Ebook-olution in action

Two interesting developments in the e-book marketplace in recent days.  One of which shall be used as a springboard today, this being the announcement that Richard Curtis has sold his e-Reads business to Open Road.  Like myself and several other leading agents in sf/f, Richard is an alumnus of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, around twenty years prior to my time there.  He started e-Reads in 1999 when the e-book business was barely in existence, and interestingly, I've traveled in some familiar circles with agents with an interest in the e-book business.  My boss for 15 months at Scott Meredith after Scott died was Arthur Klebanoff, who founded Rosetta Books a couple years after Richard founded e-Reads.

The reason Richard Curtis gave in the press about the sale was that there was a perceived need to do more marketing of the e-Reads list, which would have meant stepping up the investment in the business, and that it seemed better to find a company that could do that rather than to make that investment or seek the investors that would make that investment feasible.

In some ways, Richard Curtis' decision has no bearing on what JABberwocky does with its e-book program.  e-Reads was a separate enterprise from Curtis' literary agency, publishing books by authors who weren't all Richard Curtis clients, designed to make money as a separate entity.  JABberwocky's e-book program is a service to JABberwocky clients, where we take our standard commission of 15% on most of the books in the program (we only take 50%, which is the Open Road model, if the author wishes to have us pay all conversion costs and limit us to recouping those costs solely from within the e-book program) rather than the 50% cut that often prevails with smaller e-book publishers or the 75% cut that often prevails with larger.

And one of the biggest limitations to our e-book program, though not to ours alone, is that we under-market it.  We have one staff person who devotes a good chunk of time to the e-book program, and especially as we have vastly increased the number of books in the program, most of that time has been spent on dealing with authors on sign-up issues, with the conversion house on the file conversions, with our cover artists and cover copy writers, actually getting the books up, and dealing with vendors.  (The vendor issue is a second limitation, which we will look at in another blog post.)

Since we are taking such a small cut, smaller than pretty much any other e-book publisher, I can forgive myself the under-investment in marketing, but it is nonetheless my hope that eventually we can devote more time and energy to this, either by re-tasking as we slow the pace of new books into the program or as part of an overall expansion at JABberwocky.

These are things our marketing person might do:

Send out review copies of our books.  Many of our titles predate the explosion of websites dealing with sf/fantasy, and those sites might cover our releases more or even review some of the books, which came out long before the websites themselves started.

Coordinate more sale pricing, including analysis of the effects of sale pricing.

Help willing authors (and not all are willing to put too much promo energy into their twenty-year old books) to do guest blog posts.

Maybe set up a separate Twitter account or other social media devoted to the e-book program.

Improve the website we have for the e-book program.

Have a small budget to begin experiments with on-line advertising using Google AdWords, Facebook, or other programs.

Videos.

There's lots more that could be done, and I could easily spend close to $50K a year on salary, benefits, and other expenses for a full-time marketing person, even at entry level.

Absent making that marketing investment, our e-book program generally relies on reflected marketing for its success.  Simon R. Green, Tanya Huff and Jack Campbell all do very nicely with reverted backlist and/or collections of short fiction that are included in our e-book program. That is almost certainly because they have books being marketed and distributed by Big Five publishers, have had this for many years, and can rely on an audience that comes along from the Big Five books to discover ours.  In the next tier would be Rick Shelley, a deceased author who had fifteen books published by a Big Five publisher and who writes in an established sub-genre, military sf, that has loyal core readership.  Thereafter, the success of our e-book authors kind of tracks the success of their print books, and considering the nature of our program this isn't a surprise.  But it is limited; we don't have a good way other than word of mouth or reflected marketing to bring someone to a higher place.

Clearly, marketing would be a good thing!

But where is that marketing money going to come from?

Forget about what the JABberwocky cut is, but the total annual royalty revenue from our entire e-book program is under $100K.  Even if you say that we could increase overall revenue by 50% if we had better pricing, and then by another 50% if we had better marketing, the total royalty revenue might just scrape past the $200K mark.  No matter how you look at it, we'd be spending an enormous percentage of gross royalty earnings for the e-book program on the marketing, so where's it going to come from?

If I took a poll, I wonder how many authors in the JABberwocky e-book program would choose to give me another third of their income in exchange for having dedicated marketing, and would feel like they would come out ahead in that process.  Their sales would need to increase by 70% in order for them to break even.

And for the authors at the lowest end of our earnings scale, would it be worth their time and energy to self-publish their own e-books?  We make their decision to have us do it a little easier by taking a small cut of their earnings.  But a lot of our e-books earn less than $20 per month in gross royalty revenue.  How much time do you want to take to self-publish your e-book to save $250 or less over a year vs. having someone else do it?  Can all of those authors even find someone else to do it when the cost of setting a book up for an e-book can be $400, which can take several years to recoup?

Even though I want to spend more on marketing, it is magical thinking to say it will automatically pay for itself.  You can see why Richard Curtis would say he wasn't up for doing that.

From the perspective of the aspiring self-publisher, you must reflect on the fact that marketing expense is a real expense that comes from somewhere.  I am sure we can find examples of self-published authors who managed to succeed by word of mouth alone, just like we can find examples from Big Five publishers of little under-the-radar novels that went on to become something big.  But otherwise, someone has to do the marketing, and it has both a cost and an opportunity cost (what else you could be doing with the money).  When you realize that many people have day jobs, have children, have family or social or volunteer obligations, you can see why many people don't want to do that.  They want to have a publisher put some time and money into marketing their work.  Even if it's going to be one of those Big Five publishers that is very likely to under-market, it will likely be better than they can do on their own.

From the perspective of even the very successful author, let's look at a JABberwocky client like Brandon Sanderson.  He self-publishes his own e-books, and has the staff and support capability to do it.  At the exact hour of this writing, his self-published Kindle edition of The Emperor's Soul and of Legion are both in the 5000s on Amazon.  He makes real money at this.  Before we placed print rights with Emperor's Soul with Tachyon we had a long talk on the cost-benefit of different publication models.  We did this for his Hugo-winning novella The Emperor's Soul, we did this before selling two new Mistborn novels to Tor, and we will continue to do that.

Because even though Brandon Sanderson is underpaid for his e-book royalties, as all authors with the Big Five are, the low royalty rate isn't the only thing the Big Five offer.

Let me demonstrate this very clearly:

In 2013, Brandon Sanderson had two major NY Times bestsellers published, The Rithmatist and Steelheart, and these were among the things that his Big Five publishers did to support those books: outing to the Random House sales conference; major events at BookExpo America including booth signings, official autograph sessions, and the audio tea; national author tours; ads in magazines like Entertainment Weekly, and not just a couple but in a dozen or more; a reciprocal campaign with DC Comics; tens of thousands of books put into mass merchandisers like Walmart, Costco and Target; books on the most prominent "stepladder" displays at Barnes & Noble; other placements in endcaps, section tables and elsewhere that have been running for one book or another almost non-stop for the past nine months and with the release of Words of Radiance in two weeks may end up running for a year or more; a major promotion at dozens of Hudson Books travel locations.  I don't know the exact costs for many of these things, but can any of us doubt when you look at all of this that the publishers have spent well into six figures marketing Brandon Sanderson over the past year?

