having a publisher attempt to deny the evidence of my own eyes. Since it was now going to take six months instead of six weeks to cover costs of a new printing, and since these were books that management didn't really love anyway, they weren't going to keep in the Hot Blood business, and the cold equations that they'd make money doing it were no longer going to be acknowledged because the money wasn't worth it any longer.

And when they finally and reluctantly published the 10th Hot Blood book, it went clean within weeks of publication, could have sold thousands more copies, but Pocked didn't want to be in the Hot Blood business any longer. They printed barely more than they needed to cover the initial orders, refused to print any more just because it would be the logical money-making thing to do, and we had the quickest ever turnaround in my 25 years experience from publication to reversion of rights.


3. The Hot Blood series didn't really pick up until the second and third books in the series were published. The first didn't do badly, but it took the aggregate presence of multiple books on the shelves for people to notice them. For all that we had our difficulties with Claire Zion, it was also crucial to the series that she was willing to go ahead and do more books in the series even though the first had done OKish but not minted money. It's as good an example of any of why I do not like publishers that won't commit to at least two books for a new writer. This is one of my frustrations with our burgeoning business in children's publishing. We're getting as a rule considerably higher first novel advances in middle grade and YA than we get for selling sf or mystery novels, but usually the genre novels are part of a multi-book deal while the children's publishers adamantly insist on wait-and-see. Which I don't think works. By the time you wait and see, and then finally go ahead and buy the next book, which then has to be written and published, that next book will often not be published in a timely fashion. And even today, it might be harder but it is still possible to build a career over time instead of with an instant hit first novel. Jim C. Hines is a good example of this from the JABberwocky list over recent years, I think Jeri Westerson with her Crispin Guest medieval noir series might prove to be another. But children's publishers seem to be really bad on wanting instant success or having no success at all. Yuk.

4. Publishers will pay for things that make their lives easier or more defensible even if they don't actually make money. The Hot Blood books have always sold on the series and concept. It's sex, it's horror, it sells. There's no particular evidence that any Hot Blood book has sold better or worse because it has a Big Name on the cover, yet Pocket Books was happy to pay a bonus advance so that we could include a higher-priced Joyce Carol Oates story in one of the volumes. There's no overlap between Joyce Carol Oates and the Hot Blood audience, but she's a name, which makes it easier for the sales and marketing people to talk to retail accounts about the book, so they'll pay for that. In the case of Jeff Gelb's solo edited SHOCK ROCK, having Stephen King's "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" was a mixed blessing. The number of copies that Pocket was able to ship was extravagant in the extreme because of the Stephen King story, but it didn't increase the actual audience commensurate with the added copies that could be shipped. Which leads to bad sell-thru, which retailers hate worse than anything. Sell one copy of one, and they love you, sell ten of one hundred and they hate you. So orders get cut back, and you have to work to overcome that. Names, names, names. Even with the anthologies Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner are editing for Ace today, Ace wants very very badly to have x # of NY Times bestsellers in each book because it makes them feel warmer and fuzzier, even though none of those names are more of a sales hook than Charlaine herself being in the book. And of course publishers are blind and oblivious to the fact that their quest for names sometimes forces editors to take inferior stories by better-known authors. That might lead to bad word of mouth, that might create problems with the long tail of the anthology or make people more reluctant to buy the next. But those are all worries for another day, and the publisher is concerned only that having names makes it easier in the present to push books into sales channels.

After Pocket ended the Hot Blood series, the books lay fallow for several years, though we did set up most of them with decent results on pioneering e-book company Peanut Press, with some decent results. And then John Scognamiglio, who'd been a junior editor at Pocket during the waning days of the Hot Blood series, moved to Kensington. He had fond memories of the series, and decided to bring it back with new books and reissues of the old ones. That whole relationship thing again! This meant we were able to have some of the same conversations about how many names we should have!! But which also brings me to my next numbered point...

