Over the course of these royalty season posts, I have spoken a lot about the reserve against returns, and this entire post will deal with this.
The idea of the reserve is rooted in reality. The books the publisher sends out can be returned for full credit by booksellers. The publisher has to ave some protection against paying royalties on copies that might be returned.
But the reality of the reserve is that it is the publisher's cookie jar, a source of abuse, and like many things in the publishing industry a relic of a past age that doesn't want to come kicking and screaming into modernity.
Once upon a time, the fate of a book really was a mystery. It isn't any more. With Bookscan and other direct ties between major retail accounts and major publishers, the big publishers know the fate of a book. Maybe not by June 30 for a book that came out in May, and I can understand a bit if the reserve against returns on that first royalty report is high. Yet, I will occasionally see publishers taking such large reserves that they pay royalties for fewer copies than Bookscan reports as sold through the end of the royalty period -- and way fewer than we know are sold by the time I am getting the royalty statement. In those instances, on general principle, I complain to the publisher even about very small numbers of copies. Paying my client a royalty for 2536 copies when we know the book sold 2682 -- that's not a reasonable reserve against returns.
I mentioned how DAW used to hand-write "too early to tell" for the rest report on every royalty statement. Now, their default is to take a 100% reserve on print sales on the first royalty report, whether a book has been on sale for six weeks or six months. This used to matter less because the books would often not earn royalties on the very first statement even if the reserve was closer to 50% it becomes more likely that the client could get a small royalty check even from known activity on a short period of time.
25 years ago, retail distribution for books was hugely inefficient. It could take months for information to flow from the corner drugstore to a small independent distributor to the publisher's warehouse. Shipping fully returnable books into distribution channels that ranged from highly inefficient to somewhat inefficient with long lag time on information reporting -- you could understand why reserves had to be high in the early going. Now, Amazon has a low return rate, and channels with higher returns like Costco and Walmart have pretty good IT and can provide Point of Sale information on copies sold to publishers very quickly. But reserves are often still held as if average return rates are still what they were 40 years ago.
The purpose of a reserve against returns was to keep the publisher from being on the hook for paid royalties on copies subsequently returned. But even though the typical novel is now published in multiple formats, including audio and ebook formats sold as digital downloads with few returns, reserves are held on each print edition as if the others don't exist. If you know a book is being published hard-soft, can't the reserve on the hardcover be moderated in anticipation of paperback royalties? Many of our authors now sell over half their copies in ebook, so why take a print reserve at all when there will always be ebook royalties to make up the difference?
I don't expect publishers to do away with reserves entirely, but I sure think they should be held with a lighter touch in 2015 than in 1985.
We try in current contracts to specify that reserves not be held on digital products or after the first few royalty periods, or at least be justified upon request. But I feel like we need to get more aggressive in evaluating reserves held with a broader perspective with regard to the range of editions published.
But book by book, do you or your agent look at all your reserves against returns every period? Do you check them against Bookscan? Do you check the size of the reserve against actual returns? Do you peek inside the publisher's cookie jar to see if there are cookies? In many instances, even if the reserve is reduced you may still have a negative royalty balance or be due so little money is isn't worth the fuss to complain rather than waiting for the reserve to be reduced on the next report. But sometimes you can get decent money in your hands months earlier if you just take the time to look in the cookie jar.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Spread 'Em Wide
One of the reasons I have spoken a lot this week about royalties: well, information is the mother's milk of literary representation, and along with the quality of the book itself, the three most important pieces of information we can use to sell an author are (1) the author's bibliography and biography (2) reviews (3) sales history. Furthermore, if you want to gauge how much the market might pay for an established author you have to have a handle on actual expenses for printing books vs. actual revenue from selling them rather than royalties paid. And how do we figure out what an author's sales history is or how much revenue and expense the publisher has in printing and selling books, in both print and electronic forms? Well, we gather that information from royalty statements.
And I learned early in my career at Scott Meredith that sales information isn't well kept by stacking piles of paper in a filing cabinet. Those Penguin statements I was telling you about, that told you only the quantity of books "sold" in any given six month period -- well, back then we had many Ellery Queen books available in Penguin doubles, and if someone wanted to figure out how many Ellery Queen novels were sold, it meant collecting years with if little sheets of paper and manually adding up columns and columns of figures.
Suffice to say when I finally had a computer at my desk in the early 1990s, things changed. I could at least put the figures into a word processing document so they could be added without having to retrieve little pieces of paper from the filing cabinet. Eventually that gave way to tables within the word processing program, and eventually to tables in a spreadsheet.
And for a variety of reasons, not just out of habit, we continue today to process every incoming royalty statement on to our computers, just like I started to do over 20 years ago when I first had a computer on my desk.
Some of those reasons:
Publishers make mistakes. It doesn't hurt to check their math, and spreadsheets enable us to do this. Assuming, of course, that we set up the spreadsheets correctly. There is this tendency to trust that the computer generated very official looki royalty statements the publishers provide always have the correct royalty rates.
As discussed in my previous post on current royalty statements, most are still seriously lacking in cumulative information on copies shipped and copies returned, and it's still very 1989 in needing to track that information someplace other than on piles of paper hiding in a file drawer for years or decades.
A spreadsheet will take the information I enter for Dead Until Dark and Living Dead in Dallas and start to turn that into a series total for the Sookie Stackhouse novels and an overall total for Charlaine Harris, and this information can then be used in our marketing of translation rights and film rights, or be of use when the Wall Street Journal calls to do a major profile on the author.
In that sense, I get a lot more out of what I put in than when I started to do this over twenty years ago. Spreadsheet, and the world if ours!
All that said, there are times when I and my employees who now have to do a lot of the actual spreadsheeting work probably wonder why we bother.
Each publisher's royalty statements are different, and the royalty scenarios can be different within a publisher for mass markets, trade paperbacks, hardcovers, audios and e-books, so we have to have lots of different spreadsheet formats.
The benefits are invisible. The company that is doing the Mistborn video game needs to go to its bankers and needs information on Mistborn copies sold for Brandon Sanderson, or the screenwriter with an option on Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population needs some information to present to producers with her screenplay, or we want to rough out a profit & loss statement to try and guess how much money DAW books can pay for the new Jim Hines, and we can do those things quickly and easily because we have impeccable spreadsheets. But it is very easy to separate out those benefits from the time, heavily concentrated during the twelve weeks of royalty season, when it seems like we do nothing all day but spreadsheet royalty reports.
We can't predict. It's our policy to do spreadsheeting for every piece of paper for everyone, because we don't know when Alan Ball will stumble across a novel in a B&N while waiting for a dentist appointment and be inspired to produce True Blood. For more of our authors than not, the effort we do in spreadsheeting is ultimately futile. In that sense, even I must confess that I can't be sure that we wouldn't be better off doing time-consuming forensics to produce information when it's actually needed, rather than to have so much up-front investment to have good information for all of our clients.
It's just another variety of gibberish. We can read our spreadsheets very well because we put them together. For the many publishers that don't provide cumulative information on copies shipped and returned we like being able to give clients our spreadsheets as opposed to the underlying publisher reports. But the fact is that our spreadsheets can still use some tutorials for people who don't know their way around Excel.
High maintenance. The information doesn't flow up-hill on its own, so every time a publisher comes out with a new edition of a book we have to set up a new table and then plug the information from that table into at least one location in a summary table. Dead Until Dark has had an e-book, a mass market with many different prices attached, a True Blood tie-in mass market, a hardcover, a trade paperback, another trade paperback, etc. Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn a hardcover, a paperback, a promotional paperback, a YA trade paperback, an e-book, an audio.
But all that said, I like that we are able to get all this information to flow uphill to a nice single sheet of paper that gives the actual global sales totals for Brandon Sanderson or Peter V. Brett or Elizabeth Moon or Simon R. Green, based on actual publisher royalty reports, and that we can send that out to anyone who asks whenever they want it. I doubt we'll stop spreadsheeting any time soon, certainly not for as long as the royalty statements we get are as generally unhelpful as they often still can be.
And I learned early in my career at Scott Meredith that sales information isn't well kept by stacking piles of paper in a filing cabinet. Those Penguin statements I was telling you about, that told you only the quantity of books "sold" in any given six month period -- well, back then we had many Ellery Queen books available in Penguin doubles, and if someone wanted to figure out how many Ellery Queen novels were sold, it meant collecting years with if little sheets of paper and manually adding up columns and columns of figures.
Suffice to say when I finally had a computer at my desk in the early 1990s, things changed. I could at least put the figures into a word processing document so they could be added without having to retrieve little pieces of paper from the filing cabinet. Eventually that gave way to tables within the word processing program, and eventually to tables in a spreadsheet.
And for a variety of reasons, not just out of habit, we continue today to process every incoming royalty statement on to our computers, just like I started to do over 20 years ago when I first had a computer on my desk.
Some of those reasons:
Publishers make mistakes. It doesn't hurt to check their math, and spreadsheets enable us to do this. Assuming, of course, that we set up the spreadsheets correctly. There is this tendency to trust that the computer generated very official looki royalty statements the publishers provide always have the correct royalty rates.
As discussed in my previous post on current royalty statements, most are still seriously lacking in cumulative information on copies shipped and copies returned, and it's still very 1989 in needing to track that information someplace other than on piles of paper hiding in a file drawer for years or decades.
A spreadsheet will take the information I enter for Dead Until Dark and Living Dead in Dallas and start to turn that into a series total for the Sookie Stackhouse novels and an overall total for Charlaine Harris, and this information can then be used in our marketing of translation rights and film rights, or be of use when the Wall Street Journal calls to do a major profile on the author.
In that sense, I get a lot more out of what I put in than when I started to do this over twenty years ago. Spreadsheet, and the world if ours!
All that said, there are times when I and my employees who now have to do a lot of the actual spreadsheeting work probably wonder why we bother.
Each publisher's royalty statements are different, and the royalty scenarios can be different within a publisher for mass markets, trade paperbacks, hardcovers, audios and e-books, so we have to have lots of different spreadsheet formats.
The benefits are invisible. The company that is doing the Mistborn video game needs to go to its bankers and needs information on Mistborn copies sold for Brandon Sanderson, or the screenwriter with an option on Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population needs some information to present to producers with her screenplay, or we want to rough out a profit & loss statement to try and guess how much money DAW books can pay for the new Jim Hines, and we can do those things quickly and easily because we have impeccable spreadsheets. But it is very easy to separate out those benefits from the time, heavily concentrated during the twelve weeks of royalty season, when it seems like we do nothing all day but spreadsheet royalty reports.
We can't predict. It's our policy to do spreadsheeting for every piece of paper for everyone, because we don't know when Alan Ball will stumble across a novel in a B&N while waiting for a dentist appointment and be inspired to produce True Blood. For more of our authors than not, the effort we do in spreadsheeting is ultimately futile. In that sense, even I must confess that I can't be sure that we wouldn't be better off doing time-consuming forensics to produce information when it's actually needed, rather than to have so much up-front investment to have good information for all of our clients.
It's just another variety of gibberish. We can read our spreadsheets very well because we put them together. For the many publishers that don't provide cumulative information on copies shipped and returned we like being able to give clients our spreadsheets as opposed to the underlying publisher reports. But the fact is that our spreadsheets can still use some tutorials for people who don't know their way around Excel.
