Chiconic Fatigue Syndrome

I've had supporting memberships for World SF Conventions, WorldCons as they are known, dating back over 30 years. When I was just becoming an sf fan and devouring a goodly chunk of sf/f (Analog, Omni, Asimov's, the occasional F&SF, novel after novel) voting in the Hugos was a major temptation. Reading the progress reports and looking over the program books instilled a certain sense of community, of belonging to a larger community even though I was just a high school kid in a small town in New York City. Imagine how nice it is to have a job where I now get to attend WorldCon as part of it! And ChiCon, the 70th WorldCon, is the 18th I've actually attended.

The experience of attending WorldCon as a pro is very different than the WorldCon I dreamed of 30 years ago, however.

I get to be on panels, I don't so much get to attend them.

This year, I thought all my panels were reasonably successful. The one on business advice for writers at 3pm on the first day of the con when everyone was settling in had the kind of crowd you might expect when half the convention hasn't even picked up its membership badges yet. Having the "getting an agent" panel at 9am the next morning wasn't ideal either, it's WorldCon and people go to parties and who wants to have to wake up for a 9am panel? I was also on a panel on e-books.

I grew up wanting to vote on the Hugos and waiting around ten years to finally attend an actual Hugo ceremony.

Alas, I have learned over 26 years in the business that I am rife with internal conflict about awards. I love for my clients to be nominated for awards, I love for my clients to win awards, I just wish that this could all happen without my ever having to attend an award ceremony or banquet or dinner ever ever again. So much bad food, so many bad speeches, the occasional bad table full of bad conversation partners. And more often than not, the person you want to win -- doesn't !!

This year's Hugo Awards were not bad as such things go. Connie Willis can be a great toast"master" but sometimes there can be too much Connie, because when you have someone as good as Connie you want to take advantage. John isn't Connie, he wasn't uproarious, but there also wasn't too much of him. They made an interesting decision to have John do most of the presenting which may have saved a good 15 or 20 minutes of time introducing presenters for 12 more awards.

Alas, they did not take the equally radical decision of doing away with the clips for the long-form and short-form dramatic presentation awards. Each took ten minutes to present, all told, which is an eternity. Around 16 awards all told, if every one of those takes ten minutes and you add in the other stuff you're looking at a three hour ceremony. If you don't think the Hugo Awards should go on for three hours, and they most certainly should not, you have to do away with the damned clips for the dramatic presentation. If you're going to leave in the ciips, then I want people to read one-minute excerpts from the nominated pieces of fiction. Believe it or not, the Hugos are supposed to be a literary award, so none of these damned clips for the dramatic presentations.

My guy won! Well, one of my guys. Though the glory is in both instances reflected since the nominations were not for literary work represented by the agency, we had our client Jim C. Hines nominated for Best Fan Writer, and our client Brandon Sanderson is one of the masterminds of the Writing Excuses podcast that was up for Best Related Work. And Jim Hines not only won, but in the voting breakdowns we see he won quite quite handily. And then he did something very well, and said he would recuse himself from this category in future years, so he won't become like Locus and take home a statue every year for twenty or thirty years.

There wasn't any of that music playing at the 30-second mark, so the winners could give thank you speeches that went on pretty much just as long as they pleased. This can be unfortunate. But... I'll take this approach over the Oscars and their 30 second limits. Yeah, there were some over-long thank yous at the Hugos this year, there were also some really touching and moving speeches like Jo Walton's accepting for Best Novel, and John Picacio for Best Professional Artist, that were only possible because people had the time to speak passionately and from the heart.

I am a bad person. During an award banquet, usually held in a brightly lit hotel ballroom, I will quietly read a text-rich magazine (fewer page turns) during the speechifying. In the darkened ballroom for the Hugos, the iPad was quite delightful, and I think I read 15,000 words of a submission. Lest you think I wasn't paying attention -- I assure you I can read a good 40-50,000 words in the time the ceremony occupied, so that's 25K of paying attention to the ceremony. I had the brightness all the way down, and had the cover held tight over the screen. With all the people that have their phones out to tweet and text and whatever, as we are wont to do in the modern age, I hope I wasn't upsetting the atmosphere of the room.