5. Covers Count! The Kensington mass market reissues of the Hot Blood books had some excellent covers that were at the same time very very bad. The packaging was so intently focused on the names in each volume that the Hot Blood concept and the Gelb/Garrett co-editor names too easily got lost. This was a problem but not an insurmountable one at Borders which had a discrete horror section and stickers on the books that told employees where to shelve them. This killed the books at Barnes & Noble, which had done away with its horror section. Employees would see "Joyce Carol Oates" in really big letters on one book, "Jack Ketchum" on another and "Lawrence Block" on a third, and instead of having the benefits of shelf presence for the series (see above, re: how series took off initially only when more than one book was on shelves) the books had a tendency to be strewn over the entire length and breadth of the general fiction section where the horror titles were now being mixed in. We did object, but sometimes when publishers are set on doing things a particular way they are really set on doing things a particular way. We've been having that same problem today with Scholastic, which put bad covers on the Alcatraz novels by Brandon Sanderson and refused to listen to us at the time of initial publication and even today with Brandon a #1 bestselling author refuses to repackage and reissue the books. They say they've suggested the idea to major accounts who say they're not interested, I say they're Scholastic and if they just went ahead and did it for a #1 bestselling author the accounts would react accordingly. Deep down, the cover might not have been a good idea, but unless you have a change in personnel it's difficult for someone to volunteer to do something that if successful might prove an earlier decision to have been wrong. So even after you can look at your sell-thru and see that things aren't working, it's full speed ahead. Getting back to Kensington, it was also interesting that they put very different packages on their trade paperbacks
for the new Hot Blood books than they did on the mass markets for the reissues. In this case, there are good reasons for this. They were able to get some Front of Store promotion for the trade paperbacks with more upscale covers that never could have been gotten for the much louder covers of the reissues that certainly would stick on a rack at the supermarket.

6. And all of this also circles back to Borders. The mass markets did have shelf presence at Borders because of those stickers and the tight confines of the horror section, people could go to a Borders and find three or five or seven Hot Blood reissues (depending on the strength of the individual store) all together, and people would buy them. Not in vast great quantities, maybe Borders sold 250 copies a year of the top books in the series and fewer as you went down the list. But these were the sorts of books that the best Borders carried that other bookstores did not, of the books that gave people a reason to walk into the best of Borders. And the kinds of books that were dumped uniformly in 2008. Borders didn't go bust because they stopped carrying the Hot Blood books, let's be clear about that. We're looking at $10K or $11K in lost sales for a chain that went belly up owing orders of magnitude more than that. But I am utterly convinced of the fact that the devaluation of the brand image when they lost the depth of selection at their best stores was one of the things that started the final death spiral of year-over-year sales declines over the past three years. While Borders didn't go bust because they stopped carrying Hot Blood books, the books went bust without Borders to sell them because that was the primary outlet for physical copy sales. No coincidence that the books were remaindered and put out of print over the year following the title drops at Borders.

7. Which also points out to the importance of the physical bookstore, at least as recently as 2008. Yes, people could go on line and buy copies of the books, but the on-line experience is still not as much a browsing experience. The physical bookstore is still where you can browse the shelves and decide to buy something because it catches your eye.

In this post I've spoken lots about the business side of the Hot Blood series

Let me close with a tribute to the creative end.

The Hot Blood anthologies contain a lot of great horror stories. I love The Tub in Hotter Blood, or Black Cars in Hottest Blood. There were multiple Stoker Award finalists and some Stoker winners included in the anthologies. Graham Masterton was a standout contributor to the series with almost every volume having a long novella from him, many of them brilliant pieces of work. The series crossed cultural lines way more often than is common in the anthology trade. Grant Morrison was just one of several comic book writers who did good prose work for the Hot Blood books. Film director Mick Garris was in the series, as were other film industry veterans. Some of the books have music industry types writing prose fiction.

Please do see for yourself. If you click here you'll find buying links for all of the currently available formats (Kindle and Nook as of this writing) for the books available thru JABberwocky. And I want to give some public thanks to John Fisk.
Every time I go looking at the array of covers for these new e-book editions, I smile, for I think John did a wonderful job coming up with the perfect vibrant look.

I've been working the Hot Blood business for over 20 years, and I don't think I'm near finished with it. I'd love to see a publisher do a Best of Hot Blood compilation or some of the best stories in the series from women writers (erotic horror isn't just a guy thing!).

