One of the anniversaries of the many deaths of Borders

I should be reading a manuscript but it's late and I'm tired and it's not the right conditions for work reading.

So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale.

And it still sucks.

To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year.

But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all merrily go falling one after the other after the other.

So I should be happy, right. The business I'm in took one of the biggest hits it's faced in my quarter century in publishing and it's muddling along without disaster in its wake.

But...

The same store sales figures at B&N have increased by a very small amount, considering the number of customers and book sales that were up for grab after the demise of Borders. There hasn't been any rush of bookstores to fill the vacuums or the bookselling deserts left behind in Borders' wake. Some of this is because a lot of the sales could move to e-books, which are much more opaque to track still than print book sales, so it could be that the sales haven't gone so much as gone behind a curtain. But I still don't think of this as good news. One of my biggest worries is that the outlets for selling print books will disappear faster than the appetite for print books.

I can't go to bookstores any more. I used to spend a huge chunk of my life visiting bookstores, and I loved doing it. I felt a little empty when Borders was around that life and business had gotten busier to where I wasn't able to spend as much time visiting bookstores as I'd liked. But it turns out that was because I could visit Borders. Even in its diminished struggling state, even after all the management missteps and the remodels and everything else Borders did to make their stores less enticing places to shop, Borders had better bookstores. A better curated selection. When I could go to a Barnes & Noble and play compare & contrast I could tolerate going to Barnes & Noble. When the only bookstore option I had was to go to a Barnes & Noble, I couldn't bare to do it. Especially because B&N hasn't even been B&N any more. Once upon a time it used to be that Borders were the more interesting and sometimes better and sometimes worse stores while B&N was the boring consistent chain that you could count on to have a core selection from store to store. Now, the difference between the good and the bad B&N is as extravagantly bad as it used to be at Borders, with bad stores having half the JABberwocky title count of good ones and not having core selections like the complete Lost Fleet series or the complete Nightside series. By and large, I just get depressed.

I still drag myself into a B&N every once in a while, maybe tomorrow I'll drag myself in to the one on 46th and 5th since I have to meet a friend a couple blocks away. But there isn't any joy to me in visiting bookstores. It's all just work now.

And there aren't choices. Most indies have crappy sf/fantasy sections and don't give me much joy. The only place where people can go and buy a book in an old fashioned bookstore is a depressing boring chain that doesn't even offer the benefits of consistency the way it once did.

I still think of Borders when I think of the world. When the Silver Line on the Washington Metro starts running in very late 2013, that will be the line that was going to allow me get to the Borders in Tysons Corner more often. If they ever build a streetcar line down Columbia Pike in suburban DC, that will be the streetcar line that would have made visits to the Borders in Baileys Crossroads much easier. When I head to Chicago for WorldCon, this will be the WorldCon that won't finally give me a chance to get down to the Borders on Beverly in the far South of Chicago. I don't see dead people, I see the ghostly apparitions of the Borders that were.

Based on the timing of the first round of liquidation sales, I knew that the most likely last week for Borders would be the week I was in St. Louis for Bouchercon, and that this would make it very difficult to be the last person, turning off the lights, in a Borders somewhere. This proved to be correct. The only Borders accessible by transit from St. Louis was already closed, the signs already taken down by the landlord. The idea of taking a car service out to the suburbs was a theoretical one, the actual closing time for a store on the last day of business was a moving target. One thing to take the car if you knew you could get there at 8pm and hang around until 9, another when nobody could really say if the store would close at 2pm or 5pm or 8pm.

This still depresses me.

Part of me says it's just as well. It would have been horribly depressing going to a Borders and seeing the closed off sections of the store, the last dregs of the liquidation sale, the people scrounging around the dregs for some final bargain at 90% off. It would have been awful and sad.

But when a loved one dies, by and large you still feel that urge to be at the bedside to give your loved one a proper send-off.

And like a loved one that died after a long illness, the best memories I have of Borders don't date back to the days closest to its death. They date back to the mid and late 1990s, the earliest years of this century. The Borders that was still good enough that I could spend a day in 2002 traipsing by BART and bus and foot to the Borders in San Ramon and the Borders in Pleasanton and the Borders in Fremont and the Borders in Emeryville and feel like that was a really really wonderful way to spend a day and see the world one Borders at a time. By 2011, if I did a day like that it was because that was the kind of thing I did, because it connected me to that day in 2002.