Just to say, was it just me, or was the dealer's room a little quiet and mono-cultured this year? Something seemed to be missing.

The parallel con that I attend now vs. the con I dreamt of attending as a wee lad consists of a lot of time spent in meals and meetings with clients and editors. Since my business has grown, some of those meals have to breakfasts, which are always way too early for my tastes. I hate paying for overpriced booze at hotel bars. On days when I have a breakfast, a lunch and a dinner on my schedule, and then visits to the party suites filled with M&Ms and Doritos (this year, prawn-flavored Walker Crisps on account of the 2014 London bid) I am certainly eating too much, especially since there isn't a lot of time for exercise during a WorldCon. Oh well! I did find an Argo Tea cafe a few blocks from the hotel and did a couple meetings there, I don't actually like tea or coffee and Argo is really really big on the tea, but it's nice to get out of the convention hotel. There was also this little sunken park on an ancient golfing burial ground a couple blocks from the hotel, and we did a couple meetings there on a nice bench under a nice shade-giving tree with a wonderfully designed fountain providing that nice relaxing burbling sound of water.

I don't understand people who travel to these conventions and decide they can't leave the hotel or convention center. Yeah, you want to do your business, but you're in Chicago, a world capital, one of the major cities of the US, get out and see the world! In my early days of attending WorldCon with way fewer clients I could do some of this during the days of the convention and not feel too guilty, now I have to add on a day or two but I did get around. Especially the Wednesday before, 15+ miles of walking around Chicago to take in 3 Whole Foods, 2 Costcos, and a Cubs game. Not the usual tourist stuff, but it was 15+ miles of walking around and seeing the city and the weather was gorgeous.

It was my first time at Wrigley. I enjoyed it a lot. The park is full of atmosphere and history. Strange in some ways, they have an organ but all of the music seemed to be a little bit of organ music grafted on the same rhythm track for every song that sounded like some special kind of Christmas music. Definitely strange. The stadium got really really loud, I could hardly hear the person next to me. The game to most people was an afterthought, so many people going to see Wrigley and not that many who cared whether or not the Cubs won. The concourse had the feel of a carnival midway, which is definitely not the feel you get from most of the modern stadiums.

Thursday night Adam-Troy Castro had a launch event for his new book at the Magic Tree children's bookstore in Oak Park. Previously I had gone to Oak Park to add the Borders there to my list of conquests, a Borders conveniently near to the River Forest Whole Foods. I did visit the Whole Foods, but I also walked around and saw other parts of the neighborhood. I need to make an Oak Park day the next time I'm in Chicago to admire more of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses, maybe even visit the Hemingway birthplace and museum.

I'm going to stop here, there's more I could say but maybe I'll do another WorldCon post later, or maybe not.

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.

Borders, Post-Mortem

At this point, it's hard to see that Borders isn't on the verge of a bankruptcy filing, the best case scenario would be a Chapter 11 that would reorganize into a much smaller company that might have a go if focusing on stores that actually make money, but even that, I can't be real optimistic because same store sales are dropping so fast that a store which makes money today might not in two years. Though we live in a country that does allow companies to spend lots of time going bankrupt and doing it on multiple occasions, witness the airline industry.

So what happened?

OK, mid 1980s, Borders is one of the best stores around and starting to spread out in Michigan a little and lend out its inventory system. It's a good system. It lets stock sell down, then reorders. One day you might have 0 copies of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers on the shelf, the next day they'll get 3 in. So everytime you go to Borders, even if it's once a week, you might see a slightly different but always excellent selection. It encourages you to keep going back. And again, it's a really good system, and stores that use the system generally prosper.