Going Busting

I'm scared by the full-throttle attack on public employee unions that's taking place in many of these United States rights now.

Not unambivalently. Unions can stand for featherbedding, for archaic work rules, for stagnation. But they can also help individual employees to stand up to large corporations, to help raise living standards for their members. Bottom line, there's a reason why big corporations fight so hard to keep unions out, and it isn't because they're looking out for the little guy. And every bad thing you can say about unions, you can say sometimes about employers. If there are union heads living high on the hog off member dues, there are corporate CEOs doing the same. There are businesses that are staying wedded to old ways of doing things. I spent seven years working for Scott Meredith, who was in many ways the epitome of a bad boss.

Public employee unions are a little bit more awkward for me, largely because most politicians of my acquaintance especially here in New York City are very fond of having union support, union phone banks, union contributions, and are very eager to do the bidding of unions in ways that are harmful to everyone else in the city. For many years in NYC, any felony trial required the jury to be sequestered during the deliberations, even if nobody in the media was covering or would care about the trial. This was expensive, disruptive, unappealing to potential jurors. But it also meant jobs for court officers who had to watch over the jurors. As a result, it took many many years to do away with this stupid law. Multiply that out by negotiations across the country, where public employee unions have won things in the legislature that they couldn't win through collective bargaining or gotten things in collective bargaining that have price tags paid after the mayor leaves office, and yes, public employee unions have contributed to the financial crisis that states are facing.

But...

It isn't just an expense problem that's leading to the fiscal crisis. It's also a revenue crisis because of the economic collapse, the Great Recession, of recent years.

The general tack of the argument is to say that public employees should be happy to give up on things like good medical care or good defined benefit pension plans or good protection against unjust job termination because workers in the private sector have seen all of these things eviscerated in recent years.

It says that your goal isn't to uplift people but to bring them down. It buys into the worst short term logic of the capitalist marketplace that puts short term profit over all other concerns. It buys into the idea that no government is good government and that the best tax is no tax.

And I don't buy into that philosophy.

We aren't going to make our country better, our business climate better, our prospects better, by having a country full of people who can't afford good medical care, who can't afford to retire, who have to worry that they'll be fired for teaching evolution.

The United States is a rich country. It shouldn't squander its resources, no person or family or business or government should, but rich people are quite capable of spending money in frivolous and silly ways, and some of that money can be paid over in taxes to the greater good of all of us. Regulation can create an environment where business can go and thrive just like good parenting can do that for children, and this is an analogy I'll take and run with. Corporations are often like children, rapacious in their quest for immediate gain with no cognizance that it isn't always good to get exactly what you want at any given particular time.

I'm a businessman. I get to deal with government red tape. It can be a pain in the neck. But I can see as my authors work with publishers how my ability to leverage a client list helps every author on my list to do better -- and could do better still if authors could actually collectively bargain with publishers. Follow the logic of Scott Walker, and if one author will agree to a 4% royalty then all should, if one author will sell film rights then all should, the goal should be to single-handedly protect the interests of the publisher until every author is thoroughly impoverished.

I want to say that some of the public employee unions have had this coming because they've been very corporate in their rapacious approach to using all tools at their disposal to get pension and benefit programs that are ultimately unsustainable. And how many of those unions would support a governor who says "no raises, I need to fund the pension plan!"

But we as a society won't be better off if we can cut them off at the knees, if we do away with the idea that good benefits and good middle class jobs are something worth fighting for. That's something Henry Ford recognized, that his employees had to have some chance of buying his cars.

Quick Newsy Notes

A few items from the past week...

