11:47 PM Maybe a recap post to come, but for now, the live blog is shutting down. See you at the movies.
11:43 PM No real surprise in the Best Picture category. I wasn't a fan of The Artist, but I do want to give some respect out to Harvey Weinstein. A kind of kindred soul in this way. I have an eye for spotting talent for writing good books, and I'm always willing to stick in my two cents on how to make the good books better and hopefully into great. And that's Harvey. He knows how to find movies that can participate in the Oscar parade. His reputation as Harvey Scissorhands is not undeserved, I think here he may be a little more forceful and a little better able to have his way, in part because he actually cuts the checks while I can only promise a good effort to get people to cut them. And when it comes to Oscar campaigning, he knows what he's doing. He's got the kind of Oscar marketing machine that I try in a smaller way to apply to the foreign marketing for the JABberwocky list. He saw The Artist. He sensed it. He even sensed that he could keep his Scissorhands off of it. And he got it. Deserved? Didn't deserve? You know, I have to respect that he can go out and make these things happen.
11:40 PM My disappointment in the Best Actor category is balanced by the pleasant surprise of Meryl Streep winning for Best Actress. Woo hoo! I can't say enough how good her performance was in The Iron Lady. And what a wonderful speech, that one if you are watching at home or in the audience, please try. Real seeming emotion, thanks limited to just a few special people instead of a long laundry list. Joy, graciousness, modesty, all in one. Well, that was just a happy-making victory.
11:21 PM Overall the show is reminding me of watching a movie on commercial TV, where they have a good 15 or 20 minutes without commercials at the beginning so you get into it, and then as you get along you've got commercials for 4 mnutes out of every 12 and it's baffling why anyone actually watches the move. The commercial load the first hour wasn't bad, but for the past 45 minutes it's been one block, whether it's the actor award or the memorial, followed by multiple minutes of commercials. Explains why I shoudln't have worried the show would run short when we had just a few awards left to present a half hour ago. The Penneys commercials are excellent, though I thought maybe that last one was for Miracle Whip. Diet Coke also re-ran a commercial joining Sprint in that ignominy, but at least it's a really good fresh ad seen tonight for the first time.
11:18 PM I am not happy with Jeana Dujardin winning Best Actor for The Artist. There are only four other performances I think I liked more in this category. Even Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I wasn't a big fan of the movie, but what a performance. Well, it was a nice acceptance speech at least, but I really really really would have liked seeing George Clooney coming out with this one. Humbug.
10:58 PM Couldn't they have cut to the commercial break giving more of a glimpse of the honorary Oscar recipients in their box, instead of yet another view of the musicians playing in the other boxes, which we've seen only 12 times already over the course of the evening?
10;55 PM Best DIrector goes to Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist. No surprise, but very disappointing to me. Perhaps the only thing more disappointing than seeing a repeat of the same Sprint ad from earlier during the preceding commercial break. If they were going to run a Sprint ad twice, it should have been the one that was filmed near JABberwocky Central, with the CEO at Gantry State Park on the Long Island City waterfront just a couple miles away.
10:30 PM Happily the Original Screenplay award did NOT go to The Artist. I liked Midnight in Paris, happy here.
10:28 PM And the winners for Adapted Screenplay do thank the author of the book on which the screenplay was based. Very important!!!
10:27 PM. Since I liked The Descendants very much, my pick for Best Picture, having it take home at least the one Oscar makes me happy.
10:23 PM The chocolate chip bar from Buttercup was OK, my next dessert course is a cream cheese brownie from Crumbs. Another good Penney's ad, interesting Tide ad, better AT&T ad than what Sprint is showing.
10:19 PM Very glad to see Man or Muppet win over its one competitor for Best Song. If you watch the old Muppet Show, you'll see how important music was to the show, having fun with music, doing unexpected things with music. "A true honor to work in the shadow of such legends" does about sum up how one should feel about writing music for the Muppets, and last year's addition to the Muppet cannon did a good job of living up to that legacy. A pleasing win.
10:12 PM Original score is a really strong category. The Artist had a score that was absolutely integral to it, as did Hugo. The music for War Horse plays and I see War Horse. It's even hard to argue the excellent score for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was overlooked, because I don't know which of the nominees I'd boot in favor of it. No real surprise, and really hard to object, to having it to go The Artist.
10:04 PM for those watching at a home Christopher Plummer game a wonderful acceptance speech, but this was by a professional driver on a closed course, do not attempt because the music will cut you off, and then your microphone will cut out. The last time I watched a chunk of The Sound of Music a couple years ago, it amazed me to see how youthful Christopher Plummer looked, it shouldn't, it was 45 or 50 years ago, but still. He probably looks better at 82 than I do a bit shy of 50 still, which gives me something to look forward to. I still don't like the movie, but this is one of those career achievement awards you just can't argue with. My pick for Plummer, go and take a look at his performance as a customs agent in Atom Egoyan's film Ararat.
10:00 PM Kenneth Branaagh -- is he a vision of Jeremy Renner in 25 years? There's an uncanniy resemblance to me.
9:56 PM. 5 wins for Hugo. I would have loved seeing Harry Potter or Rise of the Planet of the Apes winning for visual effects.
9:55 PM racing through the show so they have time for the Ben Stiller - Emma Stone train wreck.
9:45 PM Kind of a dull show, the acceptance speech in the documentary cataegory is actually lively, so they bleep some and cut it off.
9:34 PM Diet Coke ad was good, Sprint ad is another same old same old that isn't impressing me, if you're going to come to the Oscars you really should put on a new outfit.
9:28 PM And with another win for Sound Effects I think we can safely give Hugo the crown for most, if not the most important.
9:26 PM Sound editing to Hugo, its 3rd win, it may end the evening at least tied for the most Oscars.
9:25 PM Today's paper has a coupon for Doritos, maybe I will buy some!
9:24 PM Even more baffling, how can it win?
9:22 PM, how can the overlong Dragon Tattoo have a nomination for film editing?
9:17 PM I thought the Miracle Whip ad was another JC Penney ad. Not a fan of The Help, hard not to like the outpouring of affection for Octavia Spencer's win for supporting actresss.
9:08 PM Footnote is the only nominee for Foreign Language Film that I've seen. I might want to see Bullhead. No interest at all in the winner, A Separation.
8:59 PM And Iron Lady wins. Excellent!
8:58 PM I would go with Iron Lady for makeup.
8:55 PM I only saw two of the Costume nominees, so it can't bd a surprise that it goes to a film, The Artist, that was actually seen and is in the award mix overall. I wish I'd seen Anonymouse.
8:53 PM This opening film montage -- pointless. Gave me a chance to crack open a Mike's Hard Lemonade and get the Buttercup Bakery chocolate chip bar out of its bag. I'm hungry!
8:50 PM After the great JC Penney ad, disappointing to see Spring with the same unlimited data for iPhone ad that I've seen 142 times before.
8:49 PM For as long as I can remember, the first award out the door was one of the Supporting Acting awards, I don't know how to deal with this thing with giving out two technical awards first.
8:48 PM The JC Penney add about coupons was funnier than the Billy Crystal opening.
8:46 PM With these first two technical awards going to Hugo, it's clear that there isn't gong to be some big sweep for The Artist even if it wins for Best Picture. I don't think these two wins are a harbinger of a surprise sweep for Hugo. I might have opted for Midnight in Paris in this category.
8:44 PM Of the films nominated for cinematography, I think War Horse had the photography I enjoyed most. I can't complain too much on having Robert RIchardson win, he's done a lot of good word and I think first and foremost of Born on the 4th of July, one of multiple films he did for Oliver Stone.
8:40 PM The Chapter 11 Theatre. Used to the Kodak Theatre, maybe even still is, but Kodak is in bankruptcy and got the OK to back out of its naming deal for the venue.
8:40 PM The opening montage was more of a chuckle than a belly laugh, but OK, it'll do kid, it'll do.
8:30 PM Best Original Screenplay is a tough category. There are three films here that I'd love to see winning, Bridesmaids, Margin Call and Midnight in Paris. I'll give some blog space to Margin Call,which is one of the movies from 2012 that I wish I'd found time to see twice. It has moments that I'm still seeing seveal months later, the really bland office space for the finanicial firm doesn't seem so bland in my mind's eye. There's Jeremy Irons chewing this boring scenery at the crucial board meeting that will decide the fate of his financial firm, Zachary Quinto staring at a computer screen. Debra Winger and Stanley Tucci being paid to sit in a room. These are moments that usually don't stock out because there's so bland, but somehow this movie takes the workaday life of high finance and makes it crackle. Excellent script and acted with passion all the way around.
8:25 PM The Supporting Actor category... well, it's hard to believe Christopher Plummer has never won an Oscar for all the excellent performances he's done over the years, I don't like that he's going to win it for a performance that's so brilliant in its subtely it didn't make much of aa impression on me at all in a film that made a rather negative impression on me, like I wish I hadn't forked over a Very Important Neighbor ticket to see it at the Clearview Chelsea. I might vote for Jonah Hill in this category. But Nick Nolte's nomination is a good occasion to talk belatedly in praise of Warrior. I wish I had more time to review movies on my blog because I feel guilty about not having given some warm words of praise to this movie when it came out. As to Nolte himself, his performance is a lot of old saws knit together, a modern update of Burgess Meredith's trainer character in Rocky, one might say. But it's an awfully good piece of work nonetheless. The movie is one of the best sports movies I've ever seen, a little surprisingly because it's about a sport, mixed martial arts, that doesn't particularly interest me. But it is the first film of it's the where I've ever gotten to the final bout and not really known which character I was supposed to root for. That never happens in sports movies, but this script is a gem and pulls it off. Doesn't hurt that Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are also giving quite excellent performances, too bad my good memories of Tom Hardy's have been washed away by the recent drek known as This Means War. But trust me on this, consider putting Warrior on your Netflix queue.