Late 1980s, early 1990s. As Borders starts to slowly spread across the country, and in fact does so before Barnes & Noble starts to open superstores, each new opening is a major occasion. The stores have well tailored massive inventory, they are architecturally distinct, they have book people who have to pass a book test working in them, they are wonderful places to go to. Eventually K-Mart buys Borders, merges it into Waldenbooks, the mall stores generate cash to fund the superstore expansion, and in the early years of Borders as a publicly held company we are told that it is selling much better per square foot than the competition, i.e. B&N. And they have this great inventory system, that carefully tailors a large selection to each individual store on a constant ongoing basis. It isn't uncommon for a Borders to be voted the best bookstore in those local newspaper year's bests, and I would say much more common for that honor to go to a Borders than to a B&N.

Mid to late 1990s. B&N invests in a major improvement in their inventory systems. For new books, the store-specific Borders inventory system was pretty much unique through 1995, I first noticed in 1996 when The Kiss was published that B&N was starting to do the same. B&N also develops a quick replenishment system, so if a store is supposed to carry a book and sells it, another copy will be on hand in a week or ten days in most instances.

Late 1990s. Against a more competitive B&N, the creaks in the vaunted Borders inventory system become apparent.

Problem #1: that sell-down and reorder thing from 1985 doesn't work so well now. Borders will order Pocket backlist once every x weeks, and for some books that don't sell as well maybe reorder them once every y cycles. And once ordered, books take much longer to move from the publisher to the Borders warehouse to the Borders store than to move through the supply chain at B&N. If a Borders and a B&N are both supposed to carry Deathstalker, as an example of a typical must-have JABberwocky book in 1998, and both sell on the same day, the B&N will have a new copy ten days later, the Borders might be back in stock six weeks later.

Problem #2: especially in genre fiction, you need to invest in inventory because it's very hard to sell book #4 in a series when you can't find the first three books, or to sell #1 to somebody who notices #4 when it comes out and says "hey, let me try this series out." The Borders inventory system can't cope with this. By focusing on performance at each individual store, it would delete an earlier book in a series that maybe hadn't sold in a year, and then that store would have trouble as the series progressed because it would have all sorts of strange inventory gaps. That wasn't a problem when you had only 28 really fantastic locations, it gets to be a problem when you have 82 locations and some don't do well in sf/fantasy. B&N on the other hand would keep books on hand for core series at most all stores even if some particular stores weren't sellling them. I could go to the Evanston IL Borders, see all these books they should have but didn't, then go to the B&N across the way and see them. They were yellowed copies from sitting on the shelf and a printing behind because they hadn't reordered in a year, but they were there.

Which brings us to Problem #3, lack of brand consistency. At any large chain whether its Home Depot or Express or Costco you have bigger stores and smaller stores with varying selection. But at Borders, the computer would happily reorder lots of older titles forever and ever at the best stores that sold one or two copies a year at those very best stores while cutting even core titles by reasonably important authors at inferior stores. The wonderful store #89 in Columbia, MD was really like a completely different store than the quiet #179 in Commack, NY. One could have twice as many items as the other, 35 vs. 80, let's say, circa 2000. A B&N might be 45 vs. 65, not that there wasn't a gap but it wasn't near as big in percentage terms, and the B&N was more likely to have the core backlist titles like all the Deathstalker books by Simon Green or all the Blood books by Tanya Huff.

These problems were apparent for a long, long time.

But whatever problems the heads of Borders would solve, it wasn't these.

Maybe it was a real problem that all of that strange quirky store architecture with all kinds of weird diagonally places shelving lines was hard to navigate. And one CEO said this was so, and remodeled all the character out of all of the old stores and made all the lines nice and straight.

Some other CEO from supermarkets, he felt Borders needed category management like in supermarkets where the big supermarket chain would partner with a marketshare leader like Procter & Gamble to plan how the detergent aisle would look.