So we chose a hybrid model for The Emperor's Soul.  Tachyon Press doesn't offer the size of marketing spend that the Big Five can do, but it markets very heavily toward a different part of the sf/f audience than the usual Brandon Sanderson crowd.  And this was a very successful book for Tachyon, even without having e-book rights.  Brandon Sanderson has something for his self-publishing pipeline.  We send a message to the Big Five that we have alternate ways to do some things, and gives us some leverage there.  But should Brandon Sanderson test what would happen if he withdrew from the Big Five ecosystem entirely, and never had a year like 2013 with all that third party marketing investment behind him and his work?

Even though I love marketing and want to do more of it, I am extremely dubious of the Open Road business model.  When I look at the cost of marketing vs. the likely return for my own little e-book program, how can Open Road justify itself?  As they say on their website "Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media."

To be sure, Open Road can gain benefits of scale in its marketing.  If I have a marketing person who markets 100 books by 20 authors and Open Road has 4200 books by eight hundred authors...  At the most basic level, any website they are in contact with for marketing or any social media anything they have for marketing can be used for many more authors.  It doesn't take much more time to us an email to Pat's Fantasy Hotlist to pitch ten giveaways instead of one or two.  Another benefit of scale:  shortly after we transferred several Simon R. Green titles to Open Road, they were able to get a Kindle Daily Deal for Simon, and in all likelihood we at JABberwocky could not have.  Amazon pays more attention to Open Road because Open Road is bigger, has deeper pockets, many more prominent authors.

However, you also start to come up against limitations of scale.  The acquisition of e-Reads will bring Open Road's catalog to over 4,000 books.  If they scale up their marketing by 30% because e-Reads scales up Open Road, they can.  But ultimately, the marginal cost of hiring an additional publicist, an additional sales person, an additional whomever, is going against the marginal author and the marginal book.  So they have to make choices just like the big publishers do.  Even at JABberwocky, we have to make choices.  When I first went to London Book Fair in the late 1990s, I could include every JABberwocky author in a catalog that I could put together myself, and which was a few dozen pages at most.  The current layout for our 2014 catalogs is over 100 pages divided between a main catalog, YA/middle grade catalog, and special mini-catalogs for our two biggest clients.  How can we feature important backlist which we feel is undersold in the translation markets, major #1 bestselling authors, ongoing bestselling series a level or two down, deserving new clients, and still have room to mention the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print?  The bigger we make the catalog, the less impactful it becomes for everyone, and the added expense of going from 100 pages to 120 pages would be allocated against the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print.  The expense cannot be justified.  I and the Big Five and everyone else could choose to allocate things differently and say to ourselves the new marketing spend is dedicated to the top of our eco-system, but that isn't how economics works when trying to run a profitable business

The bigger Open Road gets and the more selective it has to become, the more it becomes like the Big Five publishers, only with a better e-book royalty rate.

So we will look closely at how well the Simon R. Green titles do, because we are very curious to see what happens to the sales revenue for those titles.  If Open Road can't increase sales revenue by at least 50% from what we can do on our own, there isn't any good reason to consider having other of our books with Open Road or with other third-party vendors rather than keeping as much by our clients within the JABberwocky program.  If Open Road can increase sales revenue considerably, then we want to have more books with Open Road or other vendors.

But that creates another problem.  Third party vendors will exercise more selection over the books they choose to include.  They will happily take our best and most successful authors, but the JABberwocky e-book program then becomes a little like the health insurance marketplace, subject to adverse selection risks.  We have fixed costs that now have to be allocated against our least successful titles only.  That makes it hard to justify even as a service, and ultimately could force us to stop offering the service for the authors who could most benefit from it, or to increase the subsidy.  (Or, to turn it into e-Reads, scale it up as a separate entity, and be able to offer it as a package.)

This blog post has come rather far afield from a discussion just of e-Reads or just of the marketing of e-books, but I've also tried to approach it with some real rigor, and to give an understanding of how an easy real world question like "JABberwocky should spend more on marketing" which is a simple and inarguable truth, just like it is for all the Big Five publishers we deal with, gets very complicated very quickly when put into the real world.  Not just for us, but for all the authors we deal with, who have many options themselves for publishing and marketing their books.  You'll also see, or I think you will, that I'm not asking and answering these questions from a pre-conceived agenda that there is only one way to do things.  The goal is to go where the evidence leads.  But it takes a lot of trial-and-error with different approaches for different sorts of authors and different sorts of books going down different paths to find all that evidence, so even the search for the best way to make money doing this ends up being a costly one.

I've hinted above at some of the benefits of scale which an Open Road offers vs. JABberwocky, and that is the thread I'll pick up on in my next post on these topics.

Print on Decrepitude

I've had a generally good relationship with Penguin over my 28 year career, but right now I am not feeling very charitable toward the folks on 375 Hudson Street.

Sometime in 2012 or 2013, it's hard to know exactly when because they don't really announce these things, they started a Print on Demand program.

Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.  POD has come a long way since its early days, and you can do very attractive POD books, especially trade paperbacks, that are hard to tell from the standard offset edition.

But that's not what Penguin is doing.  They are doing mass market POD editions, and they are awful and crappy and markedly inferior to the regular offset editions in pretty much every way imaginable.

Today's example, a copy of Simon R. Green's Hell to Pay, the 7th Nightside novel, spotted at a Barnes & Noble in CT.

I knew it was POD the second I opened the book.  That's kind of bad sign #1.  You shouldn't be able to tell a POD book from a regular book that easily.  But these Penguin POD books have Wimpy Spine Syndrome.  Which is...  well, if you pick up a regular paperback and open it a wee bit at the center point and kind of push on one side and pull on the other, you aren't going to get a lot of give. The spine is going to kind of hold itself firm.  Not the POD editions.  You open it up, and there's a spine, but it's very malleable and elastic.  This was that kind of book.

Then there's the paper stock.  It's a very bright white.  I gave my younger brother this book and another similarly sized Nightside book and asked if he could tell anything about them, and that was the thing he noticed.  It didn't look like a book.  It looked like it had been printed on copy paper, was how he described it.  That nice 87 brightness sort of copy paper.  The problem with that is that it offers a lot more contrast between the black ink and the white paper which can be a little annoying, and may also offer a little more glare.

Then there's the guttering.  Depending on a lot of factors, a regular paperback you can usually read without having to push the pages back too far.  There's enough space between the inside text and the spine that you can hold it open with one hand, and get enough room to read the book.  Not with these POD editions.  Even though they are the same size and use the same page plates in theory, the text is much more likely to run far enough into the spine that you've really got to hold the book open with two hands to read it.  This means there is a much bigger risk that you might break the spine of your book.  Happily, I guess, these POD editions have such wimpy bendable spines that they won't break in quite the same way?