High maintenance. The information doesn't flow up-hill on its own, so every time a publisher comes out with a new edition of a book we have to set up a new table and then plug the information from that table into at least one location in a summary table. Dead Until Dark has had an e-book, a mass market with many different prices attached, a True Blood tie-in mass market, a hardcover, a trade paperback, another trade paperback, etc. Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn a hardcover, a paperback, a promotional paperback, a YA trade paperback, an e-book, an audio.
But all that said, I like that we are able to get all this information to flow uphill to a nice single sheet of paper that gives the actual global sales totals for Brandon Sanderson or Peter V. Brett or Elizabeth Moon or Simon R. Green, based on actual publisher royalty reports, and that we can send that out to anyone who asks whenever they want it. I doubt we'll stop spreadsheeting any time soon, certainly not for as long as the royalty statements we get are as generally unhelpful as they often still can be.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Apocalty Now
Yesterday I told you what royalty statements looked like at the start of my career in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Furthermore, your profitability to the publisher is dependent in some ways upon the efficiency of your sale, i.e., how many print copies the publisher has to send out into the world in order to sell one copy. This is a little less the case today than twenty years ago because of ebooks, but it is still important, If it costs $2 to print a $25 hardcover, and if the publisher gets $12 of that $25, it is harder to make money if the publisher has to print three copies in order to sell one, $6 of the $12 is already out the door to the printer, $2.50 or $3.75 to your royalty, and there could be $2 or $3 left from each copy sold for the publisher to pay for your cover, the copy-editor, the editor, etc. If the publisher sells four of every five copies, then the printer gets $10 of every $48, your royalty is $10 or $15, and the publisher can have over twice as much money left per copy sold to pay overhead and direct expenses.
Because of this, it is very important if you want to judge how big an advance you should get from your publisher to know your "sell-thru" percentage, Higher sell-thru equals more money for the publisher equals more money to pay you.
I am simplifying a little bit. The publisher can make decisions that can artificially inflate or deflate your efficiency. As an example, for Brandon Sanderson's debut YA novels in 2013, The Rithmatist and Steelheart, both Tor and Delacorte decided to invest in shipping more books into channels like Costco, Walmart and Target that generally have higher return rates. However, each publisher still had expectations on what the size of the investment would look like after the final numbers came in, relative to their profit expectations and their overall marketing budgets for each book.
Since these things are important, I think any decent royalty statement today should clearly tell you how many copies were shipped, how many copies were returned, and what the reserve against returns is.
Penguin started to provide that information only as we got into the mid 2000s; even for Dead Until Dark which the Berkley Publishing Group published in 2001, the earliest royalty statement was the old-fashioned (your number) Berkley royalty statement. I feel they provide the gold standard for royalty reporting. Each print format or ISBN gets one or two clean concise pages that give the current information for copies shipped and sold, for the reserve against returns at the start and finish, and at the bottom, summarize that information cumulatively for prior, current and ending totals. If you want to figure out your sell-thru percentage for the life of your book, you need to pull only that one most recent piece of paper.
Pretty much every other publisher falls short of this in one way or another.
Scholastic is surprisingly awful for a big US publisher in the 2010s, and their statements are relics of a last age, with the reserve against returns still hidden, and no information given on copies shipped and returned.
St. Martin's is slightly better, but only slightly. They provide cumulative total copies sold by channel, while Scholastic provides only a grand total, which is a little better. As an example, if you are a Canadian author, you might want to know how much of your business is coming from Canada, and St. Martin's is a little better for this. And St. Martin's does give the reserve against returns, albeit only in dollars and not in units, which is something I will discuss in more detail in a later post that deals exclusively with reserves.
St. Martin's is owned by a big publishing conglomerate Macmillan, and strangely other Macmillan imprints like Tor provide information on copies shipped and returned that the St. Martin's statements do not. We are told this is because St. Martin's purchased the new royalty system earlier and got the budget version. But same conglomerate, same warehouse, same computers tracking everything, and they haven't had a chance to upgrade?
Even the better statements from other Macmillan imprints have a tragic flaw. They only provide a cumulative total for net copies sold, and not for copies shipped and copies returned. Hence, if you want to know what your vitally important sell-thru is you still have to collect information from many pieces of paper dating back many years, and there is no positive change there as against the royalty statements I saw in 1988.
Other publishers are unable to present information on one page.
Simon & Schuster was one of the first publishers to provide more "informative" royalty statements, but the statements could take three or five pages to tell you that three or five copies had sold. If you are wondering why I have a "watch what you wish for, you might get it" approach to these newer royalty statements, look no further.
Other publishers have layering problems. i.e., like airline security they took their old systems and loaded new stuff on top of it.
Historically William Morrow and Avon had provided slightly better detail on their royalty statements, and when HarperCollins purchased Morrow/Avon, they just added more pages without looking at the overall quality of their reporting. It's a mess, spread over many pages. Perseus, which had been distributed by Harper, has a similar-looking statement that looks a little prettier but isn't any easier to use.
Random House made a big fuss when they switched from putting "your number" on a computer-fold oversize piece of paper to putting it on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, but it was the same information or lack thereof only more manageably presented. When they finally got around to providing information on copies shipped, copies returned, and reserves against returns, they kept that same 8.5x11 sheet of paper around as the first page of the new royalty statement. To put it less politely, the first page of your Random House statement is the same utter bullshit that we got 25 years ago. They do provide more information but you have to go hunting for it. And they don't automatically provide information on copies shipped and returned for the life of your book. They automatically provide a sheet with that information for books that have reserves activity, but if they stop holding a reserve on your hardcover after two or three years that page suddenly disappears. They provide that information by price point, so if your mass market price changed from $6.99 to $7.99, you may now only get the page for the $7.99 copies. If you ask them by ISBN and price point to provide the missing pages, they will provide them to you, but only if you ask. Or, you can ask them to provide you with all the "Print Summary" pages every time. Since e-books can be sold at many different prices, this may result in you receiving a 40-page royalty statement. Every time. You can choose to drown in information, you can choose not to have information, or you can choose to add a semi-annual e-mail request for select additional information while also being sure to archive sheets of paper from several years ago. The one good thing in these statements: Random House is on of the only publishers that will tell you how many copies they print and when they print them. On the other hand, the calculation of actual royalties earned is on a different page than the detail of how many copies were shipped and returned. At its best and simplest, you'll still have three pages of information (summary, royalty calculation, ship/return/reserve detail) vs. the one page from Penguin.
Penguin has one layering issue of its own. Early in the e-book era each e-book format had its own ISBN, and their system was designed to generate a page for each ISBN. Suddenly, we would have six pages of royalty reports for e-books. For less popular formats, those pages might list a handful of copies if any. The pages didn't have a place to tell you which ISBN was the Amazon one and which was the B&N one, so there were no benefits to having the information spread over multiple pages. Over time, ISBNs have been consolidated, but they do not have a way to purge the inactive ISBNs from the ongoing reports.
Especially now that the ebook ISBNs are consolidated, I clearly prefer the Penguin reports to the Random House reports and am curious to see which will prevail as the combined companies merge operations.
So on the one hand, we've come a long way, and on the other hand not. After two or three years the old statements were reasonably accurate for what they were, and you had just one page that anyone could understand. Now, we generally have much better visibility on reserves against returns, but there are still serious problems across the industry in giving basic cumulative information on copies shipped and returned, and the royalty statements are differently annoying with each publisher in their layers, pages, complexity and presentation.
We shall continue this series with a discussion of our internal processing of these pieces of paper, Suffice to say just sticking these pieces of paper in the file isn't going to be very helpful when we actually need to make use of the information that is hiding within these reports....
As we progressed through the 1990s, publishers slowly started to provide "better" royalty statements. As with the Random House portal, which has been around for two years now, I am always surprised when publishers make it easier for authors and agents to find information, though maybe I shouldn't always be because even publishers can sometimes recognize the cost of keeping secrets. Unlike, let's say, the NSA.
That said, the additional information is often provided in a "watch what you wish for, you might get it" kind of a way. It's sometimes so hard to find the information and so difficult to interpret it that the improvements are less significant than I would wish.
Before continuing, this post's reminder that in major trade publishing that most of the books publishers send to bookstores can be returned to the publisher for full credit. Hence, the publisher is entitled to take a reserve against returns to guard against paying royalties for books that are later returned.
Furthermore, your profitability to the publisher is dependent in some ways upon the efficiency of your sale, i.e., how many print copies the publisher has to send out into the world in order to sell one copy. This is a little less the case today than twenty years ago because of ebooks, but it is still important, If it costs $2 to print a $25 hardcover, and if the publisher gets $12 of that $25, it is harder to make money if the publisher has to print three copies in order to sell one, $6 of the $12 is already out the door to the printer, $2.50 or $3.75 to your royalty, and there could be $2 or $3 left from each copy sold for the publisher to pay for your cover, the copy-editor, the editor, etc. If the publisher sells four of every five copies, then the printer gets $10 of every $48, your royalty is $10 or $15, and the publisher can have over twice as much money left per copy sold to pay overhead and direct expenses.
Because of this, it is very important if you want to judge how big an advance you should get from your publisher to know your "sell-thru" percentage, Higher sell-thru equals more money for the publisher equals more money to pay you.
I am simplifying a little bit. The publisher can make decisions that can artificially inflate or deflate your efficiency. As an example, for Brandon Sanderson's debut YA novels in 2013, The Rithmatist and Steelheart, both Tor and Delacorte decided to invest in shipping more books into channels like Costco, Walmart and Target that generally have higher return rates. However, each publisher still had expectations on what the size of the investment would look like after the final numbers came in, relative to their profit expectations and their overall marketing budgets for each book.
Since these things are important, I think any decent royalty statement today should clearly tell you how many copies were shipped, how many copies were returned, and what the reserve against returns is.
Penguin started to provide that information only as we got into the mid 2000s; even for Dead Until Dark which the Berkley Publishing Group published in 2001, the earliest royalty statement was the old-fashioned (your number) Berkley royalty statement. I feel they provide the gold standard for royalty reporting. Each print format or ISBN gets one or two clean concise pages that give the current information for copies shipped and sold, for the reserve against returns at the start and finish, and at the bottom, summarize that information cumulatively for prior, current and ending totals. If you want to figure out your sell-thru percentage for the life of your book, you need to pull only that one most recent piece of paper.
Pretty much every other publisher falls short of this in one way or another.
Scholastic is surprisingly awful for a big US publisher in the 2010s, and their statements are relics of a last age, with the reserve against returns still hidden, and no information given on copies shipped and returned.
St. Martin's is slightly better, but only slightly. They provide cumulative total copies sold by channel, while Scholastic provides only a grand total, which is a little better. As an example, if you are a Canadian author, you might want to know how much of your business is coming from Canada, and St. Martin's is a little better for this. And St. Martin's does give the reserve against returns, albeit only in dollars and not in units, which is something I will discuss in more detail in a later post that deals exclusively with reserves.