8:23 PM LIked the backstage look at the winner's walk.
8:16 PM A quick shout out in Best Actor to Demian Bichir. Not too many people saw A Better Life. It's kind of depressing in the end. But it's excellent filmmaking, really absorbing, and Bichir's performance is an important part of that. One of those occasions when just getting the nomination is a win in and of itself.
8:07 PM Best actress is a category worht talking about ahead of time. The general consensus is that Viola Davis will win for The Help. I don't mind Viola, you can go see an incredible performance from her in the film version of Doubt, as one example. But for Meryl Streep not to win this year would be a darned shame. When I was young and Meryl was in movies like Sophie's Choice or Out of Africa, I didn't truck much with her, all of that "just doing accents" stuff. As I've aged, I've grown to appreciate her work more and more in the richness of variety and the invisibility of her technique. The Devil Wore Prada and Being Julia Child. I think her performance in The Iron Lady might be her very best performance ever. She is the movie, and you don't see her. You see Margaret Thatcher all the way. It isn't an actress wearing a nose, but an actress totally immersed in every aspect of the subject. The movie isn't great, I liked the first half quite a bit but thought it faltered in the later going as it had to deal with the Falklands in ten minutes and then the union strikes in ten minutes without very much to say about any of these things. But what a performance it is. Just incredible. She has my Oscar vote, but mine doesn't count. I didn't see Albert Nobbs, doubt I will. Michelle Williams was quite good in My Week with Marilyn. Don't get me started on Dragon Tattoo, nothing against Rooney Mara but the movie paled next to the original Swedish version. You can't take good pulp material like this and drown it in so much Hollywood acting and Hollywood production value and languor. Meryl is the best!
8:03 PM, settling in for the evening's excitement!
Sunday, February 26, 2012
The Pre Oscar -- Best Picture
I don't know how Bryce Moore manages with two kids to find time for more movie reviews than I do, but it's time to at least say something in preparation for Sunday's Oscar ceremony!
We have nine Best Picture nominees, I've seen all of them to some extent or another.
Let's say I won't be rooting for Hugo. I started to feel weary within ten or fifteen minutes of the film starting. I eventually woke up, decided sleeping was to be preferred, and ended up walking out. During the brief moments that I was awake, I could see that the movie was brilliantly made from a production design standpoint or a music standpoint or in any and many fashions you could say. But the story was just boring, I didn't care about the kid, I didn't want to see a peon to motion picture history or preservation.
I also left The Help. I hadn't read the book, I read the first page or so and recoiled at the very thought of it. Trying to watch the movie cold reminded me of what it must have been like to try and watch Sorceror's Stone without having started in on the Harry Potter series. It was dramatically inert, I didn't care about the main character or any character just from what was on the screen. The buzz is that this will mean I will not properly appreciate the virtues of the actresses most likely to win in both leading and supporting characters. Pardon the pun, but there's no Help for for that.
I did kind of like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I thought it rang true in a lot of important ways, in the relationship between the mother and child, in the child's reaction to what happened on 9/11. It's not "real" after that, it's a movie. But I was bothered a lot more by the unreality of having World War I stop for ten minutes so a British and German soldier could take care of War Horse than I was by anything in Extremely Loud. If the Best Picture race were between the two of these pictures, I'd put the horse out to some incredibly close pasture and be done with it. Not that War Horse doesn't have some virtues as well, but its mawkishness and manipulativeness was far more apparent in my eyes.
I don't know what to say about Tree of Life. I saw it. I stayed awake, pretty much. But it's not a movie. It's a tone poem or an elegy or something but it isn't a movie. I'm sure whatever it is, it's a very good example of whatever. But I like to see a movie when I go to the movies.
Of the above films, Extremely Loud and War Horse are the only ones that I was in any rush to see. I only went to The Help at all because it was a free screening months after it opened, I waited weeks to see Tree of Life. Hugo was part of a double feature with the rather disappointing Young Adult. By and large, I was right to have been disinterested.
Similarly, I saw The Artist pretty much only because I had an opportunity to see it as part of a last minute add on to the Variety Screening Series. And this was entirely disposable and missable as well. It's not a bad movie. But it's such a trifle that I don't entirely see the point of it. The most interesting part of it to me was correctly noticing that part of it was filmed in the Bradbury Building, which might be best known for being used in Blade Runner. The ornate staircase looked a lot different here, but it's one distinct piece of staircase. It pains me to think that this amusing little trifle is thought to be the leading contender for Best Picture. Really?
Extremely Loud might be preposterous in some ways in some eyes, but I at least see it as a legitimate attempt to go near the events of 9/11, and where it approaches them most directly to do so in real vibrant ways that speak -- accurately in the eyes of someone in NYC on the day -- to some of the actual emotion of the events.
If I'm not rooting for The Artist...
well, I'm not rooting for Moneyball. Brad Pitt is awfully good in the movie, Jonah Hill is awfully good in the movie, there are some good performances lurking elsewhere, like Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Oaklands As manager Art Howe. The last third or maybe last half of the move was actually pretty darned good. The problem here is just that the first chunk of the movie isn't really that good. It's too slow to get going. Not rooting for it, but of the nine nominees this is in the half that I at least don't mind seeing in the running.
Midnight in Paris, this is a great movie, but like The Artist I think it's a little too trifling for me to really want to pull for it in the Best Picture category. Still, it's an awfully good movie, Woody Allen's best movie in perhaps 20 years, his first really good one maybe since Crimes and Misdemeanors. If you haven't fallen in love with the idea of Paris before, it's hard not after the opening montage of the city photographed with its best side in every frame, in every shot, in every glimmer of light. The script is tight, witty, the contemporary relationships feel real, and I'm willing then to consider that the historical parts of it are as real as the contemporary. Whether they are or not, I don't know, but I'm willing to go along for the ride. It's hard in some ways to say why this movie charmed me so thoroughly where The Artist does not. Maybe it's because The Artist competes with my memories of Mel Brooks' Silent Movie? Maybe it's because there's some edge and ambivalence to the relationships in Midnight in Paris, while there's never any real doubt what will happen in The Artist, if you've seen a lot of movies The Artist has one of those scripts that you can write from memory of other films. I certainly couldn't fill in the blanks from my own experience on the literary experiences of Paris through the ages.
Ultimately, and rather surprisingly in light of my past experience with the director, my hands down favorite pick for Best Picture from the films that were nominated is The Descendants. I don't think I've ever liked an Alexander Payne film quite as much as his most fervent admirers. Sideways was experienced by me in the same way as Hugo, a film better suited for napping than for viewing. Election wasn't bad, but I'd call it Enhlenhectenh because it's kind of enh and not really great. And somehow or other, this director I've never really warmed to managed to come up with a brilliant picture. He's helped tons by George Clooney. Clooney has been so good if not better in so many movies, but he gives his best performance yet in this picture. It's quiet, subtle, yet incredibly forceful. There's no sign of star power or glamor when he's trying to deal with the daughters he doesn't really know. It might be the only movie set in Hawaii that makes me want to visit, because it doesn't just stay on the touristy beaches. It reveals the islands as actual places where real people eat, meet, work. Shows me a place I could actually walk around in and visit and experience in ways beyond worrying about whether I'd gotten all the right spots with my sunscreen. The script presents characters that movie experience tells us are to be experienced in particular ways, and then if gives us an entirely different experience, often in subtle, well-crafted scenes that put the craft and unique experience of cinema to use. There's the confrontation scene between George Clooney and Matthew Lillard, the gangly guy from the Scream movies, who's something entirely different here. Grown into almost middle age in his face but not quite in his life experiences, holding his own with George Clooney at his best. There are a lot of great scenes in this movie, but to me the one that still holds in my mind's eye a few months after seeing the movie is toward the end. Clooney's in-law has come to say goodbye to his dying daughter. The hospital scene is rife with tension between the two, the son-in-law who's never been good enough for the daughter, the son-in-law who knows he's never been good enough in his father-in-law's eyes. Experience suggests that we go either into some kind of full throttle final argument or to some wonderful scene of last-minute reconciliation. We get neither. Clooney and the camera quietly leave the hospital room with nothing fully resolved, and we peek in at the father and we peek in on Clooney's face. There's no resolution at all to the relationship between the characters, but we see that everything the father's ever said has been said out of real love and care for his daughter, who means more than anything to him, that it might be misguided but never out of malice and spite. And we see in Clooney's face that he might never have enjoyed his father-in-law, but that he'd managed to come to grips over time with his place in the relationship. There's no love, there's no hate, there's a lesson passed along to Clooney's daughter and to us, quietly, gently, but with clarity, it's somehow the quiet ringing of a loud clarion call.
If I could swap out some of the movies I liked less for others I liked more...