In this particular book, the copyright page was very blurry.  The text was generally crisp enough, but you could really tell on the copyright page that this wasn't well printed.  It was the book version of watching a movie somebody recorded from their seat in the theatre.

The binding of the cover to the innards is just a little off.  In a properly printed mass market, the gluing of the cover to the spine runs to the edge of the spine.  In these POD editions, the gluing will be off kilter.  On this copy of Hell to Pay, the front cover was glued a fraction of an inch more to the first page than it is supposed to be.

According to our website, the last regular printing we spotted was 5th printing.  This one says it is the "1st".  On the copyright page, that's the "10 9 8 7 6" countdown.  The lowest number is supposed to be the printing.  I am pretty certain that the list of other books by Simon R. Green was updated along the way from the first printing to the 5th printing.  This POD edition has the list of other books by the author that was current when Hell to Pay was first published seven years ago.  The Nightside series was twelve books, but this "other books" panel only goes up to this 7th book.  Good luck figuring out from here the right sequence for reading all the books that came after.  There is no mention of the Secret Histories series, a NY Times bestselling series by the author. There is no mention of his Ghost Finders series.

The POD books are much more susceptible to generic printing errors than regularly printed books.  Another client of mine, Del Howison, has purchased a few batches of these POD copies of his first Dark Delicacies anthology to sell in his Dark Delicacies store.  Can't have purchased more than 20 or 30 of these.  One had a seriously wrinkled spine.  Another had the cover for his book wrapped around the innards of another book.  In another, they put the final pages of the book from page 340 on at the beginning of the book instead of at the end of the book.  All of these are the sorts of things that sometimes happen with books printed by regular means.  But they don't happen in 10% of the copies.

Penguin also tries very hard to say that these aren't POD books, because there are contractual implications to saying that.  They are "managing the inventory."  Maybe we have 5 copies, maybe we have 48 copies.  But the bottom line is that they are printing them in very very small quantities, and only when they absolutely need to print them.  Del Howison generally has to wait a bit getting his books from Baker & Taylor, because B&T doesn't maintain much more than a one or two copy inventory and has to wait for Penguin to supply if Del wants to get five or six.

Penguin now charges $9.99 for a shoddily printed copy of Dark Delicacies.  The better-printed copies cost $7.99.

How can you tell if your paperback with Berkley or Ace or Jove or Roc or NAL or whatever imprint of Penguin is being printed in this way?  Well, on the one hand, it's very easy, because if you've read this blog post, you might accurately get a "you'll know it when you see it" feel.  But  it's also very hard, because the publisher doesn't want to utter the words POD or let you know that their book is in their Special Inventory Program.  It's hard just looking at Amazon or B&N.com or anyplace to tell a book that has just a few copies around because it's in this program from one that is in its end of days with the regularly printed copies.  By definition they're doing these POD runs for books that don't sell a lot of copies and are probably not carried regularly at most bookstores (in fact, I'm surprised a Nightside book by Simon R. Green is being printed this way) so you may not know until you decide you need another five copies for your shelf or some reader complains to you via the contact link on your website.  However, on the very last page of the book opposite the inside back cover, I have noticed that the POD editions have some kind of string of characters, a printing code of sorts, that you don't see on the regular editions.  Of course, Penguin will now do its best to get rid of that, or to add a random string of characters to the back ad on the last page of all of its books just to confuse us.

Do you want your book printed this way?

I've had communication with people at Penguin about this dating back many months, and I don't get the sense that they really care.  We are supposed to be happy that our book is being kept in print.  And the decision to do this isn't the editor's department and isn't anything the editor can influence, and who wants to spend a lot of time worrying about things you can't do anything about.  So even though I don't usually like to do business blog posts like this one, I think at this point that it's time to let the sun shine in.

This is the kind of bad, foolish, short-sighted behavior that will end up putting big publishers like Random Penguin out of business.  Because any of us can go to CreateSpace or Lulu and print a book that looks better than these Penguin group POD editions.  And if I can't even count on the publisher of my clients' books to print them half decently...

Lex Luthor's Lair

I don't have the tech savvy of E C Myers, who did this nifty little Acknowledgment Video for his debut novel Fair Coin, recently out from Pyr SF as part of their new YA line and well worth reading -- you can meet Mr. Myers at various events in the coming days as well.

But after a busy and wonderful day of actually finally housewarming my apartment, I thought I should put a few thank you things out into the world...

The biggest thanks in many ways have to go to my clients. Charlaine Harris, Sookie Stackhouse, and the True Blood folk kind of paid for the place, but I think it's a mistake to be too narrow in viewing the JABberwocky family. Because Charlaine wouldn't be a client today if it weren't for the general belief amongst authors in general that we do a good job for all of our clients, or maybe not a client today if back fifteen years ago when Charlaine Harris wasn't Charlaine Harris yet, but Arkham House and Elizabeth Moon and Simon Green were some of the key players making it possible for me to have the money to go to Malice Domestic every year in large part because I wanted to be there for Charlaine (well, and to visit all the wonderful bookstores in the DC area that are now two thirds of them closed). And I'm kind of cautious, so even today the fact that the agency is not just Charlaine Harris but is Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett, and Elizabeth Moon and Simon Green, and John Hemry/Jack Campbell, and many other people. The agency is a stool with many legs, not just one that would always threaten to wobble me into ruin. I can't name every single client here, but the thanks are to all of them.

And it isn't possible to do what we need to do without having people to help me do it all. Steve Mancino did that for four years. Eddie Schneider will soon surpass Steve as the longest tenured employee at JABberwocky. Jessie Cammack came looking for us, and once Eddie and I found her we weren't going to let her go. Lots of other people who've helped over the years, Joseph and Ronald and Armand and Kat and Brenna and Ethan and Mark and David, among others.

There's Adrian, the broker at Nestseekers who told me the apartment I really really wanted might actually become affordable, because for once in my life the real estate market was dipping as my income was increasing to where I could just find an intersection between the two. But then nobody wants to actually give a mortgage, but Yitz found the guy who would.

When I looked at the raw space, I had a vision of what I might do with the space, and one of the things I'm happiest about today is that the apartment, finally and arduously two and a half years after I purchased it, pretty fully realizes my vision of what it should be and would be and could be and what I wanted it to be. It really is my place, more than anyone else's.

But it doesn't happen that way without some help along the way, some little voices chirping in the ear with advice and suggestions and guidance and how-tos and where-tos. Ronald and Jennifer helped with the painting and recommended the contractor. Elizabeth Moon helped to fill in the idea for the display shelf at the end of the gallery. The guy from Horizon helped find the right shade of window treatment for the bedroom.

When my younger brother got married close to twenty years ago, I was the best man, and one of the groomsman was this tall lanky guy named Mason Rapaport. Mason, it turns out, does woodwork. Really gorgeous woodwork, which now that he's finally actually done something with his website, you can learn about here.