HarperCollins is doing a "this tape will self-destruct" thing on its e-book library loan program, allowing 26 circulations per library purchase. Why? I figured this out before I read it officially. They feel this about matches the iifespan of a printed book in the typical library, and they don't wish to have an e-book purchase become an eternally available sort of thing when a print book truly can't be loaned forever before it falls apart. You can find a Library Journal article on the subject here, link courtesy of publishersmarketplace.com. I'm of mixed emotion on this. I don't think it's prima facie a heinous thing to do because businesses do need to adjust to changing business models, and the longevity of the product sold is enough of a concern that it's just kind of sitting there to be noticed and looked at. On the other hand, it pisses off customers. In the real world, libraries rarely would replace copies of a book that was ready to go to pasture unless it was maybe something like Harry Potter that doesn't come along very often. The book would be discarded or sold away at a Friends of the Library sale for 25¢ and that would be it. The main difference might be that if a patron discovers, let's say, Simon Green's Nightside series when the library had the 10th book, maybe they would go out and buy the first ten and now with e-book lending they could still find the first book sitting on the electronic shelf six years later. But even though readers are readers, I'm not sure the dedicated library patron would be the reader who'd go and actually buy a series like this. Hence, I feel as if Harper is addressing a real problem, but also that they've inflated and enlarged this bogey-man beyond the stature it actually deserved, and thus perhaps come up with a remedy that's a little more punitive sounding than it needs to be.

That same issue of the Publishers Lunch Deluxe from publishersmarketplace.com reports that Bloomsbury is reporting e-book sales at 40% now, while Sourcebooks was saying 35%. On the other hand, Penguin still has print as 85% of its business and thinks people need to be reminded that the lion's share of the book business is still in the old-fashioned print variety. Penguin also reported having a very good year even after taking reserves and allowances for the $42M that Borders owes and additional sums from the bankruptcy of RED Group, the major bookseller in Australia and New Zealand.

Tweeted a link to a NY Times article that went live last night about bookstores dealing with non-bookstore channels to sell books. This is the kind of thing that's hardly news news, though the Times tries to hook it as having new urgency in a post-Borders era. Alas, these channels can't replace Borders. Their selections are too small, maybe you can get a couple hundred appropriate books into a big Whole Foods markets, or twenty in some other retail channel. These sales also don't help a lot, because they can be invisible. Publishers do look at Bookscan. We once had a book by John Zakour, Man's Guide to Pregnancy, that was selling a gazillion copies at Motherhood Maternity. But because none of those sales are on Bookscan, selling the sequel was impossible because (1) we had to take a "trust us" approach in telling people that there really were all of these sales because it was 90% of more and the visible sales to other publishes hardly there at all and (2) if you don't think the sequel will sell to the same place then you have to conclude there's no market to be had.

Finally, we've achieve launch on stage 2 of our e-book program with most of the Hot Blood erotic horror anthologies now up for sale at Kindle. We should have those up on Nook soon. Kobo we're very close, they have a slightly more cumbersome process but the account is set up. We had a problem getting the account set up at iBooks which took weeks to fix, and now we're having trouble getting them to accept uploads of the same ePub files that everyone else is perfectly happy with. We need to get in touch with Sony, still. And Mayer Alan Brenner and James Robert Baker programs are progressing, while Rick Shelley is starting to come up after.

The True Social King or the Grit Network's Speech

11:37 having the presenter do all the encomia for the acting nominees instead of the array of past winners, well OK, not lime the thing they did the past few years is unalterable. But the Best Picture nominees are all lumped into one montage. The producers don't have their names read aloud and have to settle for just type on the screen. And even the Best Picture winers have to deal with music telling them time is too shirt. C'mon, broadcast somewhere around 3:15 you can let the winners for Best Picture have their say.

11:32 why Jurassic Park music of all the films Spielberg has directed

11:31 not in love with his acceptance speech. trying too hard.

11:25 Colin Firth was also great in A Single Man last year.

11:20 unless Jeff Bridges wins in a category that is almost certainly and deservedly going to Colin Firth, safe to say that True Grit is the evening's big loser. Lots of nominations, lots of bos office, no love from Oscar. I didn't like the movie all that muspch save the painterly and stunning cinematography by roger Deakins, certainly not the performance by Bridges. I did love Jesse Eisenberg in Social Network, but as a stutterer myself I can tell you there are bits of the teenage me on the screen in Firth's King's Speech performance.

11:19 she will thank Mr Oster for inventing the blender she blends her protein shakes with in the press room afterward.

11:18 and giving such a boring cliche ridden speech that I would rather be listening to Jar Jar.

11:16 the buzz is right, what would Jar Jar Binks say to have his next door neighbor winning an Oscar?

11:13 Warren Beatty, being the loving husband to Annette Bening. He coulda been a contender, and not just on the football gridiron in Heaven Can Wait. Buzz is Portman, I want Bening.