Bridesmaids. Comedy done right, uproariously side-splittingly funny. This isn't easy to do.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. About as good a popcorn movie as you can put together. Director Brad Bird, known for animated movies such as Iron Giant and The Incredibles, manages to do live action action with the fluidity of animation, and does it without giving the film the CGI anything goes look and feel that makes some of today's films look artificial.
Margin Call. It has a nomination in the screenplay category, deservedly. I'd settle for that if it weren't that there are so many appreciably worse movies in the 9 contending for Best Picture that this one should be in the mix for the main prize.
We have nine Best Picture nominees, I've seen all of them to some extent or another.
Let's say I won't be rooting for Hugo. I started to feel weary within ten or fifteen minutes of the film starting. I eventually woke up, decided sleeping was to be preferred, and ended up walking out. During the brief moments that I was awake, I could see that the movie was brilliantly made from a production design standpoint or a music standpoint or in any and many fashions you could say. But the story was just boring, I didn't care about the kid, I didn't want to see a peon to motion picture history or preservation.
I also left The Help. I hadn't read the book, I read the first page or so and recoiled at the very thought of it. Trying to watch the movie cold reminded me of what it must have been like to try and watch Sorceror's Stone without having started in on the Harry Potter series. It was dramatically inert, I didn't care about the main character or any character just from what was on the screen. The buzz is that this will mean I will not properly appreciate the virtues of the actresses most likely to win in both leading and supporting characters. Pardon the pun, but there's no Help for for that.
I did kind of like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I thought it rang true in a lot of important ways, in the relationship between the mother and child, in the child's reaction to what happened on 9/11. It's not "real" after that, it's a movie. But I was bothered a lot more by the unreality of having World War I stop for ten minutes so a British and German soldier could take care of War Horse than I was by anything in Extremely Loud. If the Best Picture race were between the two of these pictures, I'd put the horse out to some incredibly close pasture and be done with it. Not that War Horse doesn't have some virtues as well, but its mawkishness and manipulativeness was far more apparent in my eyes.
I don't know what to say about Tree of Life. I saw it. I stayed awake, pretty much. But it's not a movie. It's a tone poem or an elegy or something but it isn't a movie. I'm sure whatever it is, it's a very good example of whatever. But I like to see a movie when I go to the movies.
Of the above films, Extremely Loud and War Horse are the only ones that I was in any rush to see. I only went to The Help at all because it was a free screening months after it opened, I waited weeks to see Tree of Life. Hugo was part of a double feature with the rather disappointing Young Adult. By and large, I was right to have been disinterested.
Similarly, I saw The Artist pretty much only because I had an opportunity to see it as part of a last minute add on to the Variety Screening Series. And this was entirely disposable and missable as well. It's not a bad movie. But it's such a trifle that I don't entirely see the point of it. The most interesting part of it to me was correctly noticing that part of it was filmed in the Bradbury Building, which might be best known for being used in Blade Runner. The ornate staircase looked a lot different here, but it's one distinct piece of staircase. It pains me to think that this amusing little trifle is thought to be the leading contender for Best Picture. Really?
Extremely Loud might be preposterous in some ways in some eyes, but I at least see it as a legitimate attempt to go near the events of 9/11, and where it approaches them most directly to do so in real vibrant ways that speak -- accurately in the eyes of someone in NYC on the day -- to some of the actual emotion of the events.
If I'm not rooting for The Artist...
well, I'm not rooting for Moneyball. Brad Pitt is awfully good in the movie, Jonah Hill is awfully good in the movie, there are some good performances lurking elsewhere, like Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Oaklands As manager Art Howe. The last third or maybe last half of the move was actually pretty darned good. The problem here is just that the first chunk of the movie isn't really that good. It's too slow to get going. Not rooting for it, but of the nine nominees this is in the half that I at least don't mind seeing in the running.
Midnight in Paris, this is a great movie, but like The Artist I think it's a little too trifling for me to really want to pull for it in the Best Picture category. Still, it's an awfully good movie, Woody Allen's best movie in perhaps 20 years, his first really good one maybe since Crimes and Misdemeanors. If you haven't fallen in love with the idea of Paris before, it's hard not after the opening montage of the city photographed with its best side in every frame, in every shot, in every glimmer of light. The script is tight, witty, the contemporary relationships feel real, and I'm willing then to consider that the historical parts of it are as real as the contemporary. Whether they are or not, I don't know, but I'm willing to go along for the ride. It's hard in some ways to say why this movie charmed me so thoroughly where The Artist does not. Maybe it's because The Artist competes with my memories of Mel Brooks' Silent Movie? Maybe it's because there's some edge and ambivalence to the relationships in Midnight in Paris, while there's never any real doubt what will happen in The Artist, if you've seen a lot of movies The Artist has one of those scripts that you can write from memory of other films. I certainly couldn't fill in the blanks from my own experience on the literary experiences of Paris through the ages.
Ultimately, and rather surprisingly in light of my past experience with the director, my hands down favorite pick for Best Picture from the films that were nominated is The Descendants. I don't think I've ever liked an Alexander Payne film quite as much as his most fervent admirers. Sideways was experienced by me in the same way as Hugo, a film better suited for napping than for viewing. Election wasn't bad, but I'd call it Enhlenhectenh because it's kind of enh and not really great. And somehow or other, this director I've never really warmed to managed to come up with a brilliant picture. He's helped tons by George Clooney. Clooney has been so good if not better in so many movies, but he gives his best performance yet in this picture. It's quiet, subtle, yet incredibly forceful. There's no sign of star power or glamor when he's trying to deal with the daughters he doesn't really know. It might be the only movie set in Hawaii that makes me want to visit, because it doesn't just stay on the touristy beaches. It reveals the islands as actual places where real people eat, meet, work. Shows me a place I could actually walk around in and visit and experience in ways beyond worrying about whether I'd gotten all the right spots with my sunscreen. The script presents characters that movie experience tells us are to be experienced in particular ways, and then if gives us an entirely different experience, often in subtle, well-crafted scenes that put the craft and unique experience of cinema to use. There's the confrontation scene between George Clooney and Matthew Lillard, the gangly guy from the Scream movies, who's something entirely different here. Grown into almost middle age in his face but not quite in his life experiences, holding his own with George Clooney at his best. There are a lot of great scenes in this movie, but to me the one that still holds in my mind's eye a few months after seeing the movie is toward the end. Clooney's in-law has come to say goodbye to his dying daughter. The hospital scene is rife with tension between the two, the son-in-law who's never been good enough for the daughter, the son-in-law who knows he's never been good enough in his father-in-law's eyes. Experience suggests that we go either into some kind of full throttle final argument or to some wonderful scene of last-minute reconciliation. We get neither. Clooney and the camera quietly leave the hospital room with nothing fully resolved, and we peek in at the father and we peek in on Clooney's face. There's no resolution at all to the relationship between the characters, but we see that everything the father's ever said has been said out of real love and care for his daughter, who means more than anything to him, that it might be misguided but never out of malice and spite. And we see in Clooney's face that he might never have enjoyed his father-in-law, but that he'd managed to come to grips over time with his place in the relationship. There's no love, there's no hate, there's a lesson passed along to Clooney's daughter and to us, quietly, gently, but with clarity, it's somehow the quiet ringing of a loud clarion call.
If I could swap out some of the movies I liked less for others I liked more...
Bridesmaids. Comedy done right, uproariously side-splittingly funny. This isn't easy to do.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. About as good a popcorn movie as you can put together. Director Brad Bird, known for animated movies such as Iron Giant and The Incredibles, manages to do live action action with the fluidity of animation, and does it without giving the film the CGI anything goes look and feel that makes some of today's films look artificial.
Margin Call. It has a nomination in the screenplay category, deservedly. I'd settle for that if it weren't that there are so many appreciably worse movies in the 9 contending for Best Picture that this one should be in the mix for the main prize.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Do The Math
So what do e-books mean for John Taylor and his bride, Suzie?
Penguin is selling an e-book of The Bride Wore Black Leather for $12.99, and the hardcover cover price is $25.95. These prices are not unusual.
The typical royalty rate from a major publisher on an e-book is 25% of net receipts, and the typical publisher share of the e-book price is 70%. So 70% of $12.99 means around $9 going to the publisher, and around $2.25 going to the author.
The typical author royalty rate for a hardcover with a big publisher is between 10 and 15%, we take the middle tier on that at 12.5%, and the author gets around $3.25.
Hence, every time somebody trades from buying a hardcover of Bride Wore Black Leather to buying an e-book, the income to Simon Green drops from $3.25 to $2.25.
This isn't good news, if you are Simon Green!
HOWEVER...
For A Hard Day's Knight, now in mass market, both the e-book and the paperback are $7.99.
Let's do some more more math.
Typical royalty of 8% on the paperback, around $.64 on each paperback sale.
Same math formula for the e-book, list price x .7 to the publisher x .25 to the author. That's $1.40.
Every time an e-book is sold instead of a mass market, the author gains $.75.
I'm using the Nightside books as the example here, but the math would be similar for pretty much any set of hardback and paperback books coming from every major publisher. For a very successful author, the hardcover math is much worse, you're probably trading down from a 15% royalty and a higher hardcover cover price, and losing closer to $2 every time out. And gaining less on mass market sales, where many top bestselling authors might get a higher royalty rate. For a less successful author, the hardcover royalty might be only 10%, and the loss on the e-book trade is reduced. But maybe you're getting only a 6% royalty on your paperback, so your gain as readers trade from e-book to paperback may be even bigger.