The killer app for this apartment was this very long, very wide, very tall entrance gallery that was going to allow me to bring a little bit of Lex Luthor into my life. The Lex Luthor of Superman: The Movie. So do I thank the director, Richard Donner? Or the production designer Jonn Barry? Or the set director Peter Howitt? Or the art direction crew? Whomever it was in whatever combination who had that gorgeous bookcase in Lex Luthor's lair, where Otis could wheel around Lex, or more pleasantly wheel around the ladder and leave Lex hanging? This entry gallery was going to enable me to have at least a little version of this bookcase complete with ladder that I could call my very own, plenty deep enough to hold three layers of mass markets, two layers of hardcovers, and still leave enough width in the entry gallery to leave room for a wheelchair with lots of space to spare. Look ma, it's my bookcase! It looks even nicer filled with books and with the lights on than it does empty posing for the photo.

Besides being a great thing for a literary agent, it stores so many books, it makes the whole business function better because we don't need to clutter the office with books, we don't need to ship extra books to a client in March because there's no room and then realize in May that we need to order more.

In any event, I knew that Mason needed to do this bookcase, and I didn't think to talk to anyone else.

If you are hanging about the northeast and want any kind of beautiful woodworking or other sorts of cabinetry (the "kitchen" section of Mason's website has a couple other pieces for my apartment) this is the guy to call.

Myke Cole refers to Peter V. Brett as his Professor X.

Myke first introduced me to the idea of getting nicer furniture when we upgraded my old apartment with some nicer stuff several years ago, we trekked out to Long Island and went furniture shopping, and my sofa and dining room set and recliner were all selected that day. And because I'm that kind of a guy, I treated Myke to a delightful picnic lunch of MREs to thank him for his time and support.

I enjoy MREs a lot more than Myke, kind of like I love to visit and mow somebody's lawn, because I do that once every two years and it's a delightful special treat.

Myke gave lots of good suggestions on the right color scheme.

He accompanied me on shopping trips to buy furniture and ceiling fans and other things to fill out the apartment.

He rented the van that moved the boxes of books from the office and then helped along with Eddie and Jessie to move and shelve those dozens of boxes of books.

If there is something hanging on a nail in the apartment, Myke banged in the nail and hung it, and he didn't almost die hanging the movie posters above the TV but it wasn't because I didn't try really really hard to get that to happen.

For the party Myke was my scullery maid and galley slave for the day, and if regulations allowed him to wear a cover indoors I'm sure he would have worn at least six different hats over the course of the day.

Even though Myke resisted my specific instructions to use the Swiffer duster instead of the Swiffer sweeper to dust the moldings, I must give him an extra special and very heartfelt thank you for all of these efforts. Which go above and beyond any rational definition of "what friends are for" or "sucking up to your agent" or any other reason or excuse or justification or whatever else you call it that one might give for somebody to do all of these things.

The brownies for the party came from the Sage General Store. Which is around the corner, and which makes some of the best brownies you can find in New York City. You can find them on the Food Network, not that everyone isn't these days. I ordered way too many brownies. However, they don't make their wonderful german chocolate brownies any more because not too many people wanted to buy those as badly as I. But since I was ordering a full tray, I was able to get some of them, and maybe the leftovers will last for a bit.

The cookies came from Nita's European Bakery in Sunnyside a few blocks from the office, which totally deserves its largely favorable notices on Yelp. I've been in Sunnyside for many years, it's only recently that I've started to habituate Nita's, as I have come to appreciate how their Italian cookies are just head and shoulders almost every other little bakery cookie that I have ever come across.

The prospect of getting yummy things from Sage or Nita's should encourage you to venture across the East River into Queens.

One of my guests said especially how much he liked the scroll that John Moore was kind enough to give, and which sat in its tube for too long before finding the right proper place to hang.

The party was nice because so many people came, childhood friend, college roomie, people from the synagogue, neighbors, clients, editors, publishers, family, from the Scrabble club. Not an abundance of people from any one place, but a wonderful mix of people from all the different parts of me all in one room for the afternoon. Thank you for stopping by!

If I ever get more tech savvy, maybe I can come up with a video that can attempt to list everyone.

The JABberwocky CES

While the electronics world gets ready to gather in Las Vegas, we've been spending time over the holidays upgrading the JABberwocky IT.

2008 was a good year for JABberwocky, it was the year that True Blood arrived, but on our bottom line it was the last year to pre-date. And in that perfectly pleasant last year before the True Blood storm, our foreign commissions represented just under 18% of our total commissions for the year, which was about typical in percentage terms for the entire history of JABberwocky.

Well, we get to 2011, and our foreign commission income alone is bigger than the entirety of our commission income in 2008. And, foreign commissions are approximately 25% of our total. Most of this is a direct result of the success of Charlaine Harris and the Sookie Stackhouse novels following on the success of True Blood, but nowhere near all of it.

No, nowhere near all of it., In the UK, Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson and Jack Campbell and Peter Brett are all selling more copies week in and week out than our most successful author in the UK in 2008. And, in relationship to Charlaine Harris, Sanderson and Campbell are closer in percentage terms to our market leader than is the case in the US.

In Germany, Peter Brett is outselling Charlaine Harris, with a big enough lead that I doubt he'll be passed, and even though both have now made the Der Speigel bestseller lists. Brandon Sanderson is starting to sell big-time as well. with an excellent chance he will become our 3rd Der Speigel bestseller.

In Japan, Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet books are selling far and away better than anything else we've previously had going in that market.

In Taiwan, Simon Green, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett have all had books hitting the charts for Eslite, the country's biggest brick-and-mortar book retailer.

And, yes, in markets across the globe, Charlaine Harris is afire.

This is all quite wonderful, except that it means that our foreign business is now bigger than our entire business was just a few short years ago. We're consistently doing 100 deals overseas every year, and for way more books than that when multi-book deals are taken into account.

Which means, alas, that our tracking mechanisms were getting a bit creaky...

2008 was also the year when we first got Filemaker and started to create our databases for keeping track of pretty much everything worth keeping track of, but as mentioned above that was when our entire business was smaller than our foreign desk in 2008. And when most of the royalty payments and such were coming from a small number of territories with really good on-the-ball sub-agents whose excellent IT we could coast on. Not so now, when royalties are coming in, sometimes in significant amounts, from twelve or twenty territories over the course of a year.

So off we go into our Deals database, to set up new tables and portals to allow us to quickly look in a nice and pretty way at all of our advances and royalties due by sub-agent in each overseas territory. Eureka moment, finally figuring out that something having to do with the relational graph for a relational database meant that the portals were only working for the existing author sorts if the author had some kind of listing in the royalty chart as well as a listing in the advances chart.

Then it's off to the database we were using to schedule our London Book Fair appointments and, as of 2011, Eddie's Bologna appointments. We probably could have built on the existing database, but it made more sense to start afresh. Now we have a database that will better allow us to check if we have a meeting with one editor at a particular publishing company instead of with some other editor, we have prettier layouts to track all of the people we maybe want to meet with by country so that we can more easily work with our sub-agents to keep those things up to date. We'll have a better place to track which sub-agents want printed catalogs, electronic catalogs or both, and if we've actually mailed them out. We'll have better places to keep track of which things we've sold to which publishers so that we know what we're supposed to talk about when we get to our appointments. It will work so that we can have a consolidated database for both Bologna and London. Not that we couldn't do all of those things a year ago, but that now we'll be able to do all of them better.