11:08 Fancy Feast ad it's not, but M&M ad cute

11:02 supposed to be David Fincher's category and is not. Tom Hooper takes it for King's Speech..Well, it's a good movie too, but I am disappointed. But I will plug Hooper's earlier film The Damned United. One of the best sports movies I have ever seen, to where it is hardly a sports movie at all. Bottom line, much as I wanted Fincher and The Social Network to win in this category, I cannot begrudge Hooper the win.

10:52 John Barry, Tom Mankiewicz, Gloria Stuart, William Fraker, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Culp, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Yates, Arthur Penn, Susannah York, Ronald Neame, David Wolper, Jill Clayburgh,, Irwin Kerschner, Blake Edwards, Theoni Aldredge.

10:49 the Lulu German chocolate cake is really good, sorry Jim C Hines but this is the one place where coconut s a good thing. I am a big fan of the Juniors version of this cake but have to make special trip to Brooklyn to buy it. Only problem with liking Lulu version is that they do not always have the same cake lineup so it's not like I can count on having when I am in the mood for it.

10:48 and he is giving such a delightful speech

10:46 found myself rooting for the song from 127 Hours after hearing all four, but I cannot complain to have Randy Newman winning. Hard to believe 20 nominations for him have resulted in so few wins.

10:41 I walked out of Hereafter. I couldn't quite believe I was walking out of a Clint Eastwood movie, but after the wonderful opening scene of the tsunami, the movie gets boring and dull and even worse pretentious. Lots of good talent, Matt Damon whom I always like and Jay Mohr and Eastwood is Eastwood. But my only regret is that I didn't Orleans before the Tube bombing which just sickened me. You have to earn the right to get emotional points out of terrorism, and otherwise you're the worst kind of exploiter. And I sat watching that scene, kind of figured where it was going before I got there, and said to myself that it is Eastwood and he can't be going there. But go there he did. A bitter aftertaste, that's the main takeaway for me from that movie.

10:33 is this four for Inception? And now another well-deserved win for Social Network for editing. I do not often think of editing when I think of a film, but just thinking back to the opening fifteen minutes of this movie, it is hard not to. The crackling conversation between Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend won't crackle without good editing. Te tension that simmers as the opening credits roll over the walk back to the dorm room, that's a lot due to the editing. I didn't love Social Network the second time I saw it, and yet each new win, each playing of the movie's theme, makes we want to see again.

10:31 bad repartee, nothing new, and white ties that you can hardly tell are there since they fade into the shirts.

10:19 but this musical montage that just finished?

10:16 what a wonderful excited enthusiastic speech from the documentary winner, and yes this of us in NYC are happy to hear NYU mentioned, not sure if I have ever heard NYU in an acceptance speech before. What a great speech.

10:09 the Randy Newman song is nice but sounds like 16 other Randy Newman songs for animated movies. I like Newman, scores for The Natural and Ragtime are bookends at the earlier end of his career but not this. The second nominated song is also nice but sounds vaguely familiar. I gets me humming some other song, something la da da, I can go the distance or something like that, instead of the song itself.

9:59 two wins for Alice in Wonderland? Wow, if Tim Burton entered an Oscar pool he may be the only person with any chance of winning.

9:54 the red velvet "twinkie" at Lulu was quite good but must try and pace myself for the other two treats...

9:51 in fact I think Inception now has the most Oscars on the night. Which will not win Best Picture. Better to have the Fancy Feast ad win than Inception. Which if put into pill form would put Ambien out of business.

9:46 but one of the major changes in Oscar voting in my 30 years paying serious attention to such things is that the awards in smaller categories have become more likely to go to deserving winners instead of the evening's sweeping Best Picture.

9:44 and a pleasant surprise that it won. most of the buzz for this category was that it would go to Alexandre Desplat as part of a King's Speech evening.

9:43 my favorite original score is that for Social Network

9:39 I cannot believe they just took two minutes to talk about the renewal of the ABC license to televise.