Or, now that Borders was a national chain, we need to function like a national chain selling our display space in the front of the store and getting our managers to put their endcaps up when they are supposed to instead of still acting like it's 1992 and you actually have local color.

Then we got more remodeling, replacing those character-filled shelves where the hardcovers and mass markets were shelved separate in the genre categories and huge amounts of excess mass markets could squeeze in right behind (sometimes books could get lost back there, I loved going through the entire on-shelf backstock and finding them) with unified hardcover and mass market shelving. This was a disaster. The remodels were very disruptive to the stores, and the new shelves were less efficient, so stores would run out of space and return books at their whim which would then not be replenished for several weeks which would exacerbate the whole out-of-stock thing.

One of the things you might notice is that the charm of Borders in its best days at its best stores was that it had carefully tailored inventory unique to each store, and each store felt like it was in and of its community instead of being just another Borders. Many of the changes made in the first decade of this century slowly took away bits and pieces of the best characteristics of the best Borders.

You may notice that none of the changes all these CEOs were doing sped up the supply chain. Even after Borders put in a reorder for a backlist book, it would still take two to four times as long for that book to make its way back to the store shelf. It could still be weeks after a book sold before the reorder was even placed. There were some efforts made by the sf/fantasy buyer in 2006 to rationalize the sf/f section so that A stores had a full A range selection thus doing away with some of the weird gaps that had developed over the years, but this didn't help much at the D or E store range to reduce the overall inconsistency of the brand.

Sometime when Borders tried to solve a problem, like getting a new inventory system for its mall stores in the mid 2000s, it managed to fail. Now, really, all the inventory management software that has to exist in 2005, and Borders manages to buy something that doesn't work? How, how, how, could they manage to do that?

And then somehow or other, everyone at Borders failed to notice that the mall store business was no longer generating cash and had become an albatross. George Jones was the CEO when the company first announced it had cash issues in the first half of 2008, which was just about the same time that the company unveiled his pet project of a new store concept. As I have blogged about, this is the one unforgivable thing, to either not notice the company is running out of cash because you're fiddling with your new concept or to still fiddle while you run out of cash. And what happened after was more unforgivable still. He cut back title counts. So all those books, the Hot Blood anthologies in their Kensington reissues a good example, that were on sale at the best Borders and not too many other places, were cut. Well, people noticed. The best Borders were no longer appreciably better than the best B&Ns, the worst Borders were still worse. They did try and remedy this some in Fall 2009.

The odd thing is that the new concept store George Jones fiddled with in 2008 was focused on digital initiatives. What if Borders had gone out to an all-out embrace of the Sony Reader then, and not fallen behind so miserably on e-readers? Christ, what if Borders had realized it needed a website, instead of being a hopeless third, then ceding to Amazon, then investing a fortune to try and regain all that lost ground.

I can forgive Borders some of its recent transgressions. The feeble Area E attempt at selling eReaders is justified when you are losing same store sales quickly, don't have cash, can't afford to have dedicated staff standing at the front of the store. I was upset, but I can forgive that. But I can't forgive idiots who think it's OK to go ten years taking eight weeks to replenish a book that your closest competitor can replenish in eight days. That's dumb-ass, and it was allowed to perpetuate under many CEOs for many years.

And I did write letters to Borders CEOs over the years to discuss some of these things.

Let me be clear, I want Borders to survive. As I've explained, we need more than one big chain. This week's case study: Brandon Sanderson's THE WAY OF KINGS was the #7 fantasy hardcover on Nielsen Bookscan last week, a major impressive showing four months after publication. As of a few days before Christmas, B&N put this title on to "No Replenishment" and has sent out the call to all their locations to return all of their copies. Now, do I want the fate of every one of my clients tied in brick-and-mortar to what B&N is doing? God, no, please, anything but. Poor Jig, in a B&N world, Jig is dead. Hard to even know if Jig's creator would have had a chance if Jig had been relying on only one major chain.