Today's eureka moment, getting out the Filemaker book and studying up on the "Send Email" scripting, so that now we can send e-mails to take care of scheduling from within the database, instead of having to copy and paste addresses into the e-mail program. And now that we've done that, it means that we can more easily target all kinds of other e-mails. The e-mails we send out when an author hits the bestseller lists, or gets an award nomination, we can now set up a way that an e-mail about Simon Green hitting the bestseller lists can go not only to our sub-agents, but also to publishers who are publishing Simon Green.

At this point, some of you might be rolling your eyes in disbelief that we haven't been doing all of that kind of stuff routinely for years now. Well, maybe you're right, except that my gut instinct tells me that our overall IT process for keeping track of different things was probably better than for a lot of other agencies before we made all of these improvements, and that now it's just that much better. Most literary agencies are rather small, 12 employees or fewer, often way fewer, not a huge IT budget. Most of them have probably gotten basic management software of some sort off the shelf to track deals and handle basic payments, but I doubt they go too much further than that.

I feel as if the hard work is done, it's always an experience to me when I'm getting out the MIssing Manual for Filemaker and playing around with it like I have half an idea what it is that I'm doing. Phew! But now that we have the capability to keep track of all the data, it also means a little more to do day-in day-out for every deal. We can keep track of royalties due by sub-agent, but now we have to start adding sub-agents to the royalties due table. Small things like that will take only a few extra seconds for each deal, but when you multiply each step with a few extra seconds by 130 deals, it's not an invisible amount of time.

And it means using the information, going at it with out sub-agents more often on payments that should have come in, on checking if a publisher purchased books #1-3 in a five-book series when/if they plan to get around to buying those last two. I like it when I occasionally have an author asking about a particular advance or royalty or something, because it's good to know that some authors are out there keeping on top of these things, which reminds us to keep on top of them for all of our clients. At the same time, if every author for every one of those hundreds of foreign deals is wondering monthly about when a payment comes in or when a book is scheduled to appear in Portugal, you can spend too much time dealing with that instead of actually selling books in Portugal, it's no different for the agents we work with overseas.

Still and all, on the whole I'm pretty happy. I've worked very hard on foreign rights over the entire 17 year history of JABberwocky, and it's exciting to see that our business is more global than it's ever been before, and likely only to become moreso, And I think we've done what we needed to do to keep on top of all of it. Still, thinking of all those new fields in new tables and new layouts that need to be populated -- well, that's not the fun side of the business, not where the glamour is.

And if we can just be sure not to use that e-mail script step to do one of those NY Times things and actually send 8 million people and e-mail that was intended for 362. What's that thing Spider Man says, about awesome power and awesome responsibility.

Change

I often tell people that the publishing industry has been dying for as long as I’ve been in the industry, on toward 25 years now.  Hence, the fact that it isn’t yet dead suggests that the impressions on any given day are not in fact correct.

Today, lots of people are saying that the industry is dying on account of the e-book.  My own impression as we are most of the way through “royalty season,” is that the industry is clearly changing, and almost certainly not dying of e-book.

There are incredible amounts of e-books selling right now, incredible. The growth over just a few short years is truly stunning. Simon Green’s Nightside books are now selling about as many copies in e-book as in print. Charlaine Harris’ Harper Connelly books are selling more in e-book. E-books now represent around 10% of her lifetime US sales of 20 million units even though they’ve only been around for a few years in her 30 year career. This is a good business to be in.

For both authors and publishers. Authors make more money from e-books. I’m making this bold unqualified assertion to make up for all of the people making the other assertion, that authors lose money on every e-book. In truth, you can make both. Authors can lose $2 every time somebody buys an e-book instead of a hardcover, but they can just as easily make $2 for every four mass market paperback sales that turn into e-books. Charlaine Harris has huge-selling hardcovers, there’s a hit to her income as those sales move to e-book. Jack Campbell has six Lost Fleet books never published in mass market, there’s a gain every time those sales move to e-book. So I shouldn’t say that authors make more money from e-books, but nor should anyone claim the opposite, that the e-book is the end of authors, of writing, of culture as we know it.

[You can look at 2010 hardbacks reported sold in PW. Pick any reasonable guess for how many of those sales migrated to e-book from 2010 to 2011, multiply by $2, and you're looking at a big chunk of change in lost royalties. Actually, I have no idea in the macro sense if the much larger # of authors who don't have those hardcover sales and are gaining on the mass market end. But what fun is a blog if you can't make blanket statements that can't be substantiated as firm hard fact that everyone should quote on the internet for sixteen years to come.]

To sum up: royalty statements come in, huge amounts of e-book sales, publishers doing well and many though by now means all authors doing better, too.

This is not the death of publishing.

With two caveats.

1. A situation where an Amazon can set the price level for e-books as a loss leader, they have the ability to bring the entire publishing industry to its heels. They can kill publishing in the blink of an eye no matter how much of it they decide to do for themselves. So, for that matter, could a court decision that declares the agency model an illegal restraint of trade.

2. People will lose places to buy print books faster than their actual desire to buy them. One thing’s for sure, the migration to e-book sales isn’t good for businesses that revolve around the sale of printed books. I think I worry more than anything about this. We could look back five years from now and view 2011 as the final flowering of a dual print/e-book marketplace that will dry up like a three-week-old bouquet into a shriveled e-only marketplace in which vastly fewer total numbers of books are being sold.

Putting aside those worst case scenarios, if the publishing industry isn’t dying of e-book, it’s certainly changing, and changing by the day. Tobias Buckell just kickstarted his 4th Xenowealth novel. Jim Hines has self-published electronically an earlier novel and some short story collections. Things like this leave a reduced role JABberwocky.

I worry and publishers worry about how we remain relevant in this changing marketplace. It’s one reason why we have a limited but growing e-book program at JABberwocky, helping our clients monetize their work in ways that weren’t possible a few years ago. But it isn’t “dying” that I use as the adjective there, it’s “changing.”

2010!

Well, on balance, 2010 was a pretty danged amazing year for Brillig, and the Business of Being Brillig.

On the dollar-and-cents scorecard, I've told people I think 2010 was the best year I had, and ever will have, and then I have to listen to all of these people saying "oh, you can't know that." Maybe I am selling myself short, but... 2010 was the year we were getting royalties for the second half of 2009, which was when there were 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the NY Times list at once (8 on paperback list linked, 9th on hardcover), a feat for an author that is unprecedented in the annals of publishing. I'd prefer to be pleasantly surprised if that can ever be equalled or surpassed by some other event or combination of events. Charlaine returned to Earth in the US in 2010, she was "just" an incredibly successful author, and the hardcover sales first week for DEAD IN THE FAMILY were "only" twice the first week sales of DEAD AND GONE the year before. Even if CBS picks up a series based on Charlaine's Harper Connellly books, that series has only four books in it and won't duplicate the 9-on-a-list Sookies. Even if Paul W.S. Anderson starts filming his Painted Man movie tomorrow, that series has only two books so far. Now, there are multiple foreign markets where we haven't yet seen the Charlaine Harris business peak. She's hit the French bestseller lists, True Blood goes on a better German network in 2011, lots of things are happening. But I like to be on the conservative side of realistic in my planning, and if you're the next person I'm telling that 2010 is the year of peak oil, JABberwocky style, humor me on that.