But yes, on balance, I wish I had been at the bedside when the lights went out.

As it was, though I hoped maybe it wouldn't be, I kind of knew that my last visit to a Borders the week before the very very end had all of the depressing aspects of being at the bedside without actually being there. It was a struggle to find in the depleted selection that book that might be the last book I actually purchased for pleasure at a Borders. The one good thing was that it was the closest bookstore to my hometown, at the successor mall to the one that once had a Book & Record store, and later a B. Dalton.

But it sucks, it totally totally sucks.

It's a year now since we knew there'd be no Borders, since it became apparent that the white knight to try and save some semblance of the chain wasn't going to materialize.

And it sucks.

There are two other posts that I could do some day. One is the optimistic one, where I can talk about how recent months are showing how e-books and the internet really can help people find an author in a better and nicer way than the old-fashioned bookstore and the old-fashioned review outlets. Take that, NY Times Book Review! Who needs to worry about all the newspaper book review sections that don't exist any more when we have iO9.

Then there's the depressing post, about the total market failure of indie bookstores that don't care, publishers that don't help them, and which I'm supposed to love because why? and love the publishers because why?

Maybe some day.

The Harvard Square Theatre

There's no doubt that there's a stretch in 1980/81 that was the most formative in forming the film-loving part of my self.

May 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back opened, and we drove down to see it in 70mm on the huge screen of the RKO Stanley Warner Route 4 Paramus Quad.

Around that same time, that I saw The Shining.

December 1980, when I saw Altered States at the Loews Astor Plaza.

The summer of 1981, when I was on my own in Boston for several weeks.

So it's with extreme sadness that I read on Monday in the New York Times that the AMC Loews Harvard Square theatre has shuttered.

According to Cinema Treasures, the theatre opened in 1926 with 1700 seats. Who knows how many seats it had in 1981, and I'm not sure that the balcony was in use at that time, but it was still one massively mammoth theatre with one humongously huge screen, and it showed a different double feature every night. And you could buy a card for ten prepaid admissions for, if memory serves, $18. I got at least one of those.

The strange thing is that I have to confess, I can't really remember all that well what all movies I saw at the Harvard Square in the summer of 1981. I can tell you what first run theatres I went to that summer to see The Great Muppet Caper or Stripes or Escape from New York or For Your Eyes Only. I can tell you that the Orson Welles was running its neverending run of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. There are a gazillion things I can remember about that summer, and running down a list of the 10 or 15 movies I must have seen at the Harvard Square just somehow doesn't make the cut. I know one of them was The Last Waltz, which I didn't care for. I think I saw The Shining again. I'm reasonably sure I took in a showing of 2001, but I wouldn't want to swear to it. But it was one of the first theatres I fell in love with, and one of the places where I fell in love with the movies.

Down the road a piece, the independent Harvard Square theatre was purchased by the local Sack movie chain, which became USA Theatres, which became part of Loews, which eventually got gobbled up by AMC, and the theatre died as the AMC Loews Harvard Square. It got chopped up over the years, the balcony was cut in two, then then downstairs was cut in three. The main entry to the theatre which fronted right on Harvard Square was turned into retail space, and the main entrance was the side door of the old lobby on a side street without any visible sign on Harvard Square that a movie theatre was in the neighborhood. There was little grandeur left, other than for having the grand stairs leading up to the balcony theatres. I ended up seeing only one movie at the theatre after 1981, so it's not like it's that big a difference to me if the theatre is there or not, I probably shouldn't waste a blog post on its demise.

But in the back of my mind, the knowledge that there was a theatre there, that the link to my past was there if I wanted or needed it, that I could look at the film times in the Boston Globe and think on what was, it means something to me.

