On Doing Better...

 One of the great joys of Fantasy novels is the opportunity to experience the way characters evolve and grow, and to see that process demonstrated through the choices they make. The characters we love best are those whose sense of personal responsibility expands ever outward as they recognize their own power to effect change in the world – to aid someone in distress, to right wrongs. 

We love this journey, in part, because it reflects our best hopes for ourselves. Most of us know that too often we narrow our own sense of responsibility, rationalizing that we are limited in what we can or even should do in our lives to help others when they need us. We call it being realistic or practical. Usually, it is an excuse for cowardice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the limits of my own sense of responsibility in the context of my reflections on a moment where I failed to act when I should have.

As some of you reading this already know, in 2009 I hosted a JABberwocky dinner at a World Fantasy Convention in San Jose. At that dinner, a friend and valued colleague, Janci Patterson, was subjected to unwanted and unacceptable behavior by another guest at that dinner, which made her deeply uncomfortable. 

I did nothing but watch as one of my authors made comments that made her feel awful at an event that I put on.

I wish I could precisely reconstruct my thinking on that night. Why didn’t I intervene? It wasn’t that I couldn’t empathize. From early in life I had plenty of personal experience -- the harshness of middle school or the awkward high school parties -- with the pain and discomfort that can be caused by other people’s bad behavior. 

On that night in San Jose I should have known how wrong this thing I was witnessing was. And yet I did nothing to stop it. 

I have no clear answer for why I made that bad choice except to say that somehow I determined it was not my responsibility. 

And, in doing so, I failed a crucial test. 

I have apologized to Janci for my failure. But no apology is sufficient unless it is coupled with an honest effort to change.

So that is what I am committing to in writing this. I have made a promise to myself and to any who read this that I will expand my sense of responsibility, as I hope we have all learned to do over the past year or two. 

I don’t expect that doing so will be easy. But that is what taking responsibility means and that is what I pledge myself to do. It is part of what I believe I owe to Janci and, as importantly, to myself in my own efforts to be the kind of person I wish to be. 

Recaparama

I guess it's that time of year when we talk about the year that was...

On the business end of things:

When you're a literary agent, your work often comes ahead of the reward.  With the time lag between a book selling and the royalty reports coming along, a book that sells in January might not bring a royalty until November or with reserves against returns until the following May.  So in 2009 and 2010, we were getting paid for when there were 8 or 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the bestseller lists in 2008 and 2009.  We were getting paid a lot.  It was also a bit like a one-legged stool, a bit unstable because so much of the income was coming in just a couple checks each year.

In the years since, the business has become more stable.  The Charlaine Harris business is still huge, not as big as when there were 9 books on the bestseller list but still big.  Other authors have gotten bigger in the past few years, Brandon Sanderson or Peter Brett or Jack Campbell.  Not so much bigger as to totally make up for that whole "not having 9 books on the bestseller list at once" thing, but bigger.  So even if my total income is down, I'm happy because the overall business is somewhat more stable.

But 2012 and 2013 are definitely inflection years.  The business is more stable, but because the income isn't just from two checks a year.  So 2012 starts with me, Eddie and Jessie still working out of the living room of my old apartment.  By February we are looking for a real office.  By May, we are in one.  By June, we have added another person to the staff with Brady McReynolds on board to handle foreign rights.  By September or October it becomes obvious we don't have enough people to do everything we need to be doing and we end the year with two 2-day part-timers.  New office, new staff, all of these things cost money, and we're making less of it in 2012 than in 2011.