Interestingly enough, then, at current industry standard royalty rates, the less successful authors might be better off -- way better off, even, than the most successful authors. You can't say for sure, that's for sure, you have to start doing fancy calculations at all different kinds of permutations of trade-offs to figure out 100% for sure if a given author is better off or worse off, but the math certainly shows that an author with huge hardcover sales to be turned into e-book sales has a lot more lost royalty potential than the author who's being published only in mass market.
Hmmm.
From the publisher standpoint...
You take a $26 hardcover, the publisher may get around $12.50 in revenue back from that. Has to pay the author $3.25, and the gross revenue after royalty expense is $9.25. For the e-book the gross revenue is $12.99 x .7 x .75, or around $6.80 if the e-book is priced at $12.99, $5.25 if the e-book is priced at $9.99. The publisher's gross revenue after royalty expense is clearly way less -- way way way way less -- for the e-book.
Hmmm, we're all sitting around thinking that the publisher is getting rich off of e-books.
That said, we must keep in mind that the hardcover book has more hard cash expenses to it. The unit cost might be $2. I'm going to assume that two-thirds of the books that are printed actually end up selling. So that's $18.50 in revenue after royalty expense for two books, less maybe $6 for the actual physical manufacturing costs of three books, less a little bit more for the freight and the warehouse expenses and other hard costs of a physical book. So that ends up being maybe $6 per book. So for a $12.99 e-book, it's kind of looking like the e-book is $12.99 instead of $9.99 for a reason, the $11.99-12.99 price point is about where the publisher can make as much money per book as on the hardcover, before all the overhead and other costs associated with the book itself -- the cover artist, the copy-editor, the office rent, the salaries for the editors and everyone else hanging around the office. At $9.99, the publisher is taking a real revenue hit from people buying e-books instead of hardcovers, even after taking account of the hard cash expenses that go along with the physical book, but not the e-book.
Bottom line here, on hardcover books, the move to e-books isn't helping publishers very much, if at all.
But on mass markets, the publisher may get $3.50 on a $7.99 paperback, have a royalty expense of $.65, and hard cash expenses for the physical book of $.80 or $1. Let's again assume three books printed for every two sold, that's $7.20 in revenue for selling two books less $1.30 royalty expense less, let's say, $2.70 in hard cash costs. That's around $1.60 per book before overhead. For the e-book at $7.99, it's $7.99 x .7 x .75 = $4.20 !!!
So unless my math is wrong, publishers are doing rather nicely when people trade from mass market to e-book sales, and the author is doing a little bit better off but nowhere near as better off here as the publisher is doing.
Again, there are myriad other factors that can go into this, this is just rough sketching, the unit costs for a mass market book from a 100,000 copy first printing will be vastly less than for a mass market with a 15,000 copy first printing, and that all by itself can make this math look a lot different from book to book.
To be honest, I'm so astonished at how much the math favors the publishers on trading from mass market to e-book that I'm thinking I've got to be getting something entirely wrong, the publishers can't really be doing that well on the mass market, can they?
Now, if you are an author with a track record, the most important lesson in all of this is that you can't determine the appropriate advance for your book by looking at your royalty statement. You might be losing royalties big time on your hardcover sales, but the publisher isn't losing per-unit profit the same way you're losing royalties. You might be gaining royalties on the paperback vs e-book side, but the publisher is probably gaining even more.
So it's like the title of this post says -- Do The Math. You or your agent need to try and grope your way toward looking at the P&L (profit and loss) statement for your book, not the royalty statement. Your numbers for that will never be like the publisher's, because all the publishers have different ways of allocating overhead and other unique factors they won't share with you, but you can rough something out by looking at your previous royalty statements and looking not at royalties earned but at copies shipped vs. sold and e-book copies sold and the expenses that go along with each.
The second thing to ponder here ... what do these numbers suggest regarding the legitimacy of 25% of net proceeds as an appropriate industry standard royalty rate for e-book sales.
Hard to say. If the publisher's trading more hardcover sales for e-book, then 25% of net seems to be kind of the right rate for keeping publisher unit profit at about the same level regardless of format. But 25% of net doesn't seem right when the publisher is trading more mass market sales. The other factor here, authors can easily self publish and get the full 70% of e-book cover price for themselves. Publishers have to justify what they're doing to be keeping three e-book dollars for every one that goes to the author when the authors can easily keep all of them. Because of that, and because of the revenue potential trading from mass market to e-book, I think the 25% has to move up some. Some.
Final quick thing, let's look at a trade paperback. $15-16 paperback, $12.99 e-book. So again $6.80 in gross revenue to the publisher on the e-book, after royalties. On the print side, two books bring in $14.50 or $15 in revenue, less $4.00 for hard physical costs for three books, less $2.40 royalties. That's $4 in gross revenue. Here, it looks like there's more revenue for both the author and the publisher, more equitably split between the two than on the mass market.
Penguin is selling an e-book of The Bride Wore Black Leather for $12.99, and the hardcover cover price is $25.95. These prices are not unusual.
The typical royalty rate from a major publisher on an e-book is 25% of net receipts, and the typical publisher share of the e-book price is 70%. So 70% of $12.99 means around $9 going to the publisher, and around $2.25 going to the author.
The typical author royalty rate for a hardcover with a big publisher is between 10 and 15%, we take the middle tier on that at 12.5%, and the author gets around $3.25.
Hence, every time somebody trades from buying a hardcover of Bride Wore Black Leather to buying an e-book, the income to Simon Green drops from $3.25 to $2.25.
This isn't good news, if you are Simon Green!
HOWEVER...
For A Hard Day's Knight, now in mass market, both the e-book and the paperback are $7.99.
Let's do some more more math.
Typical royalty of 8% on the paperback, around $.64 on each paperback sale.
Same math formula for the e-book, list price x .7 to the publisher x .25 to the author. That's $1.40.
Every time an e-book is sold instead of a mass market, the author gains $.75.
I'm using the Nightside books as the example here, but the math would be similar for pretty much any set of hardback and paperback books coming from every major publisher. For a very successful author, the hardcover math is much worse, you're probably trading down from a 15% royalty and a higher hardcover cover price, and losing closer to $2 every time out. And gaining less on mass market sales, where many top bestselling authors might get a higher royalty rate. For a less successful author, the hardcover royalty might be only 10%, and the loss on the e-book trade is reduced. But maybe you're getting only a 6% royalty on your paperback, so your gain as readers trade from e-book to paperback may be even bigger.
Interestingly enough, then, at current industry standard royalty rates, the less successful authors might be better off -- way better off, even, than the most successful authors. You can't say for sure, that's for sure, you have to start doing fancy calculations at all different kinds of permutations of trade-offs to figure out 100% for sure if a given author is better off or worse off, but the math certainly shows that an author with huge hardcover sales to be turned into e-book sales has a lot more lost royalty potential than the author who's being published only in mass market.
Hmmm.
From the publisher standpoint...
You take a $26 hardcover, the publisher may get around $12.50 in revenue back from that. Has to pay the author $3.25, and the gross revenue after royalty expense is $9.25. For the e-book the gross revenue is $12.99 x .7 x .75, or around $6.80 if the e-book is priced at $12.99, $5.25 if the e-book is priced at $9.99. The publisher's gross revenue after royalty expense is clearly way less -- way way way way less -- for the e-book.
Hmmm, we're all sitting around thinking that the publisher is getting rich off of e-books.
That said, we must keep in mind that the hardcover book has more hard cash expenses to it. The unit cost might be $2. I'm going to assume that two-thirds of the books that are printed actually end up selling. So that's $18.50 in revenue after royalty expense for two books, less maybe $6 for the actual physical manufacturing costs of three books, less a little bit more for the freight and the warehouse expenses and other hard costs of a physical book. So that ends up being maybe $6 per book. So for a $12.99 e-book, it's kind of looking like the e-book is $12.99 instead of $9.99 for a reason, the $11.99-12.99 price point is about where the publisher can make as much money per book as on the hardcover, before all the overhead and other costs associated with the book itself -- the cover artist, the copy-editor, the office rent, the salaries for the editors and everyone else hanging around the office. At $9.99, the publisher is taking a real revenue hit from people buying e-books instead of hardcovers, even after taking account of the hard cash expenses that go along with the physical book, but not the e-book.
Bottom line here, on hardcover books, the move to e-books isn't helping publishers very much, if at all.
But on mass markets, the publisher may get $3.50 on a $7.99 paperback, have a royalty expense of $.65, and hard cash expenses for the physical book of $.80 or $1. Let's again assume three books printed for every two sold, that's $7.20 in revenue for selling two books less $1.30 royalty expense less, let's say, $2.70 in hard cash costs. That's around $1.60 per book before overhead. For the e-book at $7.99, it's $7.99 x .7 x .75 = $4.20 !!!
So unless my math is wrong, publishers are doing rather nicely when people trade from mass market to e-book sales, and the author is doing a little bit better off but nowhere near as better off here as the publisher is doing.
Again, there are myriad other factors that can go into this, this is just rough sketching, the unit costs for a mass market book from a 100,000 copy first printing will be vastly less than for a mass market with a 15,000 copy first printing, and that all by itself can make this math look a lot different from book to book.
To be honest, I'm so astonished at how much the math favors the publishers on trading from mass market to e-book that I'm thinking I've got to be getting something entirely wrong, the publishers can't really be doing that well on the mass market, can they?