9:32 but this is an amazingly competitive category with Geoffrey Rush, Mark Ruffalo in particular both giving worthy performances. I have been watching Christian Bale for close to 25 years since Empire of the Sun, and there as so often he has been overpraised in so-so movies lie that or gone unnoticed in things like Newsies or Swing Kids, which might be the prior movie where I most warmed to him, which I haven't done very often indeed. I am almost surprised at how much I liked him in The Fighter. And listening to his acceptance speech -- Ewan McGregor one hardly sees doing other than a British accent and Christian Bale only seems to be in movies where he does American dialect.

9:31 and he does

9:30 Supporting Actor has to go to Christian Bale

9:19 David Seidler's speech was very nice. I do not think this was the best script in the category, but no complaints. Oh -- the Fancy Feast ad in the last commercial break was better than some movies I have seen over the past hear. The Diet Coke commercial just ended, are they maybe getting a little too full on themselves in Atlanta?

9:15 the adapted screenplay win for Aaron Sorkin for Social Network is expected and well deserved. Sorkin's speech isn't as tightly edited as the movie was.

9:14 Blinded by the white! These two white tuxes together on stage are screechingly awful to look at.

9:06 Toy Story 3 was one of the best films of the year, deserves this, everyone expected it to win. And the winner clearly had his speech prepared, unlike Melissa Leo. Who let me say was really good in Frozen River. Just not, not, not that good in The Fighter.

9:03 More vapid dialogue in presenting the Animated Short. Justin Timberlake deserves better.

9:01 I thought Melissa Leo was one of the least pleasant things in the somewhat overrated (good, just overrated) The Fighter. Jacki Weaver was one of the best things in Animal Kingdom, which you must rent. And Helena Bonham Carter whom I never like was wonderful in King's Speech.

8:58 but credit Melissa with a good adlib.

8:55 pleased that Jacki Weaver was nominated for Animal Kingdom

8:55 please not Melissa Leo.

8:52 making lecherous small talk about Anne Hathaway? Who is writing this thing?

8:51. serendipity, here comes Kirk Douglas.

8:49. I think my biggest regret in the nominations is that Michael Douglas wasn't nominated for Best Actor for Solitary Man. But nobody saw it, and Wall Street Money Never Sleeps some people did see but it wasn't as good a performance and wasn't a fantastic movie.

8:47 I did not like True Grit, but Roger Deakins deserved to win this for True Grit. No sweeps tonight, that's for sure.

8:45 Alice in Wonderland for Art Direction? One film will not win all three awards this year. How many people have this in the Oscar pool.

8:41 first year I cab live blog with an iPad

8:40. Flatter than the dictator's nose after the steamroller in Sleeper.

8:38 The dreidel joke was borrowed from my review of Inception.

8:35 I though the pre-opening opening was a commercial. The opening montage I think is falling flat.

8:25 Once again doing live blog for Oscar night. I am rooting for The Social Network, but it will probably be Best Picture for Rocky done as Masterpiece Theatre. Main course for dinner some brisket from Righteous Urban Barbecue, about to take some mashed potatoes and veggies off the stove to tap off the meal. Desserts tonight come from Lola in Chelsea.

An Anniversary Musing, #2

A couple years ago I did some postings on technology and the agenting business, in the first one I talked about how the Scott Meredith Agency kept a lot of records on green index cards, called not very creatively "green cards." Alas, those were gotten rid of in the mid 1990s when the agency moved, doing some of these anniversary posts I think how wonderful it might be to look over some of the detailed histories on some of them. But they ain't around, we must move forward!

One of my other earliest clients was a horror writer by the name of Ronald Kelly. I remember being held rapt by his "first" novel on the Shortline bus ride into Manhattan. It was then called "The Tobacco Barn." It ended up being published right around New Years, 1989 into '90, as Hindsight. It took rather a long time to sell, longer I would still think than it should have, before being taken by Wendy McCurdy, then at Kensington/Zebra, so even though Ronald was one of my very earliest clients he was beat to publication by several other authors who came later.