But if you're wondering why it seems very likely that Borders will be seeking court protection in the weeks or months to come, I think this post is as good an explanation as you will find, anyplace.

It's hard to even know whether to encourage people to shop at Borders when they need the business but maybe will never be able to pay the publisher or reorder a copy if they can't get credit arranged, or to just throw in the towel. I've been shopping at Borders for almost 30 years, 225 of their superstores, and it's a damn shame.

after the Ides

Some little tidbits today.

Our client Jim Hines has been surveying authors on how they sold their first novels, and he's put out his first set of results here. There are two main takeaways. First, the odds of your novel being the next Eragon are not very big. Self-publishing your way to a major publishing house is far and away the least likely route to success. This is one of those myth paths that will never go away because we'll always hear about the Eragon story, but we hear about them because they do't happen very often so it's newsworthy-ish the rare times it does happen. Jim also says "totally busted" on the idea that you have to sell short fiction before selling a novel, which I've known and said for 20 years. The split is 50/50 or so on the JABberwocky client list. But this myth will never die. It will be alive and well in some back corner of the room at the meal after my funeral. But I'll say it again: if you want to write a novel, write a novel. If you want to write a short story, write a short story. Do not feel in any way, shape, manner, or form that writing short stories is some kind of necessary apprenticeship to writing and selling a novel.

VOYA and Teaching Librarian are the latest old-line review publications to change hands.

On the e-reader front, the Alex Reader from Spring Design, which is similar enough to the Nook that Spring Design, which had consulted with B&N and then sued B&N, is now taking advance orders. The Plastic Logic Que reader announced this week that it would be delayed in getting to market. One stays, the other goes...

We at JABberwocky met this week with Steve Saffel, an experienced hand in sf/fantasy (w/ Del Rey) and graphic (w/Marvel) publishing who is now working for Titan, a British company with operations in both areas which seems like an excellent fit. Steve is very excited about the e-book thing. He feels it gives us the opportunity to sell way more books to casual, infrequent, maybe even heretofore nonexistent, book buyers, especially because of the ability for people to buy a book instantly when it comes to them virally. i.e., your friend says "you've got to try this," and you can try it in a minute from wherever you are in the world, you're a lot more likely to try it. I don't know if he's right or wrong, only time will tell us that. I do know publishing is inherently gloomy in its prognostication. I've been in the business 25 years, it's been dying for that entire time, and it's many years ago that I started telling people that if that's what it was really doing it would need to have actually died by now. It's therefore unusual enough to here his optimism on e-books that I thought it would be nice to offer a tiding of joy to tide you over from the Ides of March to St. Patrick's Day.

How I Spent My Vacation From Blogging

OK, so it's been 4 weeks since my last post, and I'm not happy about that, but...

Business comes first, and November kind of got to be one of those months.

Shortly after my last post I headed down to DC to spend some quality time with Brandon Sanderson.  Brandon and I have spent fall quality time in DC for each of the last 3 years, and I've got to say it's pretty amazing to see how things have been coming along for Brandon over that time.  In years past we pretty much spent our time doing drive-by visits to bookstores to sign shelf stock and say "hello."  This was somewhat helpful in 2006, and it was possible to see Brandon's market share in DC increase in 2007 for the ELANTRIS and MISTBORN paperbacks, almost certainly as a direct result of those efforts.  In 2007, we visited just after the announcement of Brandon's work on the Wheel of Time series, and we had press releases to hand out.  We handed out enough that we had to stop at the Fed Ex Kinko's in Manassas to run off some more.  This year, we would go into stores like the B&N, Borders Express and Borders in Springfield, VA or the Borders Express in the Landmark Mall and we would find staff who remembered the visit from last year and were excited to see Brandon again or who had put him up on a staff rec or were happily hand-selling his work.  It was totally inspiring to see.  Brandon also had a great crowd for his signing at the Borders in Bailey's Crossroads, VA, which is a kind of special store in the DC area that Borders reserves for major author events.  I also watched Brandon keep two rooms full of high school students entertained with presentations, and t hat takes a real gift.  We also joined Tor's sales rep for the area for dinner with some of the people from DC's Politics and Prose, which is one of those really good indie bookstores that actually has a science fiction section with some people who pay attention to it.  If only they were a little closer to the Metro...