St. Martin's is owned by a big publishing conglomerate Macmillan, and strangely other Macmillan imprints like Tor provide information on copies shipped and returned that the St. Martin's statements do not. We are told this is because St. Martin's purchased the new royalty system earlier and got the budget version. But same conglomerate, same warehouse, same computers tracking everything, and they haven't had a chance to upgrade?
Even the better statements from other Macmillan imprints have a tragic flaw. They only provide a cumulative total for net copies sold, and not for copies shipped and copies returned. Hence, if you want to know what your vitally important sell-thru is you still have to collect information from many pieces of paper dating back many years, and there is no positive change there as against the royalty statements I saw in 1988.
Other publishers are unable to present information on one page.
Simon & Schuster was one of the first publishers to provide more "informative" royalty statements, but the statements could take three or five pages to tell you that three or five copies had sold. If you are wondering why I have a "watch what you wish for, you might get it" approach to these newer royalty statements, look no further.
Other publishers have layering problems. i.e., like airline security they took their old systems and loaded new stuff on top of it.
Historically William Morrow and Avon had provided slightly better detail on their royalty statements, and when HarperCollins purchased Morrow/Avon, they just added more pages without looking at the overall quality of their reporting. It's a mess, spread over many pages. Perseus, which had been distributed by Harper, has a similar-looking statement that looks a little prettier but isn't any easier to use.
Random House made a big fuss when they switched from putting "your number" on a computer-fold oversize piece of paper to putting it on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, but it was the same information or lack thereof only more manageably presented. When they finally got around to providing information on copies shipped, copies returned, and reserves against returns, they kept that same 8.5x11 sheet of paper around as the first page of the new royalty statement. To put it less politely, the first page of your Random House statement is the same utter bullshit that we got 25 years ago. They do provide more information but you have to go hunting for it. And they don't automatically provide information on copies shipped and returned for the life of your book. They automatically provide a sheet with that information for books that have reserves activity, but if they stop holding a reserve on your hardcover after two or three years that page suddenly disappears. They provide that information by price point, so if your mass market price changed from $6.99 to $7.99, you may now only get the page for the $7.99 copies. If you ask them by ISBN and price point to provide the missing pages, they will provide them to you, but only if you ask. Or, you can ask them to provide you with all the "Print Summary" pages every time. Since e-books can be sold at many different prices, this may result in you receiving a 40-page royalty statement. Every time. You can choose to drown in information, you can choose not to have information, or you can choose to add a semi-annual e-mail request for select additional information while also being sure to archive sheets of paper from several years ago. The one good thing in these statements: Random House is on of the only publishers that will tell you how many copies they print and when they print them. On the other hand, the calculation of actual royalties earned is on a different page than the detail of how many copies were shipped and returned. At its best and simplest, you'll still have three pages of information (summary, royalty calculation, ship/return/reserve detail) vs. the one page from Penguin.
Penguin has one layering issue of its own. Early in the e-book era each e-book format had its own ISBN, and their system was designed to generate a page for each ISBN. Suddenly, we would have six pages of royalty reports for e-books. For less popular formats, those pages might list a handful of copies if any. The pages didn't have a place to tell you which ISBN was the Amazon one and which was the B&N one, so there were no benefits to having the information spread over multiple pages. Over time, ISBNs have been consolidated, but they do not have a way to purge the inactive ISBNs from the ongoing reports.
Especially now that the ebook ISBNs are consolidated, I clearly prefer the Penguin reports to the Random House reports and am curious to see which will prevail as the combined companies merge operations.
So on the one hand, we've come a long way, and on the other hand not. After two or three years the old statements were reasonably accurate for what they were, and you had just one page that anyone could understand. Now, we generally have much better visibility on reserves against returns, but there are still serious problems across the industry in giving basic cumulative information on copies shipped and returned, and the royalty statements are differently annoying with each publisher in their layers, pages, complexity and presentation.
We shall continue this series with a discussion of our internal processing of these pieces of paper, Suffice to say just sticking these pieces of paper in the file isn't going to be very helpful when we actually need to make use of the information that is hiding within these reports....
Monday, March 24, 2014
Royalty Season, Spring
We are settling in after our move just in time for the arrival of royalty season. In fact, some German royalties from Heyne, which were the first buds of the season or sprinkles of the monsoon or flakes of the blizzard arrived almost simultaneous with the move.
And I realize in six years of having Brillig, I've never spoken much about royalty season.
First, royalty season in the publishing industry doesn't arrive at the same time for everyone. It isn't like spring or fall, but rather more like the last frost.
When I was at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the early years of my career, royalty season arrived on February 1 and August 1. Random House was due to send out reports the last day of January and last day of August, and they were very nice about it. They didn't entrust their big checks to the Post Office in order to get another day or two of float, but rather would messenger them over, though late in the day so the check couldn't make it to the bank for that day's deposit. Carl Sagan -- Random House author. Norman Mailer -- Random House author. Margaret Truman -- Random House author. All of the many Scott Meredith clients published by Del Rey -- Random House authors. The Mists of Avalon -- Random House. Blade Runner -- Random House. 2010 Odyssey 2 -- Random House. So when Random House reported royalties, that was when we had royalty season.
At JABberwocky, the vast preponderance of our authors are published by the Berkley Publishing Group part of Penguin, which reports on/about March 31 and Sept. 30. Charlaine Harris, Jack Campbell, Simon R. Green -- all NY Times bestselling authors with many many books, all Berkley Publishing Group. Along with some of our Roc authors. And DAW, with many of our other authors, usually sends statements along a few days after Penguin in April, and a few days before in September.
I think Scott Meredith had the better of it, because the Random House statements were a bit off from everyone else's. It wasn't one super big season, but rather helped to spread it out a bit more. For us, it's not just Penguin on March 31 and Tor on April 30 but most of our big German and UK statements that want to come in then along with lots of miscellaneous others. Just about everything comes in between March 20 and May 10, and between September 15 and November 10. Less than a third of the year with two-thirds of our royalty paperwork.
So that is royalty season.
This is going to be a series of posts, and if that's the introduction let's put up Chapter One now as well, which is to talk about what I saw when I looked at royalty statements at the start of my career. It was a lot different, if also in some important ways not so different at all, from what I see now.
One very important thing to keep in mind in this entire discussion, so I will say here and repeat often in different keys:
For Penguin or for Kensington, the number might be the number of copies "sold" in a given accounting period. That number came on a little 5x7 (maybe, don't have any at hand) piece of paper that came off of a computer. And there wasn't much more than that one number to look at.
Random House gave multiple numbers, the number of copies "sold" over the six months and the total number of copies "sold" to the end of the period. Their number came on a big oversized piece of computer print-out paper which made it seem especially important and true.
Berkley gave their numbers on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper which made them easier to file.
DAW gave many numbers, since they did things by hand on a piece of paper that would be passed down from royalty statement to royalty statement like a revered scroll.. That paper would have rows, and the rows would have the date of the period, the number of copies sold to the end of the period, and then the next row either gave that number followed by the new number, or the number of copies "sold" over the six months which you would add to get the new number, kind of like one of those Scrabble score sheets that comes with the fancier sets. The first number was always "too early to tell."
There wasn't a lot of mentoring or training at Scott Meredith, so it took me a long time to learn that all these numbers, from all these different publishers, no matter how official looking the sheet of paper was, were utter bullshit.
Why?
Well, the number was the result of an equation, and the equation itself was hidden.
The equation used to generate the number was:
(actual copies net after ship and return) (minus) (reserve against returns) (equals) (your number)
And all we got was (your number), either as a total at the end of the period or as the difference between (your number) in one period and the immediately prior period.
You'd walk into bookstores and see a book all over the place and wonder why (your number) was so small. Well, (your number) was maybe a half or a quarter of the actual number of books the publisher had put into the marketplace.
A book would come out, not appear to sell, and when you got the second royalty statement (your number) went up. Not because there were more copies, but because the hidden reserve against returns was reduced by more than the hidden copies shipped less copies returned.
It would take around four royalty periods, or around two years, before the magic number that appeared on the royalty statements was close enough to the actual performance that the statement could be considered reliable.
I got in the habit of calling my debut novelists when their first statements came out to tell them, very excitedly, that I had their first royalty statement, I would be sending it to them, and when they got it they could put it in the trash or use it for toilet paper or do pretty much anything except pay much attention to it because it was utter bullshit.
Now it's different, and we'll move on to that in the next post, tomorrow.
And I realize in six years of having Brillig, I've never spoken much about royalty season.
First, royalty season in the publishing industry doesn't arrive at the same time for everyone. It isn't like spring or fall, but rather more like the last frost.
When I was at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the early years of my career, royalty season arrived on February 1 and August 1. Random House was due to send out reports the last day of January and last day of August, and they were very nice about it. They didn't entrust their big checks to the Post Office in order to get another day or two of float, but rather would messenger them over, though late in the day so the check couldn't make it to the bank for that day's deposit. Carl Sagan -- Random House author. Norman Mailer -- Random House author. Margaret Truman -- Random House author. All of the many Scott Meredith clients published by Del Rey -- Random House authors. The Mists of Avalon -- Random House. Blade Runner -- Random House. 2010 Odyssey 2 -- Random House. So when Random House reported royalties, that was when we had royalty season.
At JABberwocky, the vast preponderance of our authors are published by the Berkley Publishing Group part of Penguin, which reports on/about March 31 and Sept. 30. Charlaine Harris, Jack Campbell, Simon R. Green -- all NY Times bestselling authors with many many books, all Berkley Publishing Group. Along with some of our Roc authors. And DAW, with many of our other authors, usually sends statements along a few days after Penguin in April, and a few days before in September.
I think Scott Meredith had the better of it, because the Random House statements were a bit off from everyone else's. It wasn't one super big season, but rather helped to spread it out a bit more. For us, it's not just Penguin on March 31 and Tor on April 30 but most of our big German and UK statements that want to come in then along with lots of miscellaneous others. Just about everything comes in between March 20 and May 10, and between September 15 and November 10. Less than a third of the year with two-thirds of our royalty paperwork.
So that is royalty season.
This is going to be a series of posts, and if that's the introduction let's put up Chapter One now as well, which is to talk about what I saw when I looked at royalty statements at the start of my career. It was a lot different, if also in some important ways not so different at all, from what I see now.
One very important thing to keep in mind in this entire discussion, so I will say here and repeat often in different keys:
Most of the books publishers send to bookstores can be returned to the publisher for credit. So a book that is sold might not be. To protect against paying royalties to authors for copies that bookstores might return, publishers are allowed to hold a reserve against returns. We sent out 30 copies, we will reserve 10 or 20 that we feel have a reasonable chance of coming back. So I am going to use "sold" in quotes here, because it was very much the case twenty years ago that the number of copies on a royalty statement was the "in quotes" version.
For Penguin or for Kensington, the number might be the number of copies "sold" in a given accounting period. That number came on a little 5x7 (maybe, don't have any at hand) piece of paper that came off of a computer. And there wasn't much more than that one number to look at.
Random House gave multiple numbers, the number of copies "sold" over the six months and the total number of copies "sold" to the end of the period. Their number came on a big oversized piece of computer print-out paper which made it seem especially important and true.
Berkley gave their numbers on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper which made them easier to file.