As well, in the same way that the loss of Borders is a loss in part because of the book-buying deserts it leaves behind, places like downtown Boston or downtown St. Louis that don't have a good bookstore with wide selection, the loss of the Harvard Square is a loss to Harvard University. There's the Brattle Theatre, an arthouse/repertory theatre that still hangs on in Harvard Square. But there's no place to see Amazing Spider Man in Harvard Square. If you're a student at Harvard you've got a long walk ahead or a T ride to go see a movie. And that doesn't seem quite right to me. Who'd want to go to Harvard without the Harvard Square across the street?

reflection

There are a gazillion things I could/should be doing, but as we settle into our new office, our first office office, a little bit of reflection...

When I started JABberwocky almost 18 years ago, the business plan wasn't much. A piece of memo paper where I had determined I'd need around $24-25K in gross commission revenue to break even, that I was sure of having at least $12K the first year, and that I would surely sell another book or two over the next year. It wasn't a get rich quick scheme, that's for sure! As things turned out, I did somewhat better than break even, with total commission revenue in the low 30Ks. What I didn't realize, and I don't even know if I'd have started the agency if I had realized it, was that my revenue wouldn't grow for a long time. It was five years before gross commission revenue moved from the low 30Ks to the mid 30Ks, five years before I finally started to have a smidgen of breathing room.

On the other hand, I don't know if I'd have predicted that once things started to grow they would pretty much keep growing.

That growth -- well, you're in this business, you certainly dream of representing a big bestselling author or two and making a difference for an author, and somehow I've come to do just that! But I'm not proud of that, per se. Rather, I'm proud that I've managed to do it without compromising my idea of how to build and run the business. I didn't want to be an empire builder, I didn't want to accumulate clients or employees for the sake of accumulating them, I didn't want to just be around because there was money to be had. I wanted to be sure that we were working as hard as we could every day to make each client as successful as we could get each client to be.

Oh, there's luck aplenty in all of this, things would be different if Alan Ball hadn't stumbled across Dead Until Dark in a Barnes &; Noble while waiting for a dentist appointment. But it isn't just luck, it's also a lot of hard work to build my capabilities and those of the business, to be a literary agency capable of doing the job for big bestselling authors. In how we approach editors and publishers when the wind is behind our sails, in the kind of IT and infrastructure we have in the office, little ways and big ones. Big authors can open doors, they can also leave for bigger agents, I think we've managed to become bigger agents while still recognizing that we have to work to make authors big, each in their own way. So I'll confess, one of the first days leaving the new office, I got a little teary-eyed at the fact that I'd managed to build a business from a modestly defined business plan on a memo sheet to a much much larger business that now had its own real office with room to have more employees to do more good things for a client list that isn't all that much bigger than it was five or ten years ago

The project hasn't been a solo effort, of course. This is my blog, but the business isn't just me. It's Eddie, it's Jessie, it's our clients.

I don't usually like to do posts like this, it seems immodest, but then again, facts are facts and the past few years have been pretty amazing.

It's also a fact that the growth of the agency got a little bit ahead of me the past six months or so. Last summer, I had actual pleasure reading time, it seemed like I'd finally managed to earn a little leisure for myself, a little time to smell the roses and all. Then we get to the holidays in 2011, and there's no let-up. We get to January 2012, and there's still no let-up.

After I pulled the trigger on an office hunt, I realized as things marched along that we really really needed an office ASAP and that for all the money we'd spend in the office every day we remained in the home office environment was costing us money. This isn't the way to do an office hunt, you want to be the person who's willing to walk, and here, when we had found the size of office we needed in a location we liked we weren't really wanting to say no and have to go for a second choice location or another few weeks or months of looking.

Hence, we need to get settled in the office even as we're still awfully busy, even though we're about as functional now as before the move being 100% where we want will take longer. Why didn't I see this coming, so we could have been looking and set and ready a little bit before instead of a little bit after?

But I think we've got the blueprint for what we need to do. We've identified the additional furniture the larger office requires, and it's coming. We have the server, and we'll get that set up so we have a more scalable more efficient networking set-up with potential for remote access.

Most importantly, the cavalry is scheduled to arrive in a week-and-a-half, as we add another full-time staff member. More to come on that, let's just say it's exhilarating and frightening for me, I'm going to have to delegate some things I hate to delegate, but I think I'll be delegating them to an gifted and talented person who is capable of doing great things for us and for our clients. But there's a lot to catch up on to feel 100% totally back in the zone the way I feel we were just last summer.