I raced back from DC the following Tuesday morning and made a cameo appearance in the office before heading to a dinner with the publisher of Recorded Books to celebrate the success of their unabridged audio Charlaine Harris publication program.  This was a really nice dinner at the Gotham Bar & Grill.  I'd never been, but it's a standby in NYC very highly rated in Zagat's and deservedly so.  It's a nice space, with excellent service, and really good food, and I'm glad I wasn't paying.  I may have to go at lunch when they have a prix fixe menu.

That left me two days in the office before I spent Friday and Saturday enjoying more quality time with Brandon on the NY stop of his tour.  This included a visit to Tor where I was recruited unexpectedly to appear in a wonderful video, after which Brandon pitched an idea for a new fantasy series to Tor's patriarch, Tom Doherty, and then Tom took Brandon and I to a nice Italian restaurant a couple blocks away where I tried some bitters.  Brandon's fall Tor concluded with his first NYC signing at the Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village, which was another great turnout, and then we visited some more bookstores on Saturday, including the B&N in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Lisa had put Brandon's MISTBORN on a staff rec earlier in the year and was quite pleased to be able to meet Brandon in person.

Brandon isn't my only client, so after spending the better part of a week with Brandon, the week of the 17th was very busy at the office as I tried to give quality time to other clients and other matters requiring my attention, and then no sooner was that week over then it got to be  November 24 with the annual SFWA NYC reception.  I've been going to the SFWA reception every year since 1986 when I was a newbie agent who knewbied nobody, while it was the first visit for my associate Eddie Schneider and our intern Katherine.  

The next morning I was on an early train to Connecticut to begin my Thanksgiving holiday.  It was nice to have some extended time away from the office, and if I didn't get quite as much reading done as I had hoped, I did get to see Bolt with my nephews and play some Boggle and Frisbee and Monopoly and have a nice Thanksgiving dinner at one brother's and a nice Shabbat dinner at another's with time to visit some of the bookstores in the Hartford area.  One of the booksellers at the B&N in West Hartford had a staff rec for Tanya Huff.  

So it was a busy November.  

And it's just busy times at JABberwocky.  I feel a little bit guilty because I'm fortunate to have things going very well at the agency right now.  Brandon Sanderson, as above, is doing wonderfully.  Charlaine Harris and her Sookie Stackhouse books have skyrocketed in sales following True Blood more than any of us would have imagined.  All thanks go to Alan Ball for his great TV show.  But the TV show can get people to sample DEAD UNTIL DARK.  It's the books themselves that get so many of those people to decide to read the entire Sookie Stackhouse series, and it's a tribute to a really wonderful person in Charlaine Harris who's written a lot of really wonderful books that's made the  Sookie boxed set the #1-selling boxed set in the country the past three weeks.  Peter Brett continues to build ahead of his US launch for The Warded Man in March.  The one manuscript I did read over Thanksgiving was a new Paksenarrion novel by Elizabeth Moon, and it's so exciting to be back in that world 22 years after I first read the original Paks trilogy. Tobias Buckell is my latest NY Times bestseller (#4 trade paperback fiction) for his HALO: THE COLE PROTOCOL.   All this is happening here at a time when the economy as a whole is not in good shape, and publishing had a kind of Black Wednesday today with major cutbacks at Random House, S&S, Nelson, Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, with steep drops in same store sales at B&N, Borders and Books a Million, and other grim things aplenty.  JABBerwocky isn't immune to all of this.  Looking over my Nielsen Bookscan #s, you can see a lot of books by a lot of my clients that dropped by 30% or 50% in their weekly sales numbers all of a sudden and very quickly in September and have since been establishing new and dramatically lower sales levels.  But I had more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than some other people, and it's hard not to feel guilty.