DAW gave many numbers, since they did things by hand on a piece of paper that would be passed down from royalty statement to royalty statement like a revered scroll.. That paper would have rows, and the rows would have the date of the period, the number of copies sold to the end of the period, and then the next row either gave that number followed by the new number, or the number of copies "sold" over the six months which you would add to get the new number, kind of like one of those Scrabble score sheets that comes with the fancier sets. The first number was always "too early to tell."
There wasn't a lot of mentoring or training at Scott Meredith, so it took me a long time to learn that all these numbers, from all these different publishers, no matter how official looking the sheet of paper was, were utter bullshit.
Why?
Well, the number was the result of an equation, and the equation itself was hidden.
The equation used to generate the number was:
(actual copies net after ship and return) (minus) (reserve against returns) (equals) (your number)
And all we got was (your number), either as a total at the end of the period or as the difference between (your number) in one period and the immediately prior period.
You'd walk into bookstores and see a book all over the place and wonder why (your number) was so small. Well, (your number) was maybe a half or a quarter of the actual number of books the publisher had put into the marketplace.
A book would come out, not appear to sell, and when you got the second royalty statement (your number) went up. Not because there were more copies, but because the hidden reserve against returns was reduced by more than the hidden copies shipped less copies returned.
It would take around four royalty periods, or around two years, before the magic number that appeared on the royalty statements was close enough to the actual performance that the statement could be considered reliable.
I got in the habit of calling my debut novelists when their first statements came out to tell them, very excitedly, that I had their first royalty statement, I would be sending it to them, and when they got it they could put it in the trash or use it for toilet paper or do pretty much anything except pay much attention to it because it was utter bullshit.
Now it's different, and we'll move on to that in the next post, tomorrow.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Scripts that go bump in the night
Haven't done a business post in a while. I keep thinking my work must be interesting, but I'm not sure what to talk about. Part of it is probably ennui, I've been doing this thing for almost 27 years. Part of it, maybe that I get to watch while other people have the fun, a lot of my own job has changed to being the mastermind of a business that isn't as small as it used to be. Eddie takes on new clients and sells first novels, Brady gets to talk to our global partners and sell foreign rights, I get to be their boss.
My current fun task is overseeing an upgrade of our databases.
I don't know if this is something we, like, need-need to do. The current databases have kept the business running for five years.
But I don't like to settle. One of the reasons JABberwocky and its clients do well is that we don't let ourselves, try not to let ourselves, get complacent, sit back and be happy with some good news when the right thing to do is ask how that bit of good news can help lead to other and bigger bits.
So as an example, our payment items to clients have increased by 80% from 2008, which is the first year we used the current check database. It was fine to manually turn $68.49 into "Sixty Eight and 49/100" back then, now I've been thinking lots and lots that there's got to be somebody who knows how to get Filemaker to automate this task for us. As of today, we have that taken care of. Though I'm not satisfied entirely, and may call our Filemaker consultant tomorrow to see if the script can take $67 and turn it into "Sixty Seven Dollars and Zero Cents" instead of "Sixty Seven Dollars."
As another example, we have a Global Partners database where we keep the contact info for the foreign agents we work with and foreign publishers we sell to, and which is home base when it comes time to schedule appointments for book fairs. I've always liked the idea of the database but never been in love with the execution. I've grown less fond of it as it's had to scale up from handling scheduling just for London Book Fair to handling scheduling for London, Bologna and Frankfurt. We need better ways to keep track of whom we need to see at each of these Fairs, whom we need to see, whether we are seeing. And whom we don't need to see, we don't need the editors for children's books that Eddie meets with at Bologna cluttering things for London a few weeks later. This means more database fields for more Fairs, more layouts in which to view those fields, more scripts to generate more reports so we can keep on top of all of it.
Even though databases can keep lots of information forever and ever and ever, I've often been fond of having a place for historical keeping of information that is different from the place where you keep active information. Hence, our deals database has a nice table where we can look at the history of paid advances for a book, that is different from the ongoing advances due table where we keep information on anticipated payments. But, now that the business is growing there are some redundancies here that we can perhaps eliminate if we can find a nice way to view the historical information that will feed off the same information, an attractive portal or something.
With our e-book program, I am around 80% certain that we can do more with the data we're fed from Amazon and Kobo and B&N if we import that data into a database, rather than working with it in spreadsheets. But can we find ways to automate or simplify how the data is imported? If we can do that, I'm reasonably certain we can set up scripts that can match this ASIN at Amazon with that ISBN someplace else and put the Simon Green books in the right place and collect and summarize the data.
There are lots and lots of things like that. Some of them are little, some of them are big. Some of them (change in how we track advances) will allow us to enter information once that we now enter twice, but others of them might force us to feed the new database fields with new data entering procedures (carefully reviewing our entire global partner editor list to carefully check boxes for each of three different Fairs). On balance, we hope they will make the business run better.
It was interesting looking for a person to help us with this work.
Person #1 was kind of insulting, looking at everything we'd done and letting us know very clearly that we had major structural flaws with our databases, that we needed to combine everything into one mega-database instead of, as an example, having the checks cut from a different database than was keeping track of the deals themselves. When he e-mailed the next day to say he wasn't interested in doing all that work, I wasn't that upset. Yes, the official way to do things is to put all the data for the entire agency into one massive database. That's generally the way database designers work. And that's never the way I've wanted it done. I've wanted it to be robust enough for the business to run smoothly, but simple enough that we could do some basic updating and tweaking of our databases by ourselves.
Person #2, whom we are working with, was much more pleasant. You have multiple databases, he's not going to go integrating them just because the official way to do things is to do them that way. He recognizes that things grow of their own accord, not always in the way they would if they were being carefully tended like a bonsai garden, and you work with it.
All of this is going to cost us some money to have help from an outside expert on Filemaker. That makes me wonder if I should've looked harder in 2008 or looked harder now for some wonderful off-the-shelf software for running a literary agency, are the improvements we're doing now kind of reinventing the wheel of an integrated agency management package? It's a good question. I have too much invested in what I've done the past five years to be the best person to answer it. I still don't like what I see if I go searching the internet for "literary agent software." It's for Windows, the screen shots look icky, it might be great underneath the hood but you have to pay for the support and the interfaces are invariably clunky looking even if the underpinnings are not. I could go touring offices of my colleagues looking at their programs, I guess, there are probably things out there that aren't advertising on the internet.
But then again, one of the things about the business is that there's an agent for everyone, we don't all run our businesses the exact same way with the exact same focus on things. I feel extremely comfortable with something I made, that's rooted in something that's worked for a long time. Our check database, in particular, has its roots back twenty years when we were finally had computers at Scott Meredith. Not rooted in a bad way, but the basic idea of cutting the checks is that we should all know how much money came in, what got taken out, and what we're paying.
The bigger problem with all of these improvements is the meetings that go along with them.
We have to decide in the office on the best way to do certain things, we have to think on those things, we have to communicate those things to the expert who has to make them work. We can't save time without first investing it.
And if you're wondering why I haven't done a lot of business posts lately -- well, this stuff has been a lot of the business stuff that's been rolling around in recent weeks and months. If there's this huge popular outcry to know more, we have more to tell, but I'm not thinking there will be that huge outcry.
My current fun task is overseeing an upgrade of our databases.
I don't know if this is something we, like, need-need to do. The current databases have kept the business running for five years.
But I don't like to settle. One of the reasons JABberwocky and its clients do well is that we don't let ourselves, try not to let ourselves, get complacent, sit back and be happy with some good news when the right thing to do is ask how that bit of good news can help lead to other and bigger bits.
So as an example, our payment items to clients have increased by 80% from 2008, which is the first year we used the current check database. It was fine to manually turn $68.49 into "Sixty Eight and 49/100" back then, now I've been thinking lots and lots that there's got to be somebody who knows how to get Filemaker to automate this task for us. As of today, we have that taken care of. Though I'm not satisfied entirely, and may call our Filemaker consultant tomorrow to see if the script can take $67 and turn it into "Sixty Seven Dollars and Zero Cents" instead of "Sixty Seven Dollars."
As another example, we have a Global Partners database where we keep the contact info for the foreign agents we work with and foreign publishers we sell to, and which is home base when it comes time to schedule appointments for book fairs. I've always liked the idea of the database but never been in love with the execution. I've grown less fond of it as it's had to scale up from handling scheduling just for London Book Fair to handling scheduling for London, Bologna and Frankfurt. We need better ways to keep track of whom we need to see at each of these Fairs, whom we need to see, whether we are seeing. And whom we don't need to see, we don't need the editors for children's books that Eddie meets with at Bologna cluttering things for London a few weeks later. This means more database fields for more Fairs, more layouts in which to view those fields, more scripts to generate more reports so we can keep on top of all of it.
Even though databases can keep lots of information forever and ever and ever, I've often been fond of having a place for historical keeping of information that is different from the place where you keep active information. Hence, our deals database has a nice table where we can look at the history of paid advances for a book, that is different from the ongoing advances due table where we keep information on anticipated payments. But, now that the business is growing there are some redundancies here that we can perhaps eliminate if we can find a nice way to view the historical information that will feed off the same information, an attractive portal or something.
With our e-book program, I am around 80% certain that we can do more with the data we're fed from Amazon and Kobo and B&N if we import that data into a database, rather than working with it in spreadsheets. But can we find ways to automate or simplify how the data is imported? If we can do that, I'm reasonably certain we can set up scripts that can match this ASIN at Amazon with that ISBN someplace else and put the Simon Green books in the right place and collect and summarize the data.
There are lots and lots of things like that. Some of them are little, some of them are big. Some of them (change in how we track advances) will allow us to enter information once that we now enter twice, but others of them might force us to feed the new database fields with new data entering procedures (carefully reviewing our entire global partner editor list to carefully check boxes for each of three different Fairs). On balance, we hope they will make the business run better.
It was interesting looking for a person to help us with this work.
Person #1 was kind of insulting, looking at everything we'd done and letting us know very clearly that we had major structural flaws with our databases, that we needed to combine everything into one mega-database instead of, as an example, having the checks cut from a different database than was keeping track of the deals themselves. When he e-mailed the next day to say he wasn't interested in doing all that work, I wasn't that upset. Yes, the official way to do things is to put all the data for the entire agency into one massive database. That's generally the way database designers work. And that's never the way I've wanted it done. I've wanted it to be robust enough for the business to run smoothly, but simple enough that we could do some basic updating and tweaking of our databases by ourselves.
Person #2, whom we are working with, was much more pleasant. You have multiple databases, he's not going to go integrating them just because the official way to do things is to do them that way. He recognizes that things grow of their own accord, not always in the way they would if they were being carefully tended like a bonsai garden, and you work with it.
All of this is going to cost us some money to have help from an outside expert on Filemaker. That makes me wonder if I should've looked harder in 2008 or looked harder now for some wonderful off-the-shelf software for running a literary agency, are the improvements we're doing now kind of reinventing the wheel of an integrated agency management package? It's a good question. I have too much invested in what I've done the past five years to be the best person to answer it. I still don't like what I see if I go searching the internet for "literary agent software." It's for Windows, the screen shots look icky, it might be great underneath the hood but you have to pay for the support and the interfaces are invariably clunky looking even if the underpinnings are not. I could go touring offices of my colleagues looking at their programs, I guess, there are probably things out there that aren't advertising on the internet.