But we've also had multiple clients move over from other agents to JABberwocky.  Ari Marmell with Jessie, the Ellery Queen estate which Joshua had to leave behind when he left a larger agency to start his own in 1994 is back in the fold.  TC McCarthy and Marie Brennan.  And Ben Parzybok.  The year ends with Joshua getting an offer on a first novel.  We sell audio rights to upwards of 300 titles.  The e-book program grows, and by putting some of the audio money to use on conversion and cover costs it may double in title count in 2013.  Brandon Sanderson doesn't have a new book-length work come out but he has two novellas appear, we sell two new YA series, Rithmatist and Steelheart, that will come out in 2013, and he starts work on the 2nd Stormlight Archive book, so what seems like a quiet year for Brandon is actually a very important one.  Peter Brett turns in The Daylight War, which goes on sale in six weeks and is going to be a major international bestseller in the New Year.  The first of the YA/middle grade novels that Eddie has sold start to appear in stores, I'm a little disapppointed that the brilliant Chasing the Skip by Janci Patterson was so under-published by the people who grabbed it in a pre-empt with such excitement (everyone reading this post should read this book, everyone) but Adam-Troy Castro's Gustav Gloom and the People Taker is launched to good success.  Even though it will never be 2008/09 for Sookie Stackhouse, the series conclusion in May 2013 will be one of the major publishing events of the year.  All of these things feed on themselves, without Brady on board Eddie maybe doesn't have time to take on the new clients Eddie is taking on.  So even though I am spending more money (money to update the databases that I thought we'd nicely updated not so long ago...) while my top line revenue is going down, I feel content.  I will not be content if we're doing all this work and adding all this staff and not seeing some top-line year-over-year growth in 2014 vs. 2013, but that's for two years from now.

Idle thoughts on the business:

Do I mind that Charlaine Harris is winding down the Sookie Stackhouse series?  No!  One of the reasons Charlaine is so successful is because she's always stopped writing a series when she thinks it's run its course.  I'm very excited about the new Midnight Pawn series she's working on now, about the Cemetery Girl graphic novel she and Christopher Golden are working on.  And that's not just agent-speak.  For all the success of the Sookie novels, my mom won't read them because they have vampires in them.  Charlaine is ending a series that has done phenomenally well, in part because it appeals across genre lines, but there are also a lot of people like my mom out there.

I've said over the course of the year that I didn't think the e-book business would continue jumping up by leaps and bounds, that e-readers were cheap enough a year ago that the biggest book buyers probably for the most part had an e-reader in their hands by January 1 2012.  There are signs that this is correct, publishers are saying digital growth is starting to moderate.  However, we're still feeling our way to an e-book future with a lot more change to come from this transition.  All of us can see Barnes & Noble, as an example, where growth in the Nook business is slowing when they want it to be growing because of saturation and the transition from e-readers to tablets.  Their best locations are at risk because they can't pay the rent that others can pay (interestingly enough, Borders had longer leases on their stores which hurt them when their business soured, but now the generally shorter lease terms for B&N are a risk) while their lesser locations are at greatest risk of becoming unprofitable even with smaller drops in sales.  Less obvious to readers but of crucial importance to writers and agents, the actual ability to sell English-language books in the US, the UK and Australia is still heavily driven by the commitment of a local publisher to publicizing books locally, but the growth in e-books and the power shift from local retailers to Amazon may make it harder and harder to sell books locally instead of to large conglomerates intent on a global strategy.  There've always been little dust-ups over territoriality that end up not amounting to much at the end, this may be a little different.

And just to mention again in a year-end wrap-up, 2012 was clearly a year in which we could see the ability of the internet to sell books, NPR for Tobias Buckell, iO9 for EC Myers, general blog touring for Myke Cole.  I was once worried about how people could find books without physical bookstores to find them in, but I am comforted to see that it can be done. New thing in 2012 that I've never done before, calling some clients about cover reveals that their publishers have offered for the client websites and kind of ordering them never never never ever never to do such a thing, if you know anyone in the internet besides yourself you find a good third party location to do reveals where they will be discovered most readily by people not already your fans instead of doing them within your own community, they may want to have an exclusive for a day or an hour after which you can do whatever you want on your website, but let someone else present you to the world.  Some publishers are better than others about arranging third party reveals on their own (and in general I find UK publishers to be ahead of US in this regard), authors seem to get it when I explain but often don't understand it instinctively on their own.