Like many of the authors I took on during my Scott Meredith years, Ronald had used the agency's fee reading service, and The Tobacco Barn wasn't the first novel the agency had seen. Alas, those records we kept track of on what I think were the white cards, which are as dead and gone as the green cards, but if memory serves he went into horror after some initial tries at writing westerns. I didn't read the earlier novels but Barry Malzberg whom I believe did would tell me that Ronald had kind of hit upon success by sheer force of will, that he kept at and kept at until he found something that worked. That makes Ronald a little bit of a rarity. By far the large majority of aspiring writers don't have and won't have and can't have the special gifts that allow success to occur. And then a lot of the writers who do and will and can have those gifts, they have them the same way that some people are born to hit baseballs or shoot baskets. To achieve the goal through hard work, passion, commitment -- even the talented writers need that, but to make the gifts yours, to kind of take and grab them, is another skill set entirely that is vanishingly rare.

So I liked The Tobacco Barn, I worked hard over a couple years and I think nine to twelve submissions though it may have been more, to place it. Ronald ended up becoming a fixture of the Zebra horror program over the next half dozen years, with eight books published.

Alas, the Zebra horror program came to an end, with two books that Ronald had written that were not to be published. The horror market had pretty much collapsed entirely at that time, and I had no idea how or where or to whom I could market them. It didn't help that there wasn't a lot of editorial support at Zebra. The horror line was kind of about the product, they had their two slots to fill and they were going to fill them. Ronald wasn't pushed to go beyond what he needed to do to fill out his spots in that program, which meant the books he'd written with that program in mind weren't likely to go over as mainstream horror/thriller titles.

A decade or so after we parted ways, I was happy to see Ronald have a renaissance of sorts. Two years ago, Cemetery Dance published a collection of his short fiction called Midnight Grinding and Other Tales, and subsequent to that one of the novels that was caught up in the horror collapse of the mid 1990s, Hell Hollow, finally saw print as well. You can track down some of the good notices for those publications here. Another collection called Dark Dixie is available for e-book. And you can check out Ronald's own blog here.

My relationship with Ronald was hardly the longest-lived that I've had, but I will always have a soft spot for him and his work because he was one of my very very first clients, not to many that I was reading on the Shortline bus which automatically puts him in the first six months of my now 25-year career. His resurrection in recent years is inspiring.

An Anniversary Musing, #1

  It was 25 years ago today that I started at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and here's a glimpse at the hardcover cover of the very first book I sold, Mary's Grave by Malcolm McClintick. Scott Meredith had a reading fee service, and this novel was what was called a "send-up," a book that a fee reader liked enough to suggest it be taken on. The author had a story or two published in Hitchcock's, and this was the first in a series of novels featuring the George Kelso character who also appeared in some of the AHMM stories. The book was published quickly, in the first half of 1987, and subsequently appeared in paperback from Avon. The acquiring editor at Doubleday was Michelle Tempesta, the long-time editor of the Doubleday Crime Club, and at Avon the editor who took the first three Kelso books was Nancy Yost. When the Doubleday family sold Doubleday to Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate which had owned Bantam Books and which now owns the entire Random House publishing empire in the US, the library-oriented hardcover lines at the old-line Doubleday, which included a small sf program edited by Pat LoBrutto as well as a western and romance imprint, were all terminated. My relationship with Malcolm did not last long. I was not very diplomatic or tactful in my publishing youth, not very much at all, and Malcolm was not the easiest author do deal with, and after a blow-up he ended up getting switched to another agent at Scott Meredith. Avon lost interest in publishing category mysteries, and Nancy Yost ended up establishing her own literary agency, which has endured nicely with a good list of mystery, romance, paranormal, and other categories.

There used to be several library-oriented lists like Crime Club. Charlaine Harris stopped at the Walker and Scribner mystery lists along the way to Sookie Stackhouse. Walker got out of the mystery business, and when Scribner was sold to Simon & Schuster the same kind of thing happened as when Doubleday was sold to Bertelsmann, the larger company preferring to place bigger bets instead of relying on smaller trickles of reliable income. Today Avalon Books still has a library-oriented hardcover publishing program in the mystery, western and romance genres, and Five Star Books popped up to serve the market as well, this series packaged by Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books for publication.

Bride of List!