[And if you've read this post, you might have an inkling why the blog hasn't been very active in recent months, if all goes well maybe as we get into July and August more blogging time will emerge.]

quick rants

Trying to order something from Ikea, it only tells me after I've entered by billing and delivery addresses and my e-mail that the item I want isn't in stock and can't actually be ordered. Yeah, right.

Adobe Flash Player sends out notices around every two days that they have a new version they need for you to install. All of them do the exact same thing, so you can never tell one update from the rest, it's like groundhog day and you just install Flash Player over and over again every single day. They tell you, no need to restart in order to install the update. But like a mini-Ikea, they only tell you when you're midway through the update "oh, by the way, be sure to close all the programs that might be using Flash." Wouldn't it be better for them to tell you at the start of the process?

I've had a lot of good karma with the NY Times bestseller list, with books that have placed several spots higher than the Nielsen Bookscan ranking of actual recorded sales. And I've said to myself on some of them "gee, I'd hate to be the agent who has to explain to author why their book is showing up six spots lower on the Times list than the actual sales rankings say it should maybe be. Well, all that karma just evened out in spades. The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible by Jack Campbell shows up at #21 on the Bookscan list, with sales 600 to 1000 copies above the number you usually need in a given week to make the extended NY Times bestseller list, which has 35 places. The sales are 500 copies ahead of the #22 book on Bookscan. The sales are 1000+ copies ahead of the #35 book on the Bookscan list. And yet the NY Times can't find a way to place the book at #21, or #31, or anywhere in the top 35. Now, that's just bullshit. There's no way you can place titles on your list and manage to downgrade a #21 bestseller 15 places below 15 books that have sold hundreds of copies less. Let's just say I'll start to take an even more jaundiced view of the NY Times rankings moving forward.

Margin of Error

I thought I'd share with the world an e-mail I sent to the Public Advocate at the NY Times regarding margins of error in polling...

Dear Mr. Brisbane:

I am getting really tired of articles, like ones earlier this week with a paragraphs pasted below my signature block, that consistently mis-represent the meaning of the margin of error in polling. Every single time a poll shows candidates apart, even in the mid to high single digits, the articles imply that the race is tied, within the margin of error. But that's only half true. The margin of error can just as easily go the other way. Scott Walker could be five points either ahead or behind Tom Barrett in Wisconsin. He could have been tied with Kathleen Falk or could actually have had a landslide twelve point lead over Kathleen Falk. In Virginia, President Obama could be in a very close dead heat with Governor Romney because he has a seven point lead in a poll with a four percent margin of error or he could be ahead of Governor Romney by almost fifteen points.

I'm not taking sides to say in any of these cases which way the margin of error wind is actually blowing, what I am saying is that the NY Times is distorting the meaning of the term when it implies in every single instance when it uses a margin of error in polling that the margin will always and only serve only to narrow the gap between two candidates or two sides in an opinion poll and will never extend it. I realize that the approach the Times is taking is the best "cover your ass" approach, there will be a lot more complaints about the inaccuracy of polling if you say someone is up by six points and ends up winning or losing by one point than if they ended up winning by twelve, but it's not the right way to give the public a clear and proper understanding of how to evaluate polling for themselves. And more to the point, it's just not true.

Joshua Bilmes


That advantage, however, was less apparent in a poll conducted last month by Marquette University Law School that showed Mr. Walker and Mr. Barrett essentially tied in a general election matchup. Mr. Walker led Ms. Falk 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, a six-point advantage that is within the poll’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points on each candidate.


---------------------


Barack Obama won Virginia four years ago, the first time a Democrat had won the state in more than 40 years. This year, it looks like Mr. Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, may have a competitive contest for the state’s 13 electoral votes.

Mr. Obama is backed by 51 percent of voters surveyed by The Washington Post from Saturday to Wednesday, and Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is the choice of 44 percent. Mr. Obama’s seven percentage-point advantage is within the poll’s four percentage-point margin of sampling error for each candidate.

Agency E-books, the Harper statement

I hope to blog a bit more extensively about the anti-trust case on e-book pricing.