I never expected this to happen, but I've virtually stopped visiting bookstores.  I don't like Barnes & Noble very much, so many of their stores now have such awful selections, and they bore me.  Indies often don't have sf sections.  Just in general, if I could justify making a trip to a DC suburb to visit a B&N and a Borders and maybe a lingering mall store, I can't justify an hour or more of round trip transit time to spend 10 or 15 minutes visiting just a B&N.  So much of our business is now coming from e-book sales instead of sales in actual bookstores.  There's logic to it, but it leaves a bit of an empty pit in my heart.  It's as recently as ten or fifteen years ago that I could spend a day visiting bookstores, spending a half hour more more in each Borders and feeling something special about it.

On a personal front:

Which means, since I'm not visiting bookstores, that I have time to do other things, but it's a struggle for me to spend that time productively, or to think of the excuse when I'm visiting a new city to get out and see the world.  When it works, finding time to do a first-time walk on the Custis Trail to get out to West Falls Church for a dinner instead of taking the Metro, it's nice, but too often I can feel like I'm stretching for a reason/excuse to get out of the routine.

But the big news in 2012 was to have my parents moving back north, from a retirement community in south Florida to an assisted living facility in Connecticut.  My mother had a very bad health scare in the spring, bad enough that I spent my first days in London ahead of London Book Fair wondering if I might be leaving an empty spot at our tables.  It got to be as bad as it did because it was difficult for my parents to deal with it on their own, and once they got some help to get the process going it wasn't a difficult thing to treat.  But I and my four siblings had to have an intervention, as good a word as any, and tell my parents that things had to change.  Not an easy conversation.  Once my parents took the (not so subtle) hint they ended up moving within a few months.  Happily, my parents are now complaining about everything.  Why happily?  They are eating better and have more energy.  They have a zest and thirst to be doing more than they are.  In Florida, they were doing less and less and not really noticing it.  I'm very happy I have four siblings, with four of them the transition cost me around two weeks out of the office spread in bits and pieces over the year and we were all able to do different things at different times.  I don't know how anything would have happened if there'd been just one or two children to help out with things.

During Sookie's peak years, I was able to buy a very nice apartment which should be affordable come what may, short of all the wheels coming off everything.  I've taken advantage of the space to start hosting regular games events for people to play old-fashioned word games like Scrabble and Boggle and new-fangled things like Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride.  I can't tell you how much pleasure I get out of this.  I enjoy playing the games, having people over, the people who come seem to have a good time, I've always gone to conventions and looked enviously at all the intriguing games in the games room, now I own some of them or have friends to bring them and actually get to play them.  I still have insecurity issues, and I worry with each games event that I schedule that it will be one of those embarrassing things where it will be me, Eeyore, and one other person.  I'm also always very insecure that all my clients will leave, after 25 years without too much of that happening maybe I shouldn't, but that insecurity does drive me to keep trying and doing my best.

The apartment also has a large walk-in closet.  A few years ago I discovered Express sold these brightly huged crew-neck Ts that looked so much nicer than the typical tee-shirt for summer wear or as part of an ensemble.  This year they started selling brightly-hued jeans that look decent on me even though I'm heading toward 50 and struggling not to go up a waist size.  But then the more hues of jeans they have, the more hues of Ts I want.  And then I want brightly hued shirts to go along with the jeans and the shirts.  I'm starting to feel like Imelda Marcos with the shoes as I fill the available space in the closet.   As recently as 2004 and 2005, I was making less money than what I now pay any of my full-time employees, in the early years of JABberwocky in the late 1990s I was a little embarrassed to admit to myself that I was making less running my own literary agency than if I were an editorial assistant for a small publishing house.  So I know there are times you don't have money to spend.  But if you don't have to do Old Navy, just to say I've been much happier going to fancier stores, the ones they have at the "good mall" like Kenneth Cole or Armani Exchange, and hunting in store or on-line for the things that are on the sale rack.  And the thing that annoys me is that I could have maybe started buying better stuff on sale for $40 over lesser stuff for $20 years before I actually started doing it. Right now with sale items and a coupon I have three really nice snazzy pair of pants in my shopping cart at Express for $65 total, which is not much money for three nice pair of pants.  Bottom line, I enter 2013 feeling like I have the wardrobe I should have, spending less than even I might think.  Alas, I then decided to splurge on a really nice designer label suit to end the year, I don't think it's something I could have done for $200 at J Crew, it certainly cost more than that.