But then again, one of the things about the business is that there's an agent for everyone, we don't all run our businesses the exact same way with the exact same focus on things. I feel extremely comfortable with something I made, that's rooted in something that's worked for a long time. Our check database, in particular, has its roots back twenty years when we were finally had computers at Scott Meredith. Not rooted in a bad way, but the basic idea of cutting the checks is that we should all know how much money came in, what got taken out, and what we're paying.
The bigger problem with all of these improvements is the meetings that go along with them.
We have to decide in the office on the best way to do certain things, we have to think on those things, we have to communicate those things to the expert who has to make them work. We can't save time without first investing it.
And if you're wondering why I haven't done a lot of business posts lately -- well, this stuff has been a lot of the business stuff that's been rolling around in recent weeks and months. If there's this huge popular outcry to know more, we have more to tell, but I'm not thinking there will be that huge outcry.
Monday, January 9, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Splits
When I started my dialogue with Dean Wesley Smith, the starting point was a post he did, which you can find here, that was kind of on the question of whether your money should go to your agent before it came to you, though it did go off in a lot of different tangents and take on a lot more than that one question.
But let's look at that question, as an example of why I think Dean's posts have kernels of truth but are not, as a whole, totally to my liking.
Kernel of truth: Once upon a time, the marginal cost to a publisher of cutting each additional check was extremely high. No computers, royalty statements done by hand, checks cut by hand, do you want to have 820 or 8298 payees you have to send checks to every six months? In that context, I think it reasonable that a standard practice developed whereby publishers paid agents, and agents paid authors. The agents did need to get paid, the agents did need to see the paperwork, you can agree or disagree on the practice being established the way it was, but it wasn't an unreasonable way for things to develop. Now, in 2010, certainly the major US publishing conglomerates can cut more checks with very little marginal cost. And considering how wasteful some of their royalty statements are, how they can take pages upon pages to tell you what Penguin says in one page, they can hardly complain if they start "splitting" checks, where an agent gets a check for a commission and an author gets the net after commission. And since the publishers can do this, why don't we ask them to. Nothing at all unreasonable.
However, here's where it gets complicated.
1. even in the US not every publisher is a big publisher with a fancy computer system that can spit out more checks, even in massive quantity, without burping. There are some vendors that are still sending me handwritten checks. So at best, the issue has to be selectively visited.
2. the further you get from the US, the more you're going to find situations where splitting checks just isn't practical. Many of the foreign agents and/or foreign publishers I deal with are small operations, family run Czech publishers with owners speaking bad English that specialize in sf/fantasy. The agents I work with overseas are also often small operations. Most books, the Hebrew or Serbian rights don't sell for lots of money, and you have to watch overhead as an agent in those markets. Splitting checks isn't practicable at all.
So on this basis alone, your agent is likely to have some paymaster responsibility for you. And for that reason alone, an author can decide "in for a dime, in for a dollar" and prefer to have it all done that way.
And it's not as if there are no benefits at all to the author in doing so. To a real take-charge take-control person like Dean, these benefits may be small enough as to hardly merit consideration, but they are there nonetheless.
1. I have a better infrastructure set up for tracking payments. You find you need a summary of your 2006 income for some reason, I can get that for you in a few quick keystrokes, while you might have to dig through a shoebox.
2. Have you ever switched credit cards or banks or something, and you have to notify 9 different companies who do automatic debit from your account? So far as your publishing income is concerned, you can let your agent know you have a new address instead of notifying every publisher that might pay you money. We recently wrote to a client who cashed a check as recently as the latter half of 2009, found the client had moved without letting us know, and had to do a lot of legwork to reestablish contact. Yes, I know, that kind of thing will never happen to you, it's so stupid and obvious you can't believe it would happen to anyone. But guess what, it does!
3. A check doesn't get deposited. I care, I call, I follow up, I replace. What does HarperCollins do when your royalty check doesn't get deposited or gets returned?
4. On foreign payments, some wire transfers can see as many as three different banks grabbing a service charge, and these can total over $50 in some instances. My business is now big enough that a lot of payments I get cover multiple authors and these costs can be spread out over multiple authors, which can easily save 2-3% of your Serbian advance.
5. A good agent needs to see everything. Big client like Charlaine Harris, people use the global sales figures for her books (translated into more than 30 languages) as a selling point. There's only one place in the entire world with an infrastructure developed and in place to track that kind of thing, and it's JABberwocky Literary Agency. Could Charlaine replicate that? Yes. Should she? No. We don't know who our next Charlaine will be, we are starting to track global in print on an author and series basis from the first copy sold of your very first novel.
Yes, there are some agents who aren't good agents. Client doesn't deposit a check, who cares? You shouldn't go through life assuming everyone you meet, literary agent or not, is a saint, but nor should you assume everyone is a sinner.
My workload? I wouldn't have to write as many checks, but because I'm still going to be paymaster for some things I can't throw away the staff or the IT or the infrastructure I need as a paymaster. A good agent would also substitute new work, like every time I got money from a big publisher that was splitting checks, I'd have to check to be sure you got your money. No, actually. I don't have to, but you sure would like for me to, wouldn't you? On balance, this would probably be less total work for me, but not as much less as you'd think at first glance.
So even as I agree 100% with Dean that this is a question that can and should be revisited, I don't agree that the outcome of such a revisiting is as clear-cut as he would suggest.
But let's look at that question, as an example of why I think Dean's posts have kernels of truth but are not, as a whole, totally to my liking.
Kernel of truth: Once upon a time, the marginal cost to a publisher of cutting each additional check was extremely high. No computers, royalty statements done by hand, checks cut by hand, do you want to have 820 or 8298 payees you have to send checks to every six months? In that context, I think it reasonable that a standard practice developed whereby publishers paid agents, and agents paid authors. The agents did need to get paid, the agents did need to see the paperwork, you can agree or disagree on the practice being established the way it was, but it wasn't an unreasonable way for things to develop. Now, in 2010, certainly the major US publishing conglomerates can cut more checks with very little marginal cost. And considering how wasteful some of their royalty statements are, how they can take pages upon pages to tell you what Penguin says in one page, they can hardly complain if they start "splitting" checks, where an agent gets a check for a commission and an author gets the net after commission. And since the publishers can do this, why don't we ask them to. Nothing at all unreasonable.
However, here's where it gets complicated.
1. even in the US not every publisher is a big publisher with a fancy computer system that can spit out more checks, even in massive quantity, without burping. There are some vendors that are still sending me handwritten checks. So at best, the issue has to be selectively visited.
2. the further you get from the US, the more you're going to find situations where splitting checks just isn't practical. Many of the foreign agents and/or foreign publishers I deal with are small operations, family run Czech publishers with owners speaking bad English that specialize in sf/fantasy. The agents I work with overseas are also often small operations. Most books, the Hebrew or Serbian rights don't sell for lots of money, and you have to watch overhead as an agent in those markets. Splitting checks isn't practicable at all.
So on this basis alone, your agent is likely to have some paymaster responsibility for you. And for that reason alone, an author can decide "in for a dime, in for a dollar" and prefer to have it all done that way.
And it's not as if there are no benefits at all to the author in doing so. To a real take-charge take-control person like Dean, these benefits may be small enough as to hardly merit consideration, but they are there nonetheless.
1. I have a better infrastructure set up for tracking payments. You find you need a summary of your 2006 income for some reason, I can get that for you in a few quick keystrokes, while you might have to dig through a shoebox.
2. Have you ever switched credit cards or banks or something, and you have to notify 9 different companies who do automatic debit from your account? So far as your publishing income is concerned, you can let your agent know you have a new address instead of notifying every publisher that might pay you money. We recently wrote to a client who cashed a check as recently as the latter half of 2009, found the client had moved without letting us know, and had to do a lot of legwork to reestablish contact. Yes, I know, that kind of thing will never happen to you, it's so stupid and obvious you can't believe it would happen to anyone. But guess what, it does!
3. A check doesn't get deposited. I care, I call, I follow up, I replace. What does HarperCollins do when your royalty check doesn't get deposited or gets returned?
4. On foreign payments, some wire transfers can see as many as three different banks grabbing a service charge, and these can total over $50 in some instances. My business is now big enough that a lot of payments I get cover multiple authors and these costs can be spread out over multiple authors, which can easily save 2-3% of your Serbian advance.
5. A good agent needs to see everything. Big client like Charlaine Harris, people use the global sales figures for her books (translated into more than 30 languages) as a selling point. There's only one place in the entire world with an infrastructure developed and in place to track that kind of thing, and it's JABberwocky Literary Agency. Could Charlaine replicate that? Yes. Should she? No. We don't know who our next Charlaine will be, we are starting to track global in print on an author and series basis from the first copy sold of your very first novel.
Yes, there are some agents who aren't good agents. Client doesn't deposit a check, who cares? You shouldn't go through life assuming everyone you meet, literary agent or not, is a saint, but nor should you assume everyone is a sinner.
My workload? I wouldn't have to write as many checks, but because I'm still going to be paymaster for some things I can't throw away the staff or the IT or the infrastructure I need as a paymaster. A good agent would also substitute new work, like every time I got money from a big publisher that was splitting checks, I'd have to check to be sure you got your money. No, actually. I don't have to, but you sure would like for me to, wouldn't you? On balance, this would probably be less total work for me, but not as much less as you'd think at first glance.
So even as I agree 100% with Dean that this is a question that can and should be revisited, I don't agree that the outcome of such a revisiting is as clear-cut as he would suggest.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
iPad 2
Weight: With its case the iPad weighs 1.5ish pounds. I am youngish if not youthful and do modest lifting but mostly the weight doesn't bother me. A bit when I was reading a novel on it while walking around the DC area for a good chunk of a day. A big hardcover fantasy can weigh more than an iPad. So it is true that the dedicated eReaders weigh more like a modest paperback while the iPad is compared to an epic fantasy in hardcover, but the weight issue can be put into perspective.
Typing: I have survived typing on an iPod Touch, this keyboard is bigger! My biggest problem is that my finger will hit a bottom letter key instead of the space bar resultingminmsomethingblikenthis. And the autocorrect doesn't do a good job of recognizing run-on words that result from this unfortunate habit of mine. Maybe with time I will train myself to hit the space bar. Less often I hit the space bar instead of an m or n. I did also mate the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the new home Mac to the iPad, which wad done quickly and painlessly so I have that option. Perfect, no. Major issue, no.
Brightness: Inverse problem of eReaders. Great in the dark, not so much in bright. But I have read large chunks during the day, so pmetimes using te case to shade the screen a little bit and just lime I might increase font size on my Kindle in twilight to extend how ,ong I can read with it I can raise the font size in daylight on the iPad. Amazon is right to make a selling point that the Kindle really does thrive in sunlight but again this is something we can work with.