On some of those lower sales figures...  I don't envy the management of the bookstore chains right now who have some difficult issues to contend with.  Sales are falling, so you want to reduce inventory levels.  Now what do you do in early 2009 when you're planning after a difficult holiday season, and you have book #1 in a series by an established and popular author who is nonetheless being impacted by the economic climate?  If you use the same formulas to determine stock levels now that you did a year or 18 months ago, that may mean this book #1 is below the cut-off for being carried at some or all of your stores, and back it goes to the publisher, and there's logic to that.  But there's also a risk, because you're now making it harder to sell the next books in the series, and you're making a hole in your selection that might make your store less attractive as the customers start to return in the months to come, and let us all hope that 2009 will see some better times.  It becomes very challenging to figure out how to stay alive today without doing lasting harm to your future succes.  The decisions people make in Ann Arbor and NYC on questions like those will have a big impact for years to come on the big chains and on some of my clients.  And as good as things are going today, I do worry a bit about that.

One controversy I didn't chip in on in the blogging world...  My client Tobias Buckell did some posting on how the various chains were treating his new books.  You can read his 2nd generation post on the subject here.   (and find links in that post to some others by other authors.)  Blogger extraordinaire Andy Wheeler chipped in a few weeks later with a very insightful post.  You had calls for a boycott of Borders because Borders wasn't ordering every sf book by every author.  Yikes!  If there's one thing I pray for, it's that both Borders and B&N come through the difficult retail times we're in right now and survive and thrive in the future.  If you have a complaint about the world of bookselling today, you'll have many many more if there aren't two major chains around.  Simply put, both chains will sometimes do odd and inexplicable things, but they rarely do them at the same time with the same author, and if ever we don't have both to kick around it will be a very bad day.  Some examples:  Borders carries Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion omnibus which B&N does not, while B&N carries the trade paperback readers group edition of Elizabeth's The Speed of Dark, which Borders does not.  Borders might have skipped Tobias Buckell's Sly Mongoose, but as he has his success with Halo there are no B&N stores that are supposed to have his Ragamuffin paperback corporately speaking, while the book is being carried at the better f&sf locations for Borders.  Prior to the release of True Blood, B&N was more supportive over the years in terms of backlist risers and the like for the Sookie Stackhouse books, but after True Blood debuted it was Borders that took a more aggresive position on the Sookie books while the B&N mystery buyer was showering floor displays on Charlaine's non-Sookie books.  Borders has been much better than B&N to the Goblin books by Jim C. Hines, yet B&N has a more aggresive order in place for Jim's forthcoming novel The Stepsister Scheme.  B&N has done much better with the Greywalker novels by Kat Richardson, but Borders is currently better inventoried with Brandon Sanderson's Well of Ascension.  I could go on and on.

Now the success of the business is hitting my reading pile hardest.  The summer, the pile hardly budged at all.  In the past few months I've at least been making some progress, though after a stretch of time when few of my established clients were turning in new books, I'm now starting to get several of those that have to get put at the top of the pile which makes the other people have to wait that much longer.  That's perhaps the biggest obstacle to my blogging, that the hours I spend on this are hours I'm not spending reading manuscripts by authors who are waiting very patiently.  Still, I hope to find a little more time in December to tend to the Brillig Blogger.   But I promise I am trying as hard as I can while still having a life outside of work of some sort to get through my reading pile.  

Enough for now; I will try and have some movie reviews up over the next several days.

Follow-on

Author Jim C Hines tells us about his snow-filled adventure to visit the new Borders concept store.