So let's leave it at that.  I think I've covered the major events for 2012.

thinking aloud, the contract

Two major agency efforts that reached fruition last week. The first I discussed here, was getting on line with our first e-book publication. The second was hammering out new boilerplate with Macmillan, the German-owned publishing conglomerate that owns Farrar Straus, Tor, St. Martin's, Holt and various other US publishing operations.

Historically, Macmillan had kept separate publishing contracts for each of its many imprints, though certain corporate paragraphs were over time implanted into the separate agreements. In Fall 2009, they announced to the world that they had decided to have one contract form for everyone, which was politely attached to the e-mail. I gave thanks that all of our Macmillan authors (Tobias Buckell and Brandon Sanderson at Tor, Jeri Westerson at St. Martin's Minotaur) were under contracts that had a book or two or four to go, said "tomorrow is another day," filed away the attachment, and was content to let others be the guinea pig.

Because there are few things I dread quite as much as having to contend with new boilerplate. You can reasonably expect to find at least two dozen things you want to talk about. Things will never resolve in one round, because publishers tend to have things they'll give only if you've asked twice and made clear that you weren't joking in asking for them the first time around. And if I hate the words "new boilerplate," I feel even more for the author who has that first contract which needs to be negotiated with the new boilerplate, because they'll be in for a wait. The third or fourth author, it's like you get the new piece of paper, check it has the proper deal terms, and often as not you're good to go. The new boilerplate author has to sit around and chill while you go back and forth on multiple rounds of negotiation.

So tomorrow arrived in April, when Eddie had multiple publishers interested in a YA called Skipped, a first novel by Janci Patterson. Christy Ottaviano, who has an imprint at Henry Holt, decided she wanted the book very very badly, and started e-mailing from a vacation in Disney World to make a preemptive offer to lock the book up, and Eddie was contacting me with the exciting news while I was in Dallas for the DFW Writers Conference. Even worse than being the guinea pig is having to be the guinea pig on your first novel, because there are always extra added butterflies not quite believing you've sold a first novel until you've actually signed the contract and gotten the on-signing check.

And here, well, let's just say Macmillan had done quite the job on their new boilerplate. We couldn't exactly understand why the contracts department was so backed up that we were waiting a few months just to get the first cut on the contract from Macmillan until we had actually gotten it, and sat down, and read the whole thing through. The overall impression it gave was that the drafting process included a session where everyone around the table got to talk about their every bad experience when Macmillan had been left to dry on account of some aspect of the contract, and then they went to work coming up with wording to address that concern, often very very tortured wording. We all sat down with this contract -- Eddie, Jessie, myself -- and when we were done instead of the expected 25 or 35 points to go back on, we have a list of over 70 things in the contract that we weren't entirely happy about.

As an example, and with fond recollection of the "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" day of Bill Clinton's impeachment, the contract has a long tortured paragraph with a long tortured sentence that ends up referencing "those copies", only it depends on what the meaning of the word 'those' is because it isn't really very clear whether it means a lot of copies or only a small subset of copies depending on what you interpret the pronoun antecedent as being.

There are all kinds of "if" clauses. This is a single-book contract, but Macmillan is taking very seriously the idea that there should be only one contract, so they like "if this contract is for more than one book" clauses even when the contract at hand is just for a single book.