Typing: I have survived typing on an iPod Touch, this keyboard is bigger! My biggest problem is that my finger will hit a bottom letter key instead of the space bar resultingminmsomethingblikenthis. And the autocorrect doesn't do a good job of recognizing run-on words that result from this unfortunate habit of mine. Maybe with time I will train myself to hit the space bar. Less often I hit the space bar instead of an m or n. I did also mate the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the new home Mac to the iPad, which wad done quickly and painlessly so I have that option. Perfect, no. Major issue, no.
Brightness: Inverse problem of eReaders. Great in the dark, not so much in bright. But I have read large chunks during the day, so pmetimes using te case to shade the screen a little bit and just lime I might increase font size on my Kindle in twilight to extend how ,ong I can read with it I can raise the font size in daylight on the iPad. Amazon is right to make a selling point that the Kindle really does thrive in sunlight but again this is something we can work with.
me and my iPad
I got meself an iPad three weeks ago this evening.
I am quite happy with it so far.
First and most important for me is its utility as a tool for reading, and it's quite winning for that. With reading, as with many other things, one of the things I like about the iPad is that it gives you a lot of different ways to do something. So for reading, option #1 might be to just open up an e-mail with a manucript and read the manuscript within Mail. Option #2 might be to open the file in Pages, Apple's word processing app for the iPad. Option #3 might be to put the manuscript on using shared wireless network with Stanza, which is what I'd been using on my iPod Touch, and which is owned by Amazon. Option #4 might be Apple's own iBook store. And then you've got the Kindle app for the iPad and the Nook app and the Borders app. Or you've got other word proccessing apps like Documents 2 Go. I've read one novel and reviewed a contract which I had opened in Pages, and I've read another long novel in Stanza. Both are fully customizable reading environments that allow me flexibility on my font, my font size, and other important elements of the reading experience. I like the page-turning on Stanza because it's actual page-turning and now scrolling down in the document. I like that Pages can import a file direct from my e-mail while Stanza requires multiple intermediate steps on a computer sharing the same wireless network. Pages offers better support for the iPad OS cut-and-paste. In both instances, it takes only a few seconds to go from the program I'm reading in to the native Notes program on the iPad to take notes for a client. Those seconds can add up if I'm taking a lot of notes, but once upon a time I'd have to put down a manuscript, grab my note sheet, grab my pen, it's not like that was instantaneous either. And there's still the ability to then e-mail the notes directly from within the note right to the client who's supposed to be getting. Which I could do with the Touch, not with any eReader. It's safe to say that manuscript reading is hands-down better on the iPad than anything else I've ever used, including paper manuscripts, though it's not so much better as to be a complete game-changer over some of the eReaders and the like.
Haven't used the iBook store for an actual purchased book. The interface for the store has rightly been faulted for lacking a lot of the browsing tools that Amazon has. You either find something that's being marketed to you via the bestseller lists or something, or you'll buy exactly what you went to the store wanting to buy. You won't encounter a lot via serendipity. But looking at some sample chapters of Mistborn or the Winnie the Pooh that came with, the reading experience when you do get a book is about as good as you can ask for. I haven't sampled all of the different device-related apps, but I can't see much for them to improve upon other than for allowing you to access your device-specific books on this device.
Second, newspapers. I've been desperate for a second read to the NY Times since the other local papers, Newsday especially, went ever further south in the mid-00s. When I had the Kindle, I liked the idea of having a wireless subscription to the Washington Post, but the miserableness of the reading experience was one of the factors that ultimately allowed me to give up the Kindle without much angst. Then I went to reading it on the web site and buying hard copy when I was in Manhattan. More recently the Post introduced an iPhone app that offered an abridged selection of full articles (like, all the op ed pieces but none of the editorials) in a buggy but attractive and intuitive manner. Now, with the iPad, I'm able to take full advantage of a replica subscription powered by NewspaperDirect. This costs me $100 per year after a seven-day trial and is also available on monthly and quarterly subscriptions, and it is wonderful. I'm given a reduced image replica page of the actual newspaper to look at. I can click on that page and read it blown-up with all the ability to pan and scan and pinch and un-pinch with my fingers. Below the reduced image there's a list of articles on that page, so I can click a particular article if I don't want to peruse the entire page. There's also an ability to click the article in the replica page. I can scroll through the pages. I can scroll through the articles. I can click to a table of contents. I can click to a 30-day archive. I can click to share. As with reading manuscripts, the iPad is offering me the best way to consume content that I've ever had -- or maybe for newspapers tied with the best because I do still find reading actual newspapers to be pleasant.
There are a few faults with the replica subscription. If you blow up the page, you have to go back to the page with the reduced image to hit the button to go to the next page. It would save a lot of time if I could go from page to page within the full page image. If you read an article in the sports section that was given a shout-out on the front page, the article is "married" to the front page image, and you then have to to back to go forward because when you click that article you're taken back to the front. Same thing if there's an article that's given a shout-out on the front page of a section. Yes, you get used to this, but it takes some getting used to and some attention to not think you're going from page C1 to C2 and find that you've actually gone from A1 to A2. And because the touch screen isn't perfectly responsive, you'll blow up to the full replica page, try and scroll down or across, and find out your movement has registered as a tap instead of a scroll. Which then brings you back to the reduced page image, and then you have to tap back. That is a minor annoyance and time sink. On the other hand, have you even been outdoors reading a newspaper on a windy day and you try to turn the pages? Wrangle the pages, more like. While there are negatives to this experience, in its entirety it's as close to holding a dead tree as I've ever gotten.
And of course, I can also go the Post website on my iPad, or to the mobile version of the Post website, or use the Post app, though it hasn't been updated for the iPad and is thus one of those that you can fuzzily expand to a larger version of the iPhone version. As with reading books, I can use the iPad to read my newspaper in a number of different ways.
When people belittle the iPad for being a bigger version of the iPhone, they totally don't get it. Yes, all of the core built-in system features like Mail, Safari, the Address Book, looking at photos, using Google Maps,II' all of these are now bigger. But it's a lot more than just that they're bigger. Its vastly easier to check e-mail on the iPad screen than on the iPhone/Touch screen. You can look at actual web sites on the iPad instead of the mobile versions of same. You can do nifty things for looking at photos like the "origami" slideshow that just wouldn't work on the smaller screen. Pretty much anything I want to do on the iPad in terms of those core functions, I can do not just in bigger ways but in a myriad of better ways. In some instances, though, bigger isn't better. Good photos look sweet on the iPad, bad photos look worse, so I'll have to maintain separate photo albums in some instances to sync with different devices.
I've used the iPad for entirely trivial things. Numbers is a powerful spreadsheet app, I used it to make scorepads for Scrabble and for Hearts, now if we play a heated family game of Hearts, it can be e-mailed to the rest of the family just like that and clutter their inboxes.
There are so many things that I can do with the iPad that I kind of feel like it's a sports car being driven around Manhattan on rush hour. Until I really app it up...
As I get more and more of these gadgets, certain things I've been doing one way I now need to start doing another. This morning I spent some time tidying up my Address Book, and now I need to add to it substantially. It used to be that it was just as quick to have client contact info in a word-processing file which could be searched just as quickly as any file, now I need to really start using things like the Address Book/Contacts.
As Apple is in the habit of doing, the iPad doesn't work with OS 10.4. It's actually more compatible with older versions of Windows machines than it is with Apple machines. I've gotten a new Mac for my apartment, but until I get a new Mac for my office or upgrade its OS, there are some things that I have to sync with the iPod Touch and then sync at home to sync with the iPad.
The battery life of the iPad is excellent, but unfortunately the recharge time is slow slow slow. It can take an hour, maybe a little more than that, for me to recharge my iPod Touch in an outlet, it can take me three or hour hours to recharge the iPad.
Would I recommend the iPad? In an instant.
I am quite happy with it so far.
First and most important for me is its utility as a tool for reading, and it's quite winning for that. With reading, as with many other things, one of the things I like about the iPad is that it gives you a lot of different ways to do something. So for reading, option #1 might be to just open up an e-mail with a manucript and read the manuscript within Mail. Option #2 might be to open the file in Pages, Apple's word processing app for the iPad. Option #3 might be to put the manuscript on using shared wireless network with Stanza, which is what I'd been using on my iPod Touch, and which is owned by Amazon. Option #4 might be Apple's own iBook store. And then you've got the Kindle app for the iPad and the Nook app and the Borders app. Or you've got other word proccessing apps like Documents 2 Go. I've read one novel and reviewed a contract which I had opened in Pages, and I've read another long novel in Stanza. Both are fully customizable reading environments that allow me flexibility on my font, my font size, and other important elements of the reading experience. I like the page-turning on Stanza because it's actual page-turning and now scrolling down in the document. I like that Pages can import a file direct from my e-mail while Stanza requires multiple intermediate steps on a computer sharing the same wireless network. Pages offers better support for the iPad OS cut-and-paste. In both instances, it takes only a few seconds to go from the program I'm reading in to the native Notes program on the iPad to take notes for a client. Those seconds can add up if I'm taking a lot of notes, but once upon a time I'd have to put down a manuscript, grab my note sheet, grab my pen, it's not like that was instantaneous either. And there's still the ability to then e-mail the notes directly from within the note right to the client who's supposed to be getting. Which I could do with the Touch, not with any eReader. It's safe to say that manuscript reading is hands-down better on the iPad than anything else I've ever used, including paper manuscripts, though it's not so much better as to be a complete game-changer over some of the eReaders and the like.
Haven't used the iBook store for an actual purchased book. The interface for the store has rightly been faulted for lacking a lot of the browsing tools that Amazon has. You either find something that's being marketed to you via the bestseller lists or something, or you'll buy exactly what you went to the store wanting to buy. You won't encounter a lot via serendipity. But looking at some sample chapters of Mistborn or the Winnie the Pooh that came with, the reading experience when you do get a book is about as good as you can ask for. I haven't sampled all of the different device-related apps, but I can't see much for them to improve upon other than for allowing you to access your device-specific books on this device.
Second, newspapers. I've been desperate for a second read to the NY Times since the other local papers, Newsday especially, went ever further south in the mid-00s. When I had the Kindle, I liked the idea of having a wireless subscription to the Washington Post, but the miserableness of the reading experience was one of the factors that ultimately allowed me to give up the Kindle without much angst. Then I went to reading it on the web site and buying hard copy when I was in Manhattan. More recently the Post introduced an iPhone app that offered an abridged selection of full articles (like, all the op ed pieces but none of the editorials) in a buggy but attractive and intuitive manner. Now, with the iPad, I'm able to take full advantage of a replica subscription powered by NewspaperDirect. This costs me $100 per year after a seven-day trial and is also available on monthly and quarterly subscriptions, and it is wonderful. I'm given a reduced image replica page of the actual newspaper to look at. I can click on that page and read it blown-up with all the ability to pan and scan and pinch and un-pinch with my fingers. Below the reduced image there's a list of articles on that page, so I can click a particular article if I don't want to peruse the entire page. There's also an ability to click the article in the replica page. I can scroll through the pages. I can scroll through the articles. I can click to a table of contents. I can click to a 30-day archive. I can click to share. As with reading manuscripts, the iPad is offering me the best way to consume content that I've ever had -- or maybe for newspapers tied with the best because I do still find reading actual newspapers to be pleasant.