In the meantime, here is a vapid press release that just arrived from HarperCollins.

It can be summed up as "our behavior was wonderful and delightful for everyone, so we decided to settle instead of defending it."

Erin Crum Vice President, Corporate Communications HarperCollins Publishers (212) 207-7223 Erin.Crum@harpercollins.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE HarperCollins Publishers Settles e-Book Pricing Dispute with the Department of Justice
New York, NY (April 11, 2012) — HarperCollins Publishers today announced that it has reached an agreement with the United States Department of Justice to end its investigation into HarperCollins’ contracts for the distribution of e-books. HarperCollins did not violate any anti- trust laws and will comply with its obligations under the agreement. HarperCollins’ business terms and policies have been, and continue to be, designed to give readers the greatest choice of formats, features, value, platforms and partners – for both print and digital.
After HarperCollins adopted the agency model in 2010, the e-book market exploded, giving consumers more choices of devices, formats and prices that would never have existed but for the agency model. Some examples include:
 The iBookstore, which offers iTunes customers a storefront to buy HarperCollins’ books  The launch of Barnes & Noble's NOOK Book Store, which grew faster than any other
platform for HarperCollins’ titles over the last two years
 Prices for dedicated e-readers declined from almost $400 to under $100, and competition exploded in the device market, making the e-book reading experience less expensive
 Dynamic pricing of HarperCollins’ e-books, including some titles priced under $2, was introduced to maximize the sales and reach of our authors and their books
 The introduction of color tablets with native e-book stores led by Apple and Barnes & Noble, which are now the fastest selling devices for e-book consumers
 The introduction and rapid development of enhanced e-books with audio, video and interactivity, which are a fast-growing digital format for HarperCollins
Contact:
News
HarperCollins faced legal challenges on five separate fronts, including the DOJ investigation which was resolved today. The e-book market has grown over the last two years from a small e- ink market, dominated by one platform, to a $1B market with several competing platforms. HarperCollins made a business decision to settle the DOJ investigation in order to end a potentially protracted legal battle.

Goon

I just had to do a quick write-up on the movie Goon.

It's based on the biographical Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into Minor League Hockey,” by Doug Smith and Adam Frattasio. It opened on a couple screens in NYC this weekend. I took note of it after it got a kind review in this week's Village Voice, followed by another in Friday's New York Times.

It's better and worse than Slap Shot, which is pretty good praise. Slap Shot had a star turn from Paul Newman but otherwise not much else going on in the cast. Goon has Liev Schreiber in a supporting role, stars Seann William Scott from the American Pie movies and others, it just has a little more going on when you take your eye off the brightest light. It's more violent than Slap Shot but not as profane.

Considering that I don't think fighting is integral to the game of hockey, I should look down on the film, but it does just enough to show that the violence is in fact violence and fills its moments with just enough charm and offbeat wit that it's hard to resist.

Example: the big turning point in the relationship between the enforcer and the player who's still trying to recover from a big hit comes when the enforcer starts referencing ET, "the light in my chest needs the light in your chest." If you can't appreciate the wit of that line in the context of a movie about a hockey enforcer, don't look for this on video. If you can, please, yes, do.

And the movie's low budget, they could probably have spent a little more time and money in the ADR/dubbing booth. But I'd swear that there's a place when a character who's crying is asked "did you just see Rudy," which again is just the strangest and most delightfully off little piece of dialogue to hide away in a film.

I have a feeling this won't be playing at a theatre near you, you'll need to keep an eye out for a video release of some sort, and can self-identify if you should.

I saw this on the biggest screen at the City Cinemas Village East, which is in an old live stage theatre known primarily as a one time Yiddush stage house. A lot of the detailing is still intact, I smile just being in the auditorium, which doesn't happen very often. Paid full price to see it on this screen instead of using a Gold Experience ticket at the AMC Empire.

Finally, I feel like I'm living a movie. Both Friday and Saturday walking around Manhattan I heard ladies having a serious shouting match with a boyfriend (I think) on their cell phones, and then on the subway ride home from this movie there was somebody on the train with a sign board with a grudge against hindus that he had to share. In a movie, these things would be a quick montage warning us of some apocalyptic kind of something. Don't say you weren't warned.