Now, if you are an author with a track record, the most important lesson in all of this is that you can't determine the appropriate advance for your book by looking at your royalty statement. You might be losing royalties big time on your hardcover sales, but the publisher isn't losing per-unit profit the same way you're losing royalties. You might be gaining royalties on the paperback vs e-book side, but the publisher is probably gaining even more.
So it's like the title of this post says -- Do The Math. You or your agent need to try and grope your way toward looking at the P&L (profit and loss) statement for your book, not the royalty statement. Your numbers for that will never be like the publisher's, because all the publishers have different ways of allocating overhead and other unique factors they won't share with you, but you can rough something out by looking at your previous royalty statements and looking not at royalties earned but at copies shipped vs. sold and e-book copies sold and the expenses that go along with each.
The second thing to ponder here ... what do these numbers suggest regarding the legitimacy of 25% of net proceeds as an appropriate industry standard royalty rate for e-book sales.
Hard to say. If the publisher's trading more hardcover sales for e-book, then 25% of net seems to be kind of the right rate for keeping publisher unit profit at about the same level regardless of format. But 25% of net doesn't seem right when the publisher is trading more mass market sales. The other factor here, authors can easily self publish and get the full 70% of e-book cover price for themselves. Publishers have to justify what they're doing to be keeping three e-book dollars for every one that goes to the author when the authors can easily keep all of them. Because of that, and because of the revenue potential trading from mass market to e-book, I think the 25% has to move up some. Some.
Final quick thing, let's look at a trade paperback. $15-16 paperback, $12.99 e-book. So again $6.80 in gross revenue to the publisher on the e-book, after royalties. On the print side, two books bring in $14.50 or $15 in revenue, less $4.00 for hard physical costs for three books, less $2.40 royalties. That's $4 in gross revenue. Here, it looks like there's more revenue for both the author and the publisher, more equitably split between the two than on the mass market.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Latent Ability
Today's the day, the official on sale for Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole, first in a three book deal with Ace.
Today's the day, the official on sale for the mass market edition of Kings of the North by Elizabeth Moon, the 2nd book in a 5 book Paks World arc.
It's safe to say that these two authors represent very different paths to writing and selling a first novel.
Elizabeth Moon sat down some thirty years ago to write a short story. She wrote, the short story grew, grew into the three book series known as The Deed of Paksenarrion that is one of the most enduring fantasy series of the 1980s. How many fantasies published between 1985 and 1990 have been continuously in print since? I don't know, but it's likely not more than in the dozens. She didn't have to look for an agent, I liked her early stories in Analog and wrote a letter asking if she had a novel, and if it wasn't the sf novel I was expecting we can stipulate that it was good. It wasn't all super-duper easy, I did have to get Jim Baen to change his mind on publishing the series, using the fact that his editor in chief Betsy Mitchell was one of the only people I actually knew and had a relationship with at the dawn of my career. But nonetheless, she wrote a first novel, it found an agent, it was published without too much editing, and was on store shelves within two years of my first reading it, and hundreds of thousands of readers have explored the world of Paksenarrion in the 25 years following.
Myke Cole's path is a wee bit longer, and very instructive.
First, if you are an aspiring writer, you do need to try and get out there and meet people. Myke put in the time and effort to do that. I first met Myke and his Professor X, Peter V. Brett, at a SFWA NYC reception, we believe whatever year it was that it was held at some bar a tad south of the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. Myke and Peter have better recollections of this than I. I met them for good at Philcon in 2003. the first of the three years that this convention was held at the Marriott in downtown Philly in the dark pre-holiday days of December with such cheap hotel rates that it was impossible to resist. I'm not sure the move to mid-December was a great thing for Philcon, but it was certainly a good year for me. Peter, Myke and I hung out at the bar until the wee hours one night. The travel was good for all of us. You can sell a book by sending us a great query letter, but it sure doesn't hurt to rely on other tools and weapons and to invest in opportunities to network and meet and find what opportunities you can to get yourself out there in a good way.
So I probably read the first draft of Shadow Ops: Control Point, then called Latent in 2004.
Only, I hate to even call it that. That first draft bears so little resemblance to the book you're reading today (this can also be said of the first draft I read of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings) that I hate to even say I read a first draft of Latent. I didn't read the whole thing, I didn't come close to reading the whole thing. But there's this basic image that's stayed in my mind all that time, an image that's core to the concept, which in my mind is of a young magic user standing in ranks in the center of the Pentagon entering the Army's corp of magic users. The writing was good enough (I'm not even sure I'd even call it good, at that point, but the chapters I read weren't written to where they tripped over themselves) and the basic concept powerful enough that I felt it appropriate to offer encouragement to Myke to run somewhere (not in the run and hide way, the good kind of running) with it.
And after that? Well, nothing much really happened for several years. Myke and I kept in touch somewhat, it helped that he lived in DC, and I liked to visit DC, so we could hook up every so often when I was down there. We could talk, I could encourage, he could tell me about himself, he could help me paint my apartment, just about anything and everything except that there wasn't anything at all happening with this nifty concept he had for a novel. Myke was very involved with a lot of different things, had his tours to Iraq starting with the private contractor he was working with, very involved in thinking about different aspects of counterterrorism and the history of Islam, he seems cured temporarily of his big thing then of recommending everyone in the world read The Sling and the Stone. The only thing I read of his was a portion and outline for a fantasy novel that was deeply steeped in the things he was interested in at the time, so deeply steeped that it sunk and was a real step back from what I was wanting and hoping and expecting. But I liked Myke, we were becoming bona fide friends, and I kept trying to push him back in the direction of Latent. The idea still had some real pull on me.
Professor X was also trying to get him to focus on the task at hand.
And finally, right before one of his tours to Iraq, the new version of Latent finally arrived. And it was good. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it was a fully embodied realization of the concept I'd first encountered five or six years before, better written and better plotted and singing out that it was a book that I needed to be working with.
I couldn't tell this to Myke.
He didn't want distractions during his tour in Iraq, so standing orders were to say nothing about the book until he returned.
I was much relieved when he returned safe and sound from his tour.
Now, the real work could begin. As is often the case, the fact that I liked a book enough to want to work with it was somewhat distant from saying I wanted to represent it. There were problems, issues, suggestions, things to be revised, and we went through another draft of two over what has to have been a year, maybe more.
Finally, in was July 2009, we went out to market with Latent. This has to be five years after I'd first read the first thing called Latent.
And then...
We've spoken about the importance of networking, let me also say here how important it can be to heed editorial advice from a committed agent, at least to a reasonable degree. Because one of the things I've learned time and again and which I learned again with Myke Cole and Latent, is that we can work through five drafts improving a manuscript, and I do mean improving it, and then we send it out to market and we find out that it needs to be improved some more.
That's what happened here. Multiple editors came back loathing and detesting what was then Part 2 of the manuscript. Nobody wanted to publish it as is. So Myke had to go back to the drawing board.
This was not an easy time for Myke and it wasn't an easy time for me as Myke's agent and friend. Myke may not want to use this word himself, but I think the experience was a little deflating for him. He'd done all of this work, I'd vouched for how good it was, I was excited and enthusiastic, and all we had was this stack of rejections.
I didn't see it that way, at least not entirely. We had a stack of rejections, but we had some editors who were willing to look at a revision and other editors who were willing and eager to look at another novel of Myke's, a foot in the door, a calling card, all those kinds of things you have but only when you don't have what you came for. I would try and remind Myke of this, I'd tell him that 99% of the authors who contacted our agency would be quite happy to be where Myke was in the fall of 2009, but still, where we were was kind of back to the drawing board to redo the manuscript with an entire large section of it needing to be replaced and almost every page of the novel otherwise needing to be looked at for any changes necessary for consistency.
But Myke did what he needed to do, and as much as I'd liked the manuscript I'd sent out in July 2009, it was hard not to think that the new version that went out in June 2010 to a handful of editors was genuinely better.
And it did the trick.
Come the fall of 2010, we had offers from two publishing companies.
But even then, things weren't easy. Myke had a strong preference to work with Anne Sowards at Ace. There were editors who were open to seeing a revision, but Anne was the one who went a little bit further than that, really pushing and prodding and going a little beyond being open to really radiating a bone fide want, but the company was starting to make a strong push to get rights that we hadn't historically sold to them, and I had to explain to Myke that we couldn't say yes without really pushing back on those demands. Which meant another week or two or three of anxiety while we did that.
But even then, the process wasn't done. There were the requests from Anne and the sales/marketing people at Ace for changes to the author name and changes to the title, and we had to kind of decide that we were very firm that the author was Myke with a Y, but that we could try and come up with some different titles. So it was that Latent became Control Point, and Riven became Fortress Frontier, and Union became Breach Zone.
And the writing wasn't done, Now that Anne had actually acquired the book, it wasn't just "I'd love to see the book again if you totally junk the entire 2nd part of the book and replace it with something else," no, now it was pages of actual editorial notes, broad points and then the line-by-line.
I think that this long story has a happy ending. I think that this book that Myke Cole first started writing in 1998 and that I first kind of read five years after and which finally went to market five years after that and which finally sees print thirty months after that is going to be a success. The reviews have come in fast and furious over the past month, all of them good and most of them great. A common theme is that we're just into January but that this is going to be one of the debuts to beat for the rest of 2012. Myke has been busting his but doing guest blog posts and interviews and interfacing with reviewers. As we pass the witching hour and officially arrive into launch day, the book is in the top 10K in Amazon's Kindle store, the top 16K in books, These are quite respectable, more than that for a first novel since those generally don't see a lot of preorder activity. We have sold audio rights and UK rights and Czech rights, and the publisher has sold book club rights.