There are a few faults with the replica subscription. If you blow up the page, you have to go back to the page with the reduced image to hit the button to go to the next page. It would save a lot of time if I could go from page to page within the full page image. If you read an article in the sports section that was given a shout-out on the front page, the article is "married" to the front page image, and you then have to to back to go forward because when you click that article you're taken back to the front. Same thing if there's an article that's given a shout-out on the front page of a section. Yes, you get used to this, but it takes some getting used to and some attention to not think you're going from page C1 to C2 and find that you've actually gone from A1 to A2. And because the touch screen isn't perfectly responsive, you'll blow up to the full replica page, try and scroll down or across, and find out your movement has registered as a tap instead of a scroll. Which then brings you back to the reduced page image, and then you have to tap back. That is a minor annoyance and time sink. On the other hand, have you even been outdoors reading a newspaper on a windy day and you try to turn the pages? Wrangle the pages, more like. While there are negatives to this experience, in its entirety it's as close to holding a dead tree as I've ever gotten.
And of course, I can also go the Post website on my iPad, or to the mobile version of the Post website, or use the Post app, though it hasn't been updated for the iPad and is thus one of those that you can fuzzily expand to a larger version of the iPhone version. As with reading books, I can use the iPad to read my newspaper in a number of different ways.
When people belittle the iPad for being a bigger version of the iPhone, they totally don't get it. Yes, all of the core built-in system features like Mail, Safari, the Address Book, looking at photos, using Google Maps,II' all of these are now bigger. But it's a lot more than just that they're bigger. Its vastly easier to check e-mail on the iPad screen than on the iPhone/Touch screen. You can look at actual web sites on the iPad instead of the mobile versions of same. You can do nifty things for looking at photos like the "origami" slideshow that just wouldn't work on the smaller screen. Pretty much anything I want to do on the iPad in terms of those core functions, I can do not just in bigger ways but in a myriad of better ways. In some instances, though, bigger isn't better. Good photos look sweet on the iPad, bad photos look worse, so I'll have to maintain separate photo albums in some instances to sync with different devices.
I've used the iPad for entirely trivial things. Numbers is a powerful spreadsheet app, I used it to make scorepads for Scrabble and for Hearts, now if we play a heated family game of Hearts, it can be e-mailed to the rest of the family just like that and clutter their inboxes.
There are so many things that I can do with the iPad that I kind of feel like it's a sports car being driven around Manhattan on rush hour. Until I really app it up...
As I get more and more of these gadgets, certain things I've been doing one way I now need to start doing another. This morning I spent some time tidying up my Address Book, and now I need to add to it substantially. It used to be that it was just as quick to have client contact info in a word-processing file which could be searched just as quickly as any file, now I need to really start using things like the Address Book/Contacts.
As Apple is in the habit of doing, the iPad doesn't work with OS 10.4. It's actually more compatible with older versions of Windows machines than it is with Apple machines. I've gotten a new Mac for my apartment, but until I get a new Mac for my office or upgrade its OS, there are some things that I have to sync with the iPod Touch and then sync at home to sync with the iPad.
The battery life of the iPad is excellent, but unfortunately the recharge time is slow slow slow. It can take an hour, maybe a little more than that, for me to recharge my iPod Touch in an outlet, it can take me three or hour hours to recharge the iPad.
Would I recommend the iPad? In an instant.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Manilla Extract (My Life in Technology, Pt. 3)
So as I've mentioned in my posts this week, I've been taking on new clients very selectively. And things have been going well enough for most of my long-time clients that I've usually been doing new contracts with current publishers. I think it's possible that my last major multiple submission was over three years ago when I sent out Adam-Troy Castro's Emissaries from the Dead.
My, but the world has changed a lot since then.
Most major publishers have now given staff Sony Readers or other such things to do their reading on. Pretty much everyone takes submissions electronically. An entire big multiple submission was done without a single piece of paper. And I read multiple drafts of the manuscript on my Kindle and the final little tweaks just looking for the track changes on my computer.
Once upon a time, everything was on paper. In the early years of JABberwocky, I would even do my own deliveries. It saved an awful lot on postage. It saved even more because a manuscript going through the mail needed a padded envelope while a manuscript which I delivered could get put into a cheaper manilla/brown kraft clasp envelope. It got me out of the house for a few hours. I was a young and energetic thirty-something and the bag would keep getting lighter as the manuscripts were dropped off. It was a triple win scenario.
Now, I find myself thinking I should get faster broadband so the 1.6MB file can go out to an editor a few seconds more quickly.
But the problem is that I have these boxes of 11.5x14.5 manilla envelopes that I purchased pretty much for the soul purpose of having around to put in manuscripts to hand-deliver to publishers. And now they're all going as electrons instead of as dead trees, so what am I going to do with 200 11.5x14.5 manilla envelopes?
On the other hand, because we don't have authors mailing us manuscripts very often, we find that we don't have enough small boxes. We get big boxes of books from publishers, but if we want to mail a small box of books to an author...
Another part of this is the way that labor is transferred to different places. I used to get royalty statements and contracts for foreign rights deals in the mail, ready to go into the file or off to the author. Now a lot of these come in to me electronically, and I have to do the downloading and printing. A few US publishers are starting to send me PDF files for contracts so they no longer print out as many and I print out more. Some of these, I may e-mail in turn to the author, who now has to print out contracts that the agent used to print out. But on the other hand often no longer has to print out a manuscript for agent to read. And I now get to send manuscripts to the publishers electronically, so some publishers may trade printing out 4 copies of a 14 page contract for printing out chunks of a 497 page manuscript.
There's probably a doctoral dissertation in all of this, trying to identify the ultimate winners and losers from this giant shuffle in the publishing paperwork dance.
But there's no denying that I have hundreds of 11.5x14.5 manilla envelopes that I currently see no possible use for.
The times they are a changing!
Monday, June 29, 2009
A Bookscanner Darkly
A week or so ago, another agent I know, Andrew Zack, blogged about a negative experience he had with Bookscan. A book he had on submission was rejected by at least one house because the author's prior sales on Bookscan were not very good. This frustrated Andrew because the actual sales were much better than what the Bookscan numbers were saying. There is nothing more frustrating to an agent than to have a book you like rejected for a not very good reason. Here at JABberwocky we had a manuscript by Fred Durbin rejected by one house because marketing vetoed it even though everyone on the editorial side was enthusiastic, and I found this rather an odd thing to do because a chunk of the book had just been serialized in Cricket Magazine, which to me you'd think maybe the marketing people would think was a nice hook.
I've known Andrew for a very long time. He was one of the last young publishing up-and-comers to cut his teeth working for Donald I. Fine, and for some categories of work I'd unhesitatingly suggest him; I quite envy in particular the breadth of his non-fiction offerings. But I don't agree with his assessment of Bookscan at all.
There is one major problem with Bookscan, which is that a fairly full access for one user ID costs a small fortune. Several thousands of dollars, in fact, so the cost is really prohibitive for a lot of literary agencies. There are some ways to get some information for less; but if you want to really have fun with this you've got to pay big bucks. For me, for that kind of thing, cost is almost no object because I've always been fascinated with numbers. In college, before I had a career in publishing, I would always enjoy looking at the index cards used to track ordering activity at the Community Newscenter locations in Ann Arbor, and it's not like I stopped doing that sort of thing once I actually had a real professional reason to do so. Imagine how happy I am every Wednesday morning when I can have a week of actual POS sales data for the entire JABberwocky list delivered to my computer.
And yes, the information is flawed. It doesn't include Wal-Mart, which guards its sales data zealously. It doesn't include Larry Smith's table at a convention. It doesn't include a lot of grocery or drug store or similar channels, though they've kind of gone from 0 to 25 MPH in the past couple years first by adding a few supermarket chains like Kroger and Stop and Shop and this January adding Hudson News. It doesn't include a lot of non-traditional channels, so I was out of luck the same way as Andrew Zack when I tried to market a sequel to a book that was selling mostly through Motherhood Maternity. Maybe if you as an agent subscribe to Bookscan you can be aware of possibe situations like this and try to address them with a line in your marketing letter, but that may or may not work. It could just force a house that wants to reject to come up with some other "polite" but silly reason to say "no." Or maybe they'll believe Bookscan before they believe the agent. Agents do lie sometimes. A baseball free agency season hardly goes by when some GM isn't complaining about the mysterious other suitors Scott Boras claims to have, and I'm sure some editors feel that way about some literary agents.
But Bookscan is a tool, and like all tools it can be used right and used wrong. Right about the time I first got my Bookscan subscription, I noticed that the just-published Crossover by Joel Shepherd was selling pretty danged well for a book that had been taken by Borders but not by Barnes & Noble. I was able to go to Lou Anders at Pyr and point this out, and Lou was able to go to the sales people at Prometheus Books, and they were able to go to B&N and get them to take some copies of the book. And this helped turn CROSSOVER from a dubious proposition into a solid enough performer that it's now been chosen to launch the mass market program from Pyr. A lot of things had to go right for this to happen, but it all started with somebody paying attention to those Bookscan numbers.
And now this year, I was able to notice a sales spike for Adam-Troy Castro's Emissaries from the Dead after it won the Philip K. Dick Award, and I was able to make a good numbers-based case to Diana Gill at Eos and she was able to go to her sales people, and we've gotten some renewed support from Borders for Emissaries and its sequel The Third Claw of God. It's too soon to know if this will have the long-term payoff that I saw with Joel Shepherd, but again this is at least getting some good use out of the tool.
Of course it costs so darned much, that I'm not sure on strict cost-benefit terms that I can justify how much I pay in order to achieve these victories. It's a no-brainer for me because of the weird wiring of the Joshua Bilmes brain. But does it really pull my fat out of the fire near often enough to start saying cost should be no object?
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Genius? Or Mad Man?? (aka My Life in Technology, Pt. 2)
This can be considered as the next post in the series I began way too long ago with My Life in Technology Pt. 1.
There are a couple of movies that have extra resonance to me because of my job. One is definitely Vampire's Kiss, in which Nicolas Cage plays a literary agent who thinks he is becoming a vampire. It's one of Cage's classically manic performances, this one good Cage manic instead of the bad Cage manic from the very dawn of Cage's career. Hard to believe it's 21 years now since this opened. One of the classic scenes for a literary agent is when he's tasked to locate some old short story contract for one of the agency's most important clients, and the task -- well, shall we say it gets to him!
This is not an atypical problem. The longer a literary agency is in business, the more the contract files should grow, and the more the number of actual important active contracts should grow as well because you sure hope in this business that your backlist is getting deeper and more important as they years go by.
So once upon a time you have one contract for Brandon Sanderson, for his first two book deal with Tor. Then you start to sell some of the books in translation markets. Then you do a second deal with Tor. And you start selling more books in more places overseas. Then you do a deal for the Elantris jewelry and the Mistborn miniatures and slowly the contract file begins to get very big. Big contract files are bad, because it takes forever to find when you suddenly need very badly to find the agreement for the German edition of Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians. So you end up splitting it into 2 files, one with the Tor contracts and one with the translation contracts. Or 3 files, and put the merchandising deals into a different file, or 5 files for those 3, and then the European deals in a different file than the Asian ones and the audio deals in a different file than the jewelry ones. This is kind of better, except with all of those different files... does the Russian contract go in with Europe or Asia, or what if the Czech contract for Mistborn gets put in with the audio contracts by mistake. It's easier to find the right contract, but that assumes the right contract is in the right file and you still have what was once a little single contract that is slowly becoming 8" of contracts.