There are places where we can reasonably expect that Macmillan doesn't expect to keep the wording they've suggested if we ask for it to be changed, but where they are going to make sure people ask. There are things we know publishers hate to give in contracts, some of which we find utterly baffling like whether or not the author gets a copy of their e-book the same way they get a copy of their paperback, but we figure we'll try really really hard with the new boilerplate to see if Macmillan will maybe pleasantly surprise us. The answer was almost invariably no, that we would not have any pleasant surprises.

We never consider it to be a problem when a publisher says "no" to something the first time because we know there are things they'll only agree to when you ask twice. We were surprised, however, by the number of things that were still not where we wanted them to be after the second round. We were starting to understand why the contracts department was so backed up, because if they were fighting out some of these things into a third round with scores, maybe even hundreds of agents, over the past year, that gets to be a lot of back-and-forth. So then we have to talk with the author about some of the lingering sticky issues, and with new boilerplate some of those sticky things will be things that have absolutely nothing to do with this book or author but which are important in the big picture of the relationship between the agency and the publisher.

Slowly things get whittled down. There are things the publisher finally consents to. There are things we decide we'll have to give up on. Since the contract is trying to cover so many different contingencies, sometimes multiple in one extremely long and convoluted thicket of language, there are places where we try to see if there's a way to separate out which of the three things the paragraph might deal with the publisher is really concerned about, or try to explain to them which of the five things we're really concerned about, so we can try and make the language even wordier and more convoluted to carve out the one kind of thing from the other kind of thing. Sometimes it looks like the publisher is finally deciding after we've asked for something four times to give us language that they've probably reluctantly agreed to give after the sixth round with another agent 4 months ago. Sometimes there's language that maybe we're getting from them for the first time in our sixth round that maybe they'll now agree to give to somebody else in the third round. In one instance, the contracts person reaches back to his experience with another publishing company he worked for a few years ago and suggests language from that publisher's boilerplate, which more ignores than addresses the particular problem we have in this contract but which we will have to agree to because (a) kind of like an annoying relative at Thanksgiving whom you don't want to think about but at least goes off to the den to watch the Thanksgiving football games so you can chat away in the dining room and pretend the annoying relative isn't around we can ignore what isn't specifically stated and (b) there's no way to not accept the language when the contracts person knows full well we have accepted it.

So finally, a round or two after we figured out what the word "those" is, we figured out what the word "series" is, and we didn't need to deal here with what the meaning of the word "is" is, and we were able to declare victory. Happily Eddie looked at the contract closely with all the many rounds of negotiation to find the three things buried in the second part of the third round that had been overlooked in the final redraft, and over eight months after Janci Patterson has a deal for her first novel, she finally has a contract for it as well.

This was one of those things that I couldn't entirely escape responsibility for and delegate, because the boilerplate is something you need to look at really carefully. Nonetheless the biggest burden fell on Eddie, whose deal it was and who had to draft multiple long response e-mails, going back and forth to the contract files to look for good comparisons, occasionally with dictation from his boss, sometimes with his boss doing that "you know what I mean" hand wave sort of thing where neither he nor anyone else could actually expect to know what the hand wave meant, and coming up with the final compromise language for the final paragraph under discussion. I was very glad not to have to do the whole thing by myself.

And you know, for all the 70+ points we started out with, it wouldn't surprise me if Macmillan's dealt with at least that many points from other authors, agents and attorneys that didn't cross our minds to think of. And as good a job as we think we did, if the boilerplate's in use for long enough we'll find over the years where we fell short somewhere or another along the way. And even though we have boilerplate, there will still be situations where a particular author is concerned deeply about something that doesn't concern us or our other clients so much, and we'll have to hammer out some special something here or there to deal with that.

I'm told HarperCollins may have done new boilerplate at some point in the past year or so.

And as to SKIPPED, it will probably be out sometime in 2012, it's already sold in Germany in a very nice deal, and I hope you'll keep your eyes open for it.