And you know, I've read this book four or six times in multiple drafts over close to a decade, and I still like it. It's better than good, it deserves the reviews it's gotten, and I think the people who are buying it this week are going to encourage their friends to buy it next week and next month.
And I've even now read Fortress Frontier. There's no sophomore jinx here.
If you've read to the end of this post, then you ought to find out what it is you've been reading about.
You can obtain your copy of Control Point here.
You can visit Myke at his web site here.
You can follow along on Twitter here.
FInally, most importantly, if there is one thing you take away from this post that you didn't know when you started reading a half hour or three hours ago, you can find out what kind of cake Myke wants on his birthday here.
Today's the day, the official on sale for the mass market edition of Kings of the North by Elizabeth Moon, the 2nd book in a 5 book Paks World arc.
It's safe to say that these two authors represent very different paths to writing and selling a first novel.
Elizabeth Moon sat down some thirty years ago to write a short story. She wrote, the short story grew, grew into the three book series known as The Deed of Paksenarrion that is one of the most enduring fantasy series of the 1980s. How many fantasies published between 1985 and 1990 have been continuously in print since? I don't know, but it's likely not more than in the dozens. She didn't have to look for an agent, I liked her early stories in Analog and wrote a letter asking if she had a novel, and if it wasn't the sf novel I was expecting we can stipulate that it was good. It wasn't all super-duper easy, I did have to get Jim Baen to change his mind on publishing the series, using the fact that his editor in chief Betsy Mitchell was one of the only people I actually knew and had a relationship with at the dawn of my career. But nonetheless, she wrote a first novel, it found an agent, it was published without too much editing, and was on store shelves within two years of my first reading it, and hundreds of thousands of readers have explored the world of Paksenarrion in the 25 years following.
Myke Cole's path is a wee bit longer, and very instructive.
First, if you are an aspiring writer, you do need to try and get out there and meet people. Myke put in the time and effort to do that. I first met Myke and his Professor X, Peter V. Brett, at a SFWA NYC reception, we believe whatever year it was that it was held at some bar a tad south of the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. Myke and Peter have better recollections of this than I. I met them for good at Philcon in 2003. the first of the three years that this convention was held at the Marriott in downtown Philly in the dark pre-holiday days of December with such cheap hotel rates that it was impossible to resist. I'm not sure the move to mid-December was a great thing for Philcon, but it was certainly a good year for me. Peter, Myke and I hung out at the bar until the wee hours one night. The travel was good for all of us. You can sell a book by sending us a great query letter, but it sure doesn't hurt to rely on other tools and weapons and to invest in opportunities to network and meet and find what opportunities you can to get yourself out there in a good way.
So I probably read the first draft of Shadow Ops: Control Point, then called Latent in 2004.
Only, I hate to even call it that. That first draft bears so little resemblance to the book you're reading today (this can also be said of the first draft I read of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings) that I hate to even say I read a first draft of Latent. I didn't read the whole thing, I didn't come close to reading the whole thing. But there's this basic image that's stayed in my mind all that time, an image that's core to the concept, which in my mind is of a young magic user standing in ranks in the center of the Pentagon entering the Army's corp of magic users. The writing was good enough (I'm not even sure I'd even call it good, at that point, but the chapters I read weren't written to where they tripped over themselves) and the basic concept powerful enough that I felt it appropriate to offer encouragement to Myke to run somewhere (not in the run and hide way, the good kind of running) with it.
And after that? Well, nothing much really happened for several years. Myke and I kept in touch somewhat, it helped that he lived in DC, and I liked to visit DC, so we could hook up every so often when I was down there. We could talk, I could encourage, he could tell me about himself, he could help me paint my apartment, just about anything and everything except that there wasn't anything at all happening with this nifty concept he had for a novel. Myke was very involved with a lot of different things, had his tours to Iraq starting with the private contractor he was working with, very involved in thinking about different aspects of counterterrorism and the history of Islam, he seems cured temporarily of his big thing then of recommending everyone in the world read The Sling and the Stone. The only thing I read of his was a portion and outline for a fantasy novel that was deeply steeped in the things he was interested in at the time, so deeply steeped that it sunk and was a real step back from what I was wanting and hoping and expecting. But I liked Myke, we were becoming bona fide friends, and I kept trying to push him back in the direction of Latent. The idea still had some real pull on me.
Professor X was also trying to get him to focus on the task at hand.
And finally, right before one of his tours to Iraq, the new version of Latent finally arrived. And it was good. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it was a fully embodied realization of the concept I'd first encountered five or six years before, better written and better plotted and singing out that it was a book that I needed to be working with.
I couldn't tell this to Myke.
He didn't want distractions during his tour in Iraq, so standing orders were to say nothing about the book until he returned.
I was much relieved when he returned safe and sound from his tour.
Now, the real work could begin. As is often the case, the fact that I liked a book enough to want to work with it was somewhat distant from saying I wanted to represent it. There were problems, issues, suggestions, things to be revised, and we went through another draft of two over what has to have been a year, maybe more.
Finally, in was July 2009, we went out to market with Latent. This has to be five years after I'd first read the first thing called Latent.
And then...
We've spoken about the importance of networking, let me also say here how important it can be to heed editorial advice from a committed agent, at least to a reasonable degree. Because one of the things I've learned time and again and which I learned again with Myke Cole and Latent, is that we can work through five drafts improving a manuscript, and I do mean improving it, and then we send it out to market and we find out that it needs to be improved some more.
That's what happened here. Multiple editors came back loathing and detesting what was then Part 2 of the manuscript. Nobody wanted to publish it as is. So Myke had to go back to the drawing board.
This was not an easy time for Myke and it wasn't an easy time for me as Myke's agent and friend. Myke may not want to use this word himself, but I think the experience was a little deflating for him. He'd done all of this work, I'd vouched for how good it was, I was excited and enthusiastic, and all we had was this stack of rejections.
I didn't see it that way, at least not entirely. We had a stack of rejections, but we had some editors who were willing to look at a revision and other editors who were willing and eager to look at another novel of Myke's, a foot in the door, a calling card, all those kinds of things you have but only when you don't have what you came for. I would try and remind Myke of this, I'd tell him that 99% of the authors who contacted our agency would be quite happy to be where Myke was in the fall of 2009, but still, where we were was kind of back to the drawing board to redo the manuscript with an entire large section of it needing to be replaced and almost every page of the novel otherwise needing to be looked at for any changes necessary for consistency.
But Myke did what he needed to do, and as much as I'd liked the manuscript I'd sent out in July 2009, it was hard not to think that the new version that went out in June 2010 to a handful of editors was genuinely better.
And it did the trick.
Come the fall of 2010, we had offers from two publishing companies.
But even then, things weren't easy. Myke had a strong preference to work with Anne Sowards at Ace. There were editors who were open to seeing a revision, but Anne was the one who went a little bit further than that, really pushing and prodding and going a little beyond being open to really radiating a bone fide want, but the company was starting to make a strong push to get rights that we hadn't historically sold to them, and I had to explain to Myke that we couldn't say yes without really pushing back on those demands. Which meant another week or two or three of anxiety while we did that.
But even then, the process wasn't done. There were the requests from Anne and the sales/marketing people at Ace for changes to the author name and changes to the title, and we had to kind of decide that we were very firm that the author was Myke with a Y, but that we could try and come up with some different titles. So it was that Latent became Control Point, and Riven became Fortress Frontier, and Union became Breach Zone.
And the writing wasn't done, Now that Anne had actually acquired the book, it wasn't just "I'd love to see the book again if you totally junk the entire 2nd part of the book and replace it with something else," no, now it was pages of actual editorial notes, broad points and then the line-by-line.
I think that this long story has a happy ending. I think that this book that Myke Cole first started writing in 1998 and that I first kind of read five years after and which finally went to market five years after that and which finally sees print thirty months after that is going to be a success. The reviews have come in fast and furious over the past month, all of them good and most of them great. A common theme is that we're just into January but that this is going to be one of the debuts to beat for the rest of 2012. Myke has been busting his but doing guest blog posts and interviews and interfacing with reviewers. As we pass the witching hour and officially arrive into launch day, the book is in the top 10K in Amazon's Kindle store, the top 16K in books, These are quite respectable, more than that for a first novel since those generally don't see a lot of preorder activity. We have sold audio rights and UK rights and Czech rights, and the publisher has sold book club rights.
And you know, I've read this book four or six times in multiple drafts over close to a decade, and I still like it. It's better than good, it deserves the reviews it's gotten, and I think the people who are buying it this week are going to encourage their friends to buy it next week and next month.
And I've even now read Fortress Frontier. There's no sophomore jinx here.
If you've read to the end of this post, then you ought to find out what it is you've been reading about.
You can obtain your copy of Control Point here.
You can visit Myke at his web site here.
You can follow along on Twitter here.
FInally, most importantly, if there is one thing you take away from this post that you didn't know when you started reading a half hour or three hours ago, you can find out what kind of cake Myke wants on his birthday here.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Pirates!