But I believe this is how it has always been done.
Recently I've gotten to thinking if there isn't a better way. We now have a wonderful database program in Filemaker with a wonderfully robust Deals Database. We have a serial # field set up, so every time we do a new deal the deal has a serial #, and that becomes a tool that helps a little bit to track the deal as the contracts go back and forth and the payments come in.
And I've had this crazy notion that we should file our contracts by Deal #.
Which is not how it has always been done, which scares me.
And because the deals we have from before Filemaker don't have serial #s, we would have to enter all these old contracts in at least a stub entry form into Filemaker.
And if we ever stopped using Filemaker that could be a problem.
But it just seems to me it would be so much quicker over the fullness of time to find the Deal # and then go right to that contract in the file than to do things the way it has always been done/
We'd want to have backups and redundancies. We already enter the serial # for new deals in the master deal word processing file for each author. We could set up layouts to generate sortable summary sheets by title and author that we could put into binders. We'd have at least 3 layers of redundancy with the printout, the database and the word processing file. I don't think -- I don't think -- that we'd be in a situation where we'd have 862 contracts in the file by Deal # and suddenly find we didn't know any of the deal #s any more.
Anyone who comments that we should scan all of our contracts and have them as searchable PDJPEGFTIFGIF files and send them to Yucca Mountain six times a month for back-up, that's a wonderful idea, I thank you for your suggestion, etc. I know I could lose all my hard copy in a fire or something, but the idea of having all of these contracts as electrons on a keychain drive petrifies me to death.
So it seems to me in the 21st century that doing things that I should break with the past and switch the contract files around and not keep doing the way it's always been done because that's the way it's always been done. I'm around 85-90% leaning toward making this big break. But I'm kind of thinking it's still a really really bad idea because we wouldn't keep doing things the old way if it wasn't the right way as well. Would we?
Sunday, March 8, 2009
My Life in Technology, Pt. 1
The world is full of so many marvels that we sometimes lose sight of just how amazing some of them are, and I've been wanting for a while to talk some about how my business has changed over the 20-25 years I've been in it.
It's 25 years ago this summer that I started my summer sojourn at Baen Books. Honestly, I can't recall too much about the technology at Baen. There must have been some computers somewhere because Baen was one of the first publishers to do a kind of fancy-pants royalty statement that told you how many copies were shipped and returned instead of just making up a number after a mysterious reserve against returns. I think that was done very early on in Baen history, though I can't recall if it was done that way from the very start. Most of my Baen work was old-fashioned scutwork. I do know they had a very nice photocopier for back then. & writing this just got me to thinking that we're just a few months away from the 25th anniversary of the first month of Baen Books, which included some very un-Baen-y Books like this one which I believe might have been donated from Simon & Schuster's Timescape line along with some quintessential Baen stuff like this.
When I started work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in February 1986, 23 years ago now, computers were around but still not prevalent. This was a time when you still might be asked to take a typing test on an old-fashioned typewriter in order to get a job someplace. And for the most part, the Scott Meredith Agency was a computer-free zone. There was one and only one computer in the office, a Kaypro that was mostly used for the occasional manuscript that was going out on multiple submission and thus might require many copies of the same marketing letter. You knew it was special if you got to do it on the Kaypro. This hung out near the foreign rights office and may also have been used by them for the foreign marketing letters. Manuscripts came in on paper, they went out on paper, and many of them in 1986 were still being prepared on a typewriter, and most of what we did was done on IBM Selectrics. We even used carbon paper for a lot of things which Sue the bookkeeper doled out like Golem letting go of his precious. Sue did all her checks by hand.
The essential guts of the agency were the Green Cards. 3x5 index cards. On the front we'd type the author's name, title of manuscript, and something like "short story" or "mystery novel proposal" or "SF novel". On the back of the card went a little bit of description about the project, and then we used this index card to either type or hand-write the marketing history of the project. When something sold, the basic deal terms were typed into the back of the card, and then when advances or royalties came in, the details of when the payments were received were typed on to the card. If you ran out of space on one card, you'd get out a second green card and staple or fasten that to the original card. For a book like 2001: A Space Odyssey, you had quite a nice thick stack of green cards. Then there were the white cards where we kept track of the authors who had sent in manuscripts to the agency's reading fee service along with an old-fashioned paper log on when those manuscripts had come in and when responses were sent out, and there were two sets of index cards maintained for keeping track of foreign sales, one by author and the other by country. If money came in, that was noted on the green card and not on the foreign cards, though there would be a notation so we would know that the on-signing money or copies of the book had come in.
Basically, think index cards.
We had five phone lines, and somewhat old-fashioned five-line phones. No voice mail, no answering machine, none of that.
No fax. We had a telex machine, and foreign offers and responses usually came in over the telex.
Contracts were often still typed out, though some of the bigger publishers may have had early word processing systems even then but certainly not all. A lot of them were done in multiple copies on a very thin onionskin paper to save on mailing costs.
Royalty statements were crude. The most impressive-looking were the Random House statements that came in on big computer fold paper all very fancily printed by computers. Penguin statements came in on little pieces of paper, and provided only the number of copies sold during that particular six month period. This was rather annoying because if you wanted to find out how many copies a book had sold over five years, you had to dig out all five years of statements and add those numbers together, and back then it wasn't like most people (and certainly not Scott Meredith) had a spreadsheet program to add the numbers together or any other much better way of keeping track of it than to save every last royalty statement if you wanted to know your actual total sales. DAW sent out handwritten statements that gave the total # of copies sold at the end of each period in a kind of ledger format where they'd fit twelve or twenty periods worth of data on the page, the first period always being filled in with a notation something like "too early to tell" and then the updated sales, and this was nifty because it was the only statement where you could get a historical glance at a title's performance.
However it was that the royalty statements came, they were almost all as fictional as the novels they were reporting on. Because then as now as for many decades, publishers had the right to withhold a reserve against returns, and that number was almost always taken out without any detailing in order to arrive at the one single number that was put on the piece of paper you received. Whether it was the handwritten ledger from DAW of the fancy-pants formal looking "We Have A Computer" statements on the big computer-fold paper from Random House, you had no way of knowing in the first royalty period if the 12,892 copies that were reported on your first statement meant there were 15,000 copies that had been shipped of 25,000, no way of knowing how many copies had come back, and how many copies the publisher was hiding. It took even me several years to catch on to the fact that those impressive looking Random House statements didn't mean very much, and that I'd need to call clients and tell them "so I'm sending you your first royalty statement, but you may as well ignore it." If that 12,892 copies went up to 19,528 on the second royalty statement, did this mean that they had gone from 25,000 shipped to 30,000, or from 24,000 to 25,829, or from 15,000 to 22,000? Essentially, you had to wait maybe 3 or 4 royalty periods until you could be reasonably sure that the total # of copies reported on the royalty statement was somewhat similar to the actual # of copies that had been sold because by then the publisher would probably be down to only a 10% reserve against returns that was hidden in the background. Maybe. And it was only after that point that if the next statement showed sales going up by 3,200 copies or down by 569 that you might consider that to be an actual reflection of how your book had performed over that time.
So those fictional royalty statements would come in, the money would be typed in on the green card, the check written out by hand and put into a ledger book by hand, it would come to one of the agents to typewrite out an itemization letter that would go off to the client.
So we'll end Pt. 1 of this e-mail here, with a glimpse of SMLA technology circa 1986. And I'll try over time to advance the narrative forward. Let me know if there's something you think I should be talking about in this part of the posting that I've missed.
And spring has just forwarded; my Mac has advanced itself from 2AM to 3AM. I hate the lost hour of sleep, but this does mean there will still be some daylight when I escape the office in the evening, which I am always very happy about.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
The Great Divide
Can anyone explain why there seems to be such a big gap in the use of computer technology between US and UK businesses, even when they're owned by the same conglomerate?
In my business, this is most notable with regard to royalty statements. For many years now, most US publishers have been producing royalty statements that are quite detailed. Almost everyone gives you the important information: how many copies the publisher shipped, how many copies were returned by bookstores, and how many of the copies that are left "in the field" are being held as a reserve against possible future returns. In some instances, the publishers almost seem to have this gleeful "you want information, you've got information" approach, and manage to provide this information over three or five pages of stunningly incomprehensible statements. It's a dozen years or more with some publishers that this information has been provided. And somehow, the British publishers are still stuck in the dark ages, or giving a number of copies sold but without any information on how they got there. Since books are returnable, the percentage of copies that are returned is crucial in determining how successful a book is, and from the UK, I'm still waiting... Why can't the technology be transplanted?
Nielsen, the TV ratings people, also provide weekly book sales information in both the US and UK. Again, the information you can get in the US is much more detailed, much more helpful, and much more easily found than in the UK. Again, why can't this company use the same good technology on both sides of the Atlantic?
And the same again if you're planning to attend Book Expo America vs. London Book Fair. BEA just radiates this sense of technological achievement in registering and paying that seems to elude LBF, even though both are run by Reed Exhibitions.
This doesn't make sense. At JABberwocky Literary Agency, I confess the technology at one end of the office isn't the exact same as at the other end; his Mac ran 10.3, mine 8.6; then I ran 10.4 vs. 10.3, now his is 10.5 and I'm still 10.4. But shouldn't these big global conglomerates be a little better at spreading best IT practices than a little literary agency?
In my business, this is most notable with regard to royalty statements. For many years now, most US publishers have been producing royalty statements that are quite detailed. Almost everyone gives you the important information: how many copies the publisher shipped, how many copies were returned by bookstores, and how many of the copies that are left "in the field" are being held as a reserve against possible future returns. In some instances, the publishers almost seem to have this gleeful "you want information, you've got information" approach, and manage to provide this information over three or five pages of stunningly incomprehensible statements. It's a dozen years or more with some publishers that this information has been provided. And somehow, the British publishers are still stuck in the dark ages, or giving a number of copies sold but without any information on how they got there. Since books are returnable, the percentage of copies that are returned is crucial in determining how successful a book is, and from the UK, I'm still waiting... Why can't the technology be transplanted?
Nielsen, the TV ratings people, also provide weekly book sales information in both the US and UK. Again, the information you can get in the US is much more detailed, much more helpful, and much more easily found than in the UK. Again, why can't this company use the same good technology on both sides of the Atlantic?
And the same again if you're planning to attend Book Expo America vs. London Book Fair. BEA just radiates this sense of technological achievement in registering and paying that seems to elude LBF, even though both are run by Reed Exhibitions.
This doesn't make sense. At JABberwocky Literary Agency, I confess the technology at one end of the office isn't the exact same as at the other end; his Mac ran 10.3, mine 8.6; then I ran 10.4 vs. 10.3, now his is 10.5 and I'm still 10.4. But shouldn't these big global conglomerates be a little better at spreading best IT practices than a little literary agency?
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