JABberwocky is not a one-legged stool.

The Sookie Stackhouse books were bestsellers even before True Blood. In 2010, Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy was selling well beyond what the first three Sookie books ever came close to doing even as that series was climbing the charts pre-True Blood. Well beyond. The Stormlight Archive is, with The Way of Kings, off to an amazing start. The success is deserved. The Mistborn trilogy is one of the towering achievements in the fantasy genre in the past five years, and The Stormlight Archive will be all that and more in the next ten years.

As successful as Charlaine and Brandon are, Peter V. Brett has accomplished things with just two books under his belt that go well beyond either at equivalent points in their career. #35 NY Times, #16 Der Spiegel, #9 Sunday Times of London with THE DESERT SPEAR.

I don't want to turn this post into a Christmas letter where I mention every single client, but I could. Elizabeth Moon's OATH OF FEALTY is making many best of year lists, Tim Akers is doing so for a 2nd year running, Jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet" books got to #10 on the NY Times paperback list and are moving into hardcover, Simon R. Green turned in his 40th novel in 2010, Eddie's author Jon Sprunk has had the kind of early foreign success Peter V. Brett and Brandon Sanderson enjoyed.

It was a really good year.

One shadow was having Kat Richardson depart our company, probably the most important client to part ways with JABberwocky. Maybe it was inevitable. Kat had been discovered by my first full-time employee Steve Mancino in our slush pile during his very first week on the job, and Steve took very good care of Kat's. I don't know if I ever saw him happier during his time at JABberwocky than when he did a great deal with Roc for her 4th thru 6th Greywalker novels. His decision to head back to his family in Philadelphia and later to depart the agency was a blow, and I wasn't able, as the writing of those three books played out, to match that kind of first author/agent special thing that the two of them had.

But we also had our best year ever in 2010 for placing first novels.

Eddie did a great job getting multiple editors excited about Janci Patterson's SKIPPED, and then of doing the heavy lifting for an eight-month process of negotiating new boilerplate with the publisher that ended up buying. I was able to sell Myke Cole's LATENT after many years and many drafts. Interestingly, I first had extensive face-time with Myke at the same Philcon in 2003 where I first had extensive face-time with Peter V. Brett, so that was definitely a good weekend to be at the Philadelphia Marriott. We didn't entirely sell Bryce Moore's VODNIK to the new Tu Books imprint, but we were thrilled when he came to us with the offer. I first met Bryce at the World Fantasy Convention in Madison in 2005, had read and given notes on an earlier draft of the book along with some others along the way, and feel we did something more than pick up the phone when it rang. And interestingly enough, I also first met Tim Akers at that same World Fantasy, so that was definitely a good weekend to be hanging out in Wisconsin. The person who introduced me to Brandon Sanderson at the 2000 Nebula Awards in NYC recently tweeted that he had finished a novel and was starting in to revise, who knows maybe we can make a two-fer on that convention, too! And at the very end of the year, Eddie got an offer for FAIR COIN by Eugene Myers, more details to come.

We launched our e-book program. I did hope it would be a little further along by the end of 2010. We ended up taking more months than weeks to ponder exactly how big a program we wanted to have and what overall approach we wanted to take, which I think is time well spent. We also ended up underestimating all the little things that would come up to be sure we were setting up our vendor relationships the right way, which is just annoying time to have to spend that I'd like to make go away. But we do have six Simon Green titles up for Kindle, sales are in line with expectations, Kobo should follow very soon, and a lot of horror anthologies not long after, some possibly on Kobo before they show up elsewhere.

Of course, that whole Kobo thing... In the US, Kobo is pretty well tied to Borders, who knows where Borders will be in a couple of months but it looks grim, and then what is the Kobo store in the US? However, Kobo is very well established in Canada and Australia, to name a few other markets, and probably will be a player in the e-book space at some level no matter what befalls its major US partner. Well, with the e-book revolution happening by the day and the Borders scenario to play out, 2011 will be interesting for the business. Enough publishers had bad experiences in Borders in 2008 especially that I think most will manage to muddle through even if Borders does go into bankruptcy, but it wouldn't be entirely surprising to see some smller publishers go into bankruptcy if Borders does.

After years of pretty much sleeping in the office, I finally gained some distance between work and play in 2010. I hate to commute to work after all these years, but I like not sleeping in the office. But the last stage of decorating new apartment to allow old apartment with home office to be spruced up a bit (bedroom there hasn't been painted in over 19 years!) is becoming one of those typically long-winded fix-up stories.

I saw just under 80 movies, which is pretty typical for recent years. I used to see more like 120 movies, however, and there are always a half dozen or so of the missed movies that I wish I'd seen.

I was shocked to see just how little theatre I'd done in NYC in 2010, but am trying to catch some things before they close. I reviewed two of those shows here and here. I think I'm going to try harder to make time for going to shows during 2011. Why live in NYC otherwise, and if Myke Cole follows through on plans to move to New York, I can't drag him with me to see things sometimes when I do "missed it in NYC, last chance DC" theatre trips.

The iPad is amazing. I think the best technological device that I've ever had, and it pretty much goes everywhere with me. I read on it, I tweet, I surf, I correspond, I find efficient walking routes on Google Maps, and imagine if I started to really load it with apps.

The one thing I don't have now that I had a year ago is Len Horowitz. Len was a man, around 70, who was a regular at my Scrabble club. And however these things happen because I can't really explain why it did, we became good friends. We'd walk up 7th Ave and talk after Scrabble, the summer holidays when we had a bbq at someone's house we'd play an extra game or two at a local pizza dive after or head to where we could watch the fireworks on the 4th. Len kept a lot to himself, we didn't talk much if at all about his family as an example, but we could talk about movies at length even if we often didn't agree, and he was genuinely interested in what I was doing and happy for the success I was having in recent years. At the start of 2010, Len stopped showing up at Scrabble without any word, and I ended up stopping by his apartment building in March to see what was up. He'd been diagnosed with a brain tumor, he was in rehab, didn't really want visitors. In retrospect you could look at some of the little things, the eye problems he'd been having or the way the Boggle words were getting more fanciful (Len always thought it was better to create words when you couldn't find many real ones), but only in retrospect. I sent a healthy number of greeting cards, got one e-mail from him that didn't sound very good because he said he was dealing now with pneumonia on top of everything else, and we all know that's not a good thing in situations like these, not a good thing at all. He ended up passing away while I was away at London Book Fair. No funeral, I was told. Maybe there'd be a memorial service. There really wasn't any family to speak of to bother sending a card to, a cousin or nephew or something helping to sort through his affairs. I was really looking forward to having him over to play Scrabble in my new apartment, he'd have actually ventured forth from Manhattan for that. When those of us in the Scrabble club play Boggle, we'll always know what it means when we say somebody's written down a "Len word." It's fifteen years now that my Uncle Matthew passed away, and I still feel that on occasion. In fifteen years, when I'm starting at an awful Boggle board with one vowel and no words and putting things down just because that I'll still see Len there, guiding my hand as I write down my very own Len words.