This might disappoint some of my clients who've been tweeting about the on-line petitions against, but I find myself sympathizing more with the content providers than the internet providers on the SOPA/PIPA question.
Why?
Well, this weekend somebody e-mails me with a listing on eBay for a seller hawking complete sets of Sookie Stackhouse audios for £3.99. These are not legal. These are the copyrighted works of my client Charlaine Harris, and the sound recordings themselves are (p) Recorded Books, Inc., and the rights to sell these in the UK belong to the Orion Publishing Group. I don't believe for a single solitary second that the person who's putting up these listings thinks it's legal to run his/her own duplicating operation and to sell them on eBay for £3.99. And for that matter, I don't think the people buying these if they have half a brain or have ever been taught the "if it's too good to be true" think it's legal, either. And no, the seller isn't selling their one copy of the audios at whatever price they can get, they're selling multiple sets on this listing, and when this listing goes down they put up a new one with another batch.
You can't take the most basic step of reporting the seller by clicking the "report" link without being a registered eBay user. I have never been and have no desire ever to be a registered user of eBay, get along just fine without, thank you. And you can search high and low and up and down and left and right on eBay for an awfully long time without finding any depository e-mail for sending DCMA notices, there is no such thing, they just don't want to hear it.
Let me be blunt: eBay simply doesn't give a shit that it is aiding and abetting in the violation of copyright law.
So I don't want to hear eBay telling me about how I should oppose the cruelties of SOPA.
And of course, eBay is one of the good guys, a major corporation that theoretically has a reputation to care about.
What about the bad guys? As an example, a site that I was told about two weeks ago that has a raft of pirated A. Bertram Chandler e-books. This site is allegedly to help readers buy textbooks, what a generous kind group of people to help students. Oddly enough, their #1 category is science fiction and fantasy. The site doesn't have any depository e-mail for DCMA notices, or any contact information at all, for that matter. A request to their hosts, based in France, reveals that the registry is with group based in Poland. I decide I don't even want to try and complain, why not just draw a target on my back for Eastern Europan hackers to take their revenge. This site exists for no other purpose than to help in the infringement of copyrights, and the people who set up the site know it, and they're hiding behind their offshore addresses.
And guess what, I don't need eBay to run about running interference for these pirates. Or Yahoo, or Facebook, or Google, or whomever.
None of these major internet companies are our friends, they aren't my friends or your friends or your friends friends. There are big corporations, making huge sums of money, just like the big music companies and the big motion picture studios that have been trying to get SOPA passed.
I want to go after these people. I want the government to assist me in this. I want that copyright violators like this can at least be protested the same way that I can file a report about an illegal telemarking call to the FTC, maybe my one complaint won't do anything but if enough people complain, at least there's this sense that you can do something to fight people who are going around happily and knowingly breaking the law.
Now that I've vented, let me say that SOPA does go over the top. I don't like the idea of censoring search results. I don't think you should get zapped because you have one link somewhere to one person doing bad things.
So in that regard, it's good to have an opposition that might help to shave some of the rough edges off of the legislation.
But we need to make the criminals work a little harder.
I don't think, by the by, that these pirates are going to kill book publishing the way they killed Big Music. If for no other reason, than that people want whole books more than short stories, and the industry sells whole books at very reasonable prices. This is the exact opposite of the music industry, which thrived on selling whole books at high prices to people who really just wanted the short stories.
But even though I don't feel this person on eBay selling illegal copies of Charlaine Harris audios is going to kill the livelihood of Charlaine Harris or her agent, I don't think it's a good idea to treat laws like they are disposable, or things for us to ignore. I can't have a reader who's kind enough to tell me about the eBay listing and just shrug my shoulders and say, no, not worth worrying about. eBay shouldn't make it a challenge to report a crime in progress. It's a matter of principle to me.
And that's the kind of guy I am. I'm the kind of guy who called the NYFD to complain that a gym had a huge hamper of towels parked directly in front of the main fire exit. No, I didn't really expect there was going to be a fire, but fires do happen, and dozens of people die when those fires happen in places that have the fire exits blocked or locked.
So even though I don't think the pirates threaten me in a serious or urgent or immediate way, I want to have the might of law a little more on my side when it's necessary to go after them.
A lot of people disagree with me, some of my own clients. It happens, especially in these sorts of situations where we are trying to muddle through the fast-changing publishing industry. I had respectful disagreements with some of my clients on the proposed Google Books settlement, interestingly on that one I was siding with the Google Empire, on this one it's the clients siding with Google and the other big internet companies.
This is my personal opinion, it isn't an official opinion of the agency.
Why?
Well, this weekend somebody e-mails me with a listing on eBay for a seller hawking complete sets of Sookie Stackhouse audios for £3.99. These are not legal. These are the copyrighted works of my client Charlaine Harris, and the sound recordings themselves are (p) Recorded Books, Inc., and the rights to sell these in the UK belong to the Orion Publishing Group. I don't believe for a single solitary second that the person who's putting up these listings thinks it's legal to run his/her own duplicating operation and to sell them on eBay for £3.99. And for that matter, I don't think the people buying these if they have half a brain or have ever been taught the "if it's too good to be true" think it's legal, either. And no, the seller isn't selling their one copy of the audios at whatever price they can get, they're selling multiple sets on this listing, and when this listing goes down they put up a new one with another batch.
You can't take the most basic step of reporting the seller by clicking the "report" link without being a registered eBay user. I have never been and have no desire ever to be a registered user of eBay, get along just fine without, thank you. And you can search high and low and up and down and left and right on eBay for an awfully long time without finding any depository e-mail for sending DCMA notices, there is no such thing, they just don't want to hear it.
Let me be blunt: eBay simply doesn't give a shit that it is aiding and abetting in the violation of copyright law.
So I don't want to hear eBay telling me about how I should oppose the cruelties of SOPA.
And of course, eBay is one of the good guys, a major corporation that theoretically has a reputation to care about.
What about the bad guys? As an example, a site that I was told about two weeks ago that has a raft of pirated A. Bertram Chandler e-books. This site is allegedly to help readers buy textbooks, what a generous kind group of people to help students. Oddly enough, their #1 category is science fiction and fantasy. The site doesn't have any depository e-mail for DCMA notices, or any contact information at all, for that matter. A request to their hosts, based in France, reveals that the registry is with group based in Poland. I decide I don't even want to try and complain, why not just draw a target on my back for Eastern Europan hackers to take their revenge. This site exists for no other purpose than to help in the infringement of copyrights, and the people who set up the site know it, and they're hiding behind their offshore addresses.
And guess what, I don't need eBay to run about running interference for these pirates. Or Yahoo, or Facebook, or Google, or whomever.
None of these major internet companies are our friends, they aren't my friends or your friends or your friends friends. There are big corporations, making huge sums of money, just like the big music companies and the big motion picture studios that have been trying to get SOPA passed.
I want to go after these people. I want the government to assist me in this. I want that copyright violators like this can at least be protested the same way that I can file a report about an illegal telemarking call to the FTC, maybe my one complaint won't do anything but if enough people complain, at least there's this sense that you can do something to fight people who are going around happily and knowingly breaking the law.
Now that I've vented, let me say that SOPA does go over the top. I don't like the idea of censoring search results. I don't think you should get zapped because you have one link somewhere to one person doing bad things.
So in that regard, it's good to have an opposition that might help to shave some of the rough edges off of the legislation.
But we need to make the criminals work a little harder.
I don't think, by the by, that these pirates are going to kill book publishing the way they killed Big Music. If for no other reason, than that people want whole books more than short stories, and the industry sells whole books at very reasonable prices. This is the exact opposite of the music industry, which thrived on selling whole books at high prices to people who really just wanted the short stories.
But even though I don't feel this person on eBay selling illegal copies of Charlaine Harris audios is going to kill the livelihood of Charlaine Harris or her agent, I don't think it's a good idea to treat laws like they are disposable, or things for us to ignore. I can't have a reader who's kind enough to tell me about the eBay listing and just shrug my shoulders and say, no, not worth worrying about. eBay shouldn't make it a challenge to report a crime in progress. It's a matter of principle to me.
And that's the kind of guy I am. I'm the kind of guy who called the NYFD to complain that a gym had a huge hamper of towels parked directly in front of the main fire exit. No, I didn't really expect there was going to be a fire, but fires do happen, and dozens of people die when those fires happen in places that have the fire exits blocked or locked.
So even though I don't think the pirates threaten me in a serious or urgent or immediate way, I want to have the might of law a little more on my side when it's necessary to go after them.
A lot of people disagree with me, some of my own clients. It happens, especially in these sorts of situations where we are trying to muddle through the fast-changing publishing industry. I had respectful disagreements with some of my clients on the proposed Google Books settlement, interestingly on that one I was siding with the Google Empire, on this one it's the clients siding with Google and the other big internet companies.
This is my personal opinion, it isn't an official opinion of the agency.
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.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Barnes & Borders
Publishers Lunch Daily has a list of Barnes & Noble locations that have quietly closed at the end of 2011.
The demise of their big and busy store in the University Village mall just down the hill from the University of Washington and its University Bookstore had been known to me earlier. But also of interest is that their store in Washington DC's Georgetown neighborhood has also shuttered.
Going back fifteen years ago in the earliest days of B&N's nationwide superstore expansion, they would take out ads in places like The New Republic to ballyhoo their wonderful selection, including of academic, scholarly U Press type books. Those two stores, University Village and Georgetown, were two of the half dozen or so locations that would be specifically included in those posts. So to see those two stores closing at pretty much the same time kind of brings down the curtain on a small part of the book superstore era.