All told I have visited around 80 of the Borders that are closing, adding two in Burlington and Peabody MA this past weekend.  Around 25,000 square feet, e average store that's closing.  Leave aside the drain represented by entire stores, each of those could have done it's business in 5000 fewer square feet, 5K x 200, and that's one million extra square feet floating around, and the troubling thing is that the 450 stores that remain open probably carry around another 2M spare tire around the belly, and the bankruptcy filing doesn't help that. 

Start at the top, alphabetically by state, and the Anchorage store is as typical an example as any.  When I visited Anchorage in 2006, the Borders was disappointing. I had been to the amazing Waldenbooks in Wasilla, which had an amazing selection in an amazingly small space, kind of a captive audience, and then the BN in Anchorage which was selling books in jaw-dropping quantity. And then the Borders?  Well, it was just OK. It had no doubt been first in the market, but clearly was no longer best. Move ahead four years and a remodel or two later with four years of likely declines in same store sales, with the music and movies sections gone, and then you would end up with that 31k sq ft box looking like the tumbleweed friendly environs of the Plano TX store in 2010. 

In the San Francisco area, we've got the too expensive flagship in Union Sq that's closing, the Pleasanton store in the Walmart mall where you can almost see the better-situated BN on the other side of the highway in Dublin, the Fremont store which I doubt ever made much money, and the store in San Francisco Center that is only 20k sq ft and doing a decent business but which must be carrying a heckuva rent bill. 

LA, there's the Century City store that replaced a prosperous small Brentanos with a Borders that I thought should have been a gold mine but somehow never came close. Pasadena was 40k sq ft, which can't be justified any more, and the equally large Glendale store that was a ghost town long before a spiffy huge BN opened across the street. I am surprised that the older Long Beach store is going, but then you see it's 30k sq ft which is too big even though it was still selling books. The newer store in downtown Long Beach was a shipwreck from day one. 

Connecticut us getting creamed. The Danbury store was quite prosperous in 2002, Milford is an upgrade from a Waldenbooks to a new wing of the mall by e movie theatre, and that's going. Manchester was a really nice store once upon a time but was in decline and started to look seedy and had a spiffy new BN to contend with -- and still had a better wider selection in the sf/f category than that spiffy BN as of Thanksgiving.  Is there any chance Borders could have sublet the old store several years ago and grabbed the BN location?  Southbury was a Waldenbooks replacement new concept store that opened less than three years ago. 

Chicago is getting creamed. It is the anti-DC, a market where every store seemed below average but where more and more and more were opened.  Huge swaths of the market are now being ceded to BN. But what does it say about the company that 16 of 29 stores within a 50 mile radius of downtown are closing?  Did they all start losing money only recently? I mean, the Evanston store was my first introduction to a seriously underwhelming Borders, and that was over a decade ago. 

And on and on it goes, stores that never should have opened (Commack NY) or ended up on the wrong side of the tracks when a better-located BN came along (Peabody MA) or too big and perhaps helped to their death by bad management (Westbury NY was not known for the quality of its alphabetization, and Monroeville and Langhorne PA a tad large), or relocated to make more room for more stuff even after the death of music-movies was on the horizon (Austin north), or strangely placed (Mt. Kisco is mediocre, White Plains is starting to fade, let's in-fill with a store in Scarsdale).

All happy bookstores are alike, all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own special way!

When I went to Dallas, I got annoyed that Borders was sending big national authors to their original Dallas area store that was big, cobwebbed, not looking very prosperous any longer, while there was a livelier happier somewhat newer store a few miles down the road. Why?  Because that was the old store where big tours had always stopped, thus they always should. The "good" news is that the friendly better nicer store is going to stay open, the original Dallas store will not. Alas, that inability to be fleet of thought remains intact.

Some people want to blame the Borders inventory stickers as the quintessential example of inefficiency. Um, NOT! Stickers told employees where to shelve books, every store has to do that somehow, you can go to a BN and watch employees spend time scanning books to figure out where to shelve them, which is its own kind of inefficiency. Books needed to cross the warehouse and go from the incoming boxes tome outgoing boxes, sticking along the doesn't add a lot of time. The process could cause an efficient business to take ten days instead of eight to move a book, the problem at Borders was doing in weeks what BN could do in days, and Books a Mllion and many other stores use stickers.

No more long Borders posts forma while, unless developments warrant.