He was in his early 70s. How do people live to be 50? Let alone into their 80s and 56+ years together like my parents. There are days when my hair is looking its most grey, my knees feeling their creakiest, this week when I've been sitting around with an icky cold, when I wonder just what the pleasures of a ripe old age are supposed to be. But you know, we sold four first novels this year, and I'm quite eager to see what people think of them. Sookie has a choice to make between Eric and Bill. I'm not yet entirely sure if The Warded Man or Jardir is the Deliverer, if the bad Verrakai can be defeated once and for all, whether the Knights Radiant can be re-formed, if Black Jack can discover what makes those mysterious aliens tick. The Gale family has yet to bake me a pie on my birthday, maybe John Taylor can find my Latent magic, and the Mets and Blue Jays will finally meet in the World Series. All of these are things worth waiting for.

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.

thinking aloud, the e-book

We at JABberwocky put up our first e-book this week, for Simon Green's Beyond the Blue Moon, which is now available for the Kindle. Why when I knock the Kindle early and often is this first? Well, Amazon has had a one-time NYC editor Dan Slater working in their digital department for many years, Dan has always been available to us and pushing and prodding on getting content for Amazon, first for their Amazon shorts program and then later for Kindle. He's there to meet with us, he's there to put us in touch with people if we need help, or even if we really don't need the help but it's nice to have the person there at the other end (kind of like the security of having the music in front of you even when you know the song by heart). Barnes & Noble, emails vanish into the mists and there's nobody to talk to without writing a certified letter to the head of the company to get some attention. Some other places even worse. We'll have more books up soon in more formats/stores, including for Nook, iPad, probably Kobo, and we'll have to start digging through into Google's new e-book store. Five other Simon R. Green books, and Hot Blood anthologies and other titles from Jeff Gelb and/or Michael Garrett. Want to have as many in as many places come Christmas as we can, but also do see Beyond the Blue Moon as a kind of cold launch where we can see if the files have been well-converted and figure out the process. I felt a little bit the dummy not to realize until we were partway through the upload process for this that we'd need cover copy, as an example, and that's something to spend more time on earlier in for the next book.

In general, as we got closer and closer to having the first book up, the process seemed to become bigger as we found all the little things beyond just sending a book to a conversion house that needed to be done. And the process as a whole was a goal for 2010 that I envisioned reaching fruition earlier than the last month of 2010. Some of the things we've looked at: where to go for file conversions; where to go for cover art; whether to have an exclusive release somewhere in exchange for promo support; how to share costs of the conversions with the clients; what price we'd put on the books; which books to start with; and oh -- yeah, you need cover copy you idiot.

Simon was the obvious lead choice for the program. because books like this have been unavailable and have people wanting to buy and tie in to other books that are in print, in this case the obvious being Blue Moon Rising. Alas, that isn't available in e-book right now because the contract is so old it didn't talk much about e-books. So we're reaching out to the publisher to address that, but it will be several months before both books are available as e-book.

We're pricing Beyond the Blue Moon at $9.95. A physical copy of Blue Moon Rising costs $16, and Amazon sells that for $10.88, so we are charging less than physical for a fairly similar book. With the cheapest used copies around $7.50+ after the S&H charge, it's not like any other copy can be had for much less. We're charging more than the $6.99 cost on Kindle for his mass market backlist titles that Penguin has in print. My initital thought had been to charge $9.95 across the board, but I might go down a bit for some of Simon's shorter books like Down Among the Dead Men, or might go down after we've generated sufficient sales to have fixed costs (conversion & cover being the bulk) covered.

Covers, we wanted to have things that were a distinct upgrade from a lot of the other small house POD/e-book covers that you can find out there, while also recognizing that we can't go around paying thousands of dollars or even many thousands of dollars to have Michael Whelan or Chris McGrath. For the Simon R Green books we ended up reaching out to Isaac Stewart, an illustrator and cartographer who's done interior art and maps for Brandon Sanderson and others. For other titles, we secured John Fisk, a friend of Eddie's, who has a great sensibility.

In general, we feel the e-book business is now mature enough where it's important for any literary agent to be invested in it. We see this as a service that we can and should offer to our clients. In part, this is because I do believe e-book royalty rates offered by the major publishers need to increase from their current 25% of net, or at least to escalate at some point in a book's life from that, and offering some e-books of our own might help to accomplish that over time. In a nutshell, when authors have more options they have more leverage in a negotiation. That being said, our goal in the e-book program isn't to be directly competing with or stepping on toes of our publishing partners. These aren't books where the rights situation is vague. These are books that we've tried to get Simon's publisher to do at various points. I'd argue that Simon might sell more e-books for his books with Penguin when there are no longer availability holes in his backlist, where people can buy a Blue Moon Rising somewhere but not a Beyond the Blue Moon.

There are conflict issues. We don't intend to be the originating publishers for things, at least as we're thinking of it right now, but we are still now the publisher for this book as well as just the literary agent for it. We don't intend to become an eReads, the e-publisher that agent Richard Curtis started many years ago, doing books for a wide swath of authors. I think the business of actually being an agent selling all kinds of rights throughout the world is still too critical and important to want to have an entire huge side business. For most books moving forward, we will only be able to get the rights reverted from the publishers if the books are failing to meet certain sales or royalty earning thresholds, and I'm not sure even as the e-book business matures that there's a lot to be gained investing in books that are having trouble selling 350 copies a year. I'm not sure it makes sense for us to reach out to former clients with a book or series we liked just for the sake of having more product, but I've been very tempted by that idea nonetheless.

The big next thing is to gear up promotional efforts. Minimally, that means having a page on our web site either for Beyond the Blue Moon specifically or for Simon Green as a whole where we can put up more information on our ebooks and have robust links to the various places to buy them. Do we take out banner ads or key words somewhere? For the Hot Blood books, we've reserved an entire domain name to promote but aren't sure yet what we're actually going to do with that domain.

We've purposely chosen to keep these efforts in-house, but I think the question of the day is whether that will always be so. It's only with the experience of what we're doing now that we can see what the trade-offs are. Obviously we and the author make more money per copy doing e-books ourselves. But will we sell fewer copies because we aren't a destination like an eReads? Will our e-book efforts divert us from other agently things to where we're making more money on e-books but losing bigger sums elsewhere? Maybe tomorrow we'll end up looking for an actual e-book publishing partner, maybe not.