The University Village store is one that I'll certainly miss as a literary agent for sf/fantasy. Not so much the one in Georgetown, which sold very little in the genre though it was overall still considered a kind of flagship store for the company and had a depth of inventory that went beyond what was justified by its sales. That store gave me "Evanston moments."
Because it was visiting Evanston, IL, I'd guess when I was over for WorldCon in 2000, that I first came across a Borders with a really really godawful surprisingly bad sf/fantasy section, which theretofore I'd never known such a thing existed, and then popped across the street to the B&N which had a much better selection, but you could tell by looking at the yellowed books and how they would have the 5th printing of a Deathstalker novel that was several months into a 6th printing that they weren't actually selling sf/fantasy but at least deserved credit for having the selection.
That was a strength of B&N for many years, to have a more consistent core title selection across their entire range of stores, and that was the Georgetown store, to go in and be grateful they were carrying a lot of JABberwocky titles but to be deeply depressed by the deeply yellowed tops of the books.
But to get to the actual two points of the post...
1. B&N is getting very Borders like in their selection now. They're no longer bothering with a core stock across the full range of their stores. It used to be, and I felt this lack of brand identity was a very big problem for Borders that did not serve them well, that I could go to the Borders in Commack and find half the selection of the Stony Brook store a few miles away, while the B&N gap was more like 2/3 or 3/4 of the title count in a bad store vs. a good one. Now, the Tribeca B&N carries fewer than half the titles in Union Square. The B&N in Bayside Queens carries only two of the six "Lost Fleet" paperbacks, and these are up there with the Nightside books as the top-selling JABberwocky titles after Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett.
Now, B&N doesn't have to worry about physical competition the way Borders had to worry about competition from B&N. But there is competition from Amazon. There's a school of thought that says it doesn't make any sense for B&N to compete with the long tail of Amazon because there's no way to do it so why even try, as a B&N you're selling something other than whether the store carries two Lost Fleet paperbacks or six. I'm not there. Cost of inventory in mass market is not a huge factor in the success or failure of your business, I still think if you're a B&N and you want to give people an excuse to get in their car and visit your store that you can't nickle and dime. B&N knew this once, and it saddens me that they no longer do. That said, times have changed, and maybe it doesn't matter the way it did six or eight years ago that your stores had full runs of the key series while the other guys did not.
2. I used to visit DC for a four day weekend in no small part because I loved to take the temperature of a very big bookselling market. I could easily visit 6 B&N, 8 Borders, a handful of Waldenbooks, a few Daltons, a handful of Olsson's, some Books a Million. I could easily visit a very very impressive 30-35 bookstores over a long weekend. Now there's nothing left to visit. The mall stores slowly disappeared. Then Olsson's went bankrupt. Then Borders started to close the underperformers before now closing entirely. And the Books a Million in Old Town Alexandria is gone as well.
So let's see, now on a DC visit I can go around and visit the Dalton/now B&N in Union Station, B&N on E St., Clarendon, Rockville, Springfield, Potomac Yard and Bethesda. KramerBooks and Books a Million in Dupont Circle. Politics & Prose. Whatever's before security at National Airport. So that trip's gone from 32 bookstores to 10. And really, not even that. Traipsing out to Rockville or Springfield made sense when I could visit both a Borders and B&N, not just to visit another B&N. Potomac Yard is a pain to get to without a car, I'm not up for that any more. Politics & Prose is a pain to get to and doesn't really have much of an sf/f section so what's the point. I used to think about dragging in some of these just to make the list of stores visited look very very impressive for claiming the trips as business. Now, I can go to DC and actually justify visiting all of seven bookstores that might offer a reasonable return on the schlepping.
Am I right to find this depressing?
Because that's one way to look at it, with each new bookstore that closes more and more of us can now choose to drive several more miles than before to visit a boring B&N that maybe doesn't even bother to carry the entire Lost Fleet series in mass market. [Another of the B&N that's said to have closed is their Westside Pavilion store just south of Westwood in LA; with the Borders having closed a year prior to the bankruptcy, this introduces yet another urban book-buying desert, with the closest stores now requiring a schlep several miles west to Santa Monica or east to the Grove.]
Intellectually, I know that we can also all now sit in our easy chairs and buy pretty much whatever book we want in a minute or two on our iPads or our Nooks, our Kindles or our phones.
But you know, even that kind of depresses me in a way.
The demise of their big and busy store in the University Village mall just down the hill from the University of Washington and its University Bookstore had been known to me earlier. But also of interest is that their store in Washington DC's Georgetown neighborhood has also shuttered.
Going back fifteen years ago in the earliest days of B&N's nationwide superstore expansion, they would take out ads in places like The New Republic to ballyhoo their wonderful selection, including of academic, scholarly U Press type books. Those two stores, University Village and Georgetown, were two of the half dozen or so locations that would be specifically included in those posts. So to see those two stores closing at pretty much the same time kind of brings down the curtain on a small part of the book superstore era.
The University Village store is one that I'll certainly miss as a literary agent for sf/fantasy. Not so much the one in Georgetown, which sold very little in the genre though it was overall still considered a kind of flagship store for the company and had a depth of inventory that went beyond what was justified by its sales. That store gave me "Evanston moments."
Because it was visiting Evanston, IL, I'd guess when I was over for WorldCon in 2000, that I first came across a Borders with a really really godawful surprisingly bad sf/fantasy section, which theretofore I'd never known such a thing existed, and then popped across the street to the B&N which had a much better selection, but you could tell by looking at the yellowed books and how they would have the 5th printing of a Deathstalker novel that was several months into a 6th printing that they weren't actually selling sf/fantasy but at least deserved credit for having the selection.
That was a strength of B&N for many years, to have a more consistent core title selection across their entire range of stores, and that was the Georgetown store, to go in and be grateful they were carrying a lot of JABberwocky titles but to be deeply depressed by the deeply yellowed tops of the books.
But to get to the actual two points of the post...
1. B&N is getting very Borders like in their selection now. They're no longer bothering with a core stock across the full range of their stores. It used to be, and I felt this lack of brand identity was a very big problem for Borders that did not serve them well, that I could go to the Borders in Commack and find half the selection of the Stony Brook store a few miles away, while the B&N gap was more like 2/3 or 3/4 of the title count in a bad store vs. a good one. Now, the Tribeca B&N carries fewer than half the titles in Union Square. The B&N in Bayside Queens carries only two of the six "Lost Fleet" paperbacks, and these are up there with the Nightside books as the top-selling JABberwocky titles after Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett.
Now, B&N doesn't have to worry about physical competition the way Borders had to worry about competition from B&N. But there is competition from Amazon. There's a school of thought that says it doesn't make any sense for B&N to compete with the long tail of Amazon because there's no way to do it so why even try, as a B&N you're selling something other than whether the store carries two Lost Fleet paperbacks or six. I'm not there. Cost of inventory in mass market is not a huge factor in the success or failure of your business, I still think if you're a B&N and you want to give people an excuse to get in their car and visit your store that you can't nickle and dime. B&N knew this once, and it saddens me that they no longer do. That said, times have changed, and maybe it doesn't matter the way it did six or eight years ago that your stores had full runs of the key series while the other guys did not.
2. I used to visit DC for a four day weekend in no small part because I loved to take the temperature of a very big bookselling market. I could easily visit 6 B&N, 8 Borders, a handful of Waldenbooks, a few Daltons, a handful of Olsson's, some Books a Million. I could easily visit a very very impressive 30-35 bookstores over a long weekend. Now there's nothing left to visit. The mall stores slowly disappeared. Then Olsson's went bankrupt. Then Borders started to close the underperformers before now closing entirely. And the Books a Million in Old Town Alexandria is gone as well.
So let's see, now on a DC visit I can go around and visit the Dalton/now B&N in Union Station, B&N on E St., Clarendon, Rockville, Springfield, Potomac Yard and Bethesda. KramerBooks and Books a Million in Dupont Circle. Politics & Prose. Whatever's before security at National Airport. So that trip's gone from 32 bookstores to 10. And really, not even that. Traipsing out to Rockville or Springfield made sense when I could visit both a Borders and B&N, not just to visit another B&N. Potomac Yard is a pain to get to without a car, I'm not up for that any more. Politics & Prose is a pain to get to and doesn't really have much of an sf/f section so what's the point. I used to think about dragging in some of these just to make the list of stores visited look very very impressive for claiming the trips as business. Now, I can go to DC and actually justify visiting all of seven bookstores that might offer a reasonable return on the schlepping.
Am I right to find this depressing?
Because that's one way to look at it, with each new bookstore that closes more and more of us can now choose to drive several more miles than before to visit a boring B&N that maybe doesn't even bother to carry the entire Lost Fleet series in mass market. [Another of the B&N that's said to have closed is their Westside Pavilion store just south of Westwood in LA; with the Borders having closed a year prior to the bankruptcy, this introduces yet another urban book-buying desert, with the closest stores now requiring a schlep several miles west to Santa Monica or east to the Grove.]
Intellectually, I know that we can also all now sit in our easy chairs and buy pretty much whatever book we want in a minute or two on our iPads or our Nooks, our Kindles or our phones.
But you know, even that kind of depresses me in a way.
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