The JABberwocky Digital Rights Manager Jessie Cammack has been on the front lines of our efforts and deserves a lot of credit for this, and she and Eddie and I have batted around a lot of stuff together in the office.

Maybe this approach makes me the literary equivalent of the dude who gets loster because he won't stop for directions or floods the kitchen because he wants to fix the sink before calling the plumber. I hope not. My instinct for a while has been to put an investment in this ourselves when the time seemed right. But we'll see. Feel free to put in your two cents in the comments here, or to contact us in the office.

Elaine Koster

Publishers Marketplace reports that long-time NAL publisher Elaine Koster passed away earlier this week at the age of 69. Elaine was kind of the go-to person during the early years of my career when I was selling Simon Green and Rick Shelley to the NAL list, the person editors like John Silbersack and Chris Schelling and later on Laura Anne Gilman would need to go to for the thumbs-up on an acquisition. I'm told by many of these people that she could be hell to work for, but was at the same time one of those people that a lot of good people would all learn a lot from working with. After she left NAL, she became an agent. John and Chris did eventually as well, actually. But we'll forgive her for that. And remember her support of the genre.

My Three Sons

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, I visited Borders #40 in Bohemia, Long Island.

Well, no, that would be crazy. Really, I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by travelling out to Long Island for the Grand Opening of the Whole Foods Market in Lake Grove, NY. Not as crazy, right! And the Borders was on the way. Like, go to a totally different line on the Long Island Rail Road and have a two-mile walk to the Borders but then the Suffolk County bus goes from directly in front of the Borders pretty much right to the Whole Foods along the way, not crazy at all.

I took this picture as I approached the Borders because you're looking at a little piece of American corporate history that I don't think you can see too many other places right now. In fact, this may be just about the only place in the country where you can see it.

For in the early 1990s, K-Mart decided that the future was in diversification. It acquired Sports Authority, it acquired Office Max, it acquired Borders to pair with the Waldenbooks chain it had owned since 1984. And then almost immediately thereafter, the decision was made that the future was in focusing on the K-Mart stores, and it spun off all three chains. But for a period of two or three years in the early 1990s, K-Mart owned Borders, it owned Office Max, it owned Sports Authority, and it did real estate deals that combined K-Mart stores with an Office Max, a Borders, a Sports Authority, in various combinations. And here we have K-Mart and its three sons, thus the title of this blog post, all lined up in a neat little row, in a plaza built in the early 1990s (my first visit to this Borders was circa 1993), all still in business.

And you just don't see that very often. K-Mart went bankrupt, closed lots of stores. OfficeMax closed lots of stores in the early 2000s. Sports Authority closed stores. Borders has probably closed the fewest stores of all of these chains, let's hope it doesn't catch up in a hurry, but it occurred to me that of the dozens or scores of real estate deals K-Mart did for itself and its progeny, there are only so many of them that included all four brands, and of those the odds are pretty good that one or more of the stores is something else by now, 15 or 18 years later.

Where else but here are you going to get an illustrated piece of corporate Americana like this.

As I enjoyed my ride on the Suffolk bus out the back way into this little slice of Americana, it looked as if they might have patched up some of the potholes. Maybe next time Peter Brett can enjoy the sightseeing a little bit more.

The Whole Foods in Lake Grove was doing the brisk opening day business one might expect, and is the 102nd that I've been to. It has a pickle bar, which is something I haven't seen before, I don't think. Their Indian bar had a squash puree that I hadn't seen at other Whole Foods, though the sign that says their Indian food is from Zaika is a little bit deceptive because Zaika turns out to be part of the same Cafe Spice outfit that provides Indian food to most of the Whole Foods in the region. They had a good gelato brand.

This Whole Foods is pretty much across the street from Borders #79 in Stony Brook, which was also a K-Mart real estate deal. My three sons are all still there, but the K-Mart is now a Lowe's. I also popped over to the relatively new B&N in Stony Brook, which was added around two years ago when the Smith Haven Mall added a "lifestyle center" outdoor extension, the Borders in Commack, and the B&N in Commack. Most of the stores had around 70 non-Charlaine Harris JABberwocky titles. The Borders in Commack has always been an underperformer and had only 50. So why is the Borders in Commack the only Borders on LI that still opens at 9AM? Do they have some super-brisk business at the Seattle's Best? This was my first visit to this B&N in Commack. They had a store catercorner that closed. This newer store is part of the Huntington Square mall where it looks like they pretty much demolished all of what was a small, old, decaying little mall, save for the Sears, and rebuilt it with the B&N taking up most of the space. I don't think the B&N does much better for sf/fantasy than the Borders does. The best current barometer is to see if a B&N has the Deathstalker books by Simon Green and/or the Blood books and some others from Tanya Huff, since those are titles that are found at the better stores in genre but not at the lesser locations.

I used to celebrate my birthday by visiting all of these various bookstores, Bohemia then bus to Stony Brook then bus to Commack then maybe on toward Huntington and maybe down to Farmingdale. It's gotten harder in recent years to take the time off for this, so I was glad the Whole Foods opening gave me an excuse to visit some of these old haunts.

E-book pricing

As publishers gain more control over pricing of their e-book product via the new "agency model," how creative will they get in figuring out how to maximize revenue?

A real world example: Simon Green's Hawk & Fisher books are available for Kindle in a $9.99 3-in-1 omnibus edition, price is $3.33 per book. An individual Nightside book sells for as little as $5.20, as much as $6.40. The Hawk & Fisher books sell fewer Kindle copies by far than the Nightside books. Which on the one hand, makes sense because the Nightside books are newer and ongoing while the Hawk & Fisher books are backlist items, published a while ago and not ongoing. But on the other hand, the books themselves are very similar, and my instinct is that there's a bigger gap in sales than there should be considering the unit price per book.

Is it possible that there are price-sensitive people who are so focused on price that they refuse to buy the Hawk & Fisher omnibus at $9.99, because that's 80% or 50% more than a Nightside book, without realizing that they're actually getting a Hawk & Fisher novel for half the price?

What would happen if Penguin stopped offering the omnibus edition of the Hawk & Fisher books at all, and just sold them where they'd sell for the same $6.40 as Hex and the City?

What would happen if they followed the Baen Webscription model, where you can buy seven John Hemry books for $5 each or seven in a $30 bundle? In my experience, Baen manages to drive a lot of purchasers toward the high-priced bundle because the discount suddenly becomes visible. Hardly anyone buys one book for $5 when they can save $5 by spending an extra $25.

My gut feeling tells me that the current pricing for the Hawk & Fisher books is the worst of all possible words, losing revenue to the price sensitive customer and to the less price sensitive cover by offering a discount that isn't clearly visible. I think if you had only single books you'd have some people who'd be upset they couldn't buy the same omnibus for an e-book that they could for the physical, but still end up making more money. The Webscription program suggests the best thing to do is offer both the single and the bundle even if you don't sell any singles. I know it would be a good idea for the publishers to start getting very creative and scientific in looking at these things when they have the control and ability to do so.

Will they?