Between Riverside and Crazy

I saw the last preview before tonight's opening of Between Riverside and Crazy, a new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, a highly regarded playwright whose The Motherf**ker with the Hat was nominated for six Tony Awards.  I'd seen that play, somewhat flawed by tremendously well acted, at the Studio Theater in DC last year.

What should I say about Between Riverside and Crazy?

Bedecked with references to Game of Thrones and Whole Foods, it's a play very much of its time and moment.  It has some tremendous scenes in it.  It has lots and lots of laugh lines, and the audience was clearly having a very good time. I expect it will be popular and get some good reviews.

But honestly, it's not a very good play.

It takes around 40 minutes of a play that's around 2:10 with intermission to get to its point, to the extent that it has one.

The lead character, name of Walter "Pops" Washington, is a former NYPD officer, who was shot six times by a white rookie officer eight years ago, and has a lawsuit going against the city.  There's pressure coming down on behalf of the powers that be from his one-time partner and her fiancee for him to agree to a settlement, because it's not looking good for his case after eight years.  The public has turned its attention elsewhere.  He's suffering since his wife died, having trouble paying the rent on his apartment, his son is off-and-on, more on, with criminal troubles with the police.  So after around 40 minutes of engagingly written, lively, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, but ultimately going nowhere scenes, we finally get to this confrontation.  Which is great.

Then the curtain comes down on Act One with a cliffhanger.  Which resolves like most cliffhangers.  And Act Two has four or five scenes that just don't go anywhere, like most of the first act.

Part of the problem is that we don't care about the characters.  "Pops" is an alcoholic.  If he isn't soaking in his drink, he's stewing in his bitterness.  Stephen McKinley Henderson does a great job playing the part, but the part goes nowhere.  We see a man who's less pleasant to be around than he thinks, with less going on upstairs than he thinks.  His "adversaries," Elizabeth Canavan as his one-time partner and Michael Rispoli as Lieutenant Caro, get as much as they can out of their roles, which are probably more fully realized in the script than anyone else's and then boosted a little beyond by the performances, but I didn't want to hang around with any of the people hanging around in Pops' apartment, and even accounting for the fact that some of them are family, they're the family I don't think I'd want to see other than at Thanksgiving.

I hate to come down hard on a play that has some lively writing and lots of good laugh lines, but I generally prefer plays that don't have me wishing for more brightly lit scenes to provide more reflected light in the auditorium to allow me to do more of my crossword from my seat in Row C.

Battle of the Ebook Superstars

Haven't done a blog post in way too long…

On the subject of Hachette vs. Amazon of which too much has been written, let me make a few points:

When Amazon says that e-book sales will grow if only they are priced cheaper, I consider this to be bullshit.

John Scalzi is much more polite.  He disagrees by saying that he thinks it might well be a true statement for Amazon, but that it might not be true for everyone else, or for the broad publishing ecosystem in general, but that he has no reason to think Amazon is making up the numbers for Amazon.

I don't feel like being that polite.

Amazon's argument is essentially an updated variation of the famous "Laffer Curve" which Ronald Reagan used to justify the argument that lower taxes meant higher revenues.  Which if it is true at all is true only at certain high extremes of tax rates, because after a point you just can't keep getting more by charging less, whether it's e-books or government or chewing gum.   It also isn't accurate to say that you always get more by pricing something more expensively.  I don't believe e-books should all cost $29.99.  In pretty much any market, there is only so much demand to go around.  The number of readers is finite.  The number of books they have time to read is finite.  The budget they have for buying books is finite.  At the margins, you can occasionally pick up an added sale or get a little more money spent on books than on something else, but not forever or indefinitely.  As an example of this, look at all of the added casinos that have been built in the US with the argument that we'll keep the casino dollars here and people will spend more at casinos.  Nope; not forever.  Casinos are starting to close.  Tax revenues are starting to fall short.  You can't keep getting enough more revenue to support endless casinos by building more casinos, and you can't keep getting more e-book money by cutting e-book prices.

Here's a question which I'm asking Amazon right now, and can't wait for the answer:  What do their studies show about dropping prices from $14.99 to $12.99?  Or $12.99 to $10.99?  What is the exact magic that all e-books which are $14.99 should be $9.99?  Very few e-books by our clients have ever carried a $14.99 price tag, actually.

The marketplace should determine what the right price is for any given e-book based on lots of people competing to sell goods through lots of different places.  It shouldn't be set at $9.99 because Jeff Bezos has a divine revelation when the Kindle was launched that the price should be $9.99.

While I disagree with Amazon on certain things, I also admire them on others.

Their battle with Hachette has been waged much more skillfully and artfully than a few years ago when they were battling with Macmillan.  The Macmillan fight with the buy buttons removed was very aggressive and in-your-face and visible.  WIth Hachette, they've done all sorts of things to make it difficult to buy Hachette books, but they've never actually stopped anyone from buying them.  Yeah, you can't preorder them.  And no, you can't get them tomorrow.  But you can get them.  A good tactician learns from the battles of the past, and Amazon has learned its lessons well.

HarperCollins isn't my favorite publisher to deal with.  They are much more set in their territorial ways than other publishers.  But I am quite pleased to see that they now have a website that sells e-books direct to customers.  Publishers need to have that tool in reserve in order to strengthen their position when negotiating terms with Amazon, B&N, and their other big customers.

Here's my takeaway:  A healthy marketplace should determine e-book prices and compensation, and we don't have a healthy marketplace in e-books.  And both Hachette and Amazon are part of that unhealthy marketplace.  Amazon has too big a share of e-book sales, and the self-published authors who instinctively side with Amazon don't realize that this will not end well for them.  But Hachette is in a highly concentrated industry like the airline industry is, where all the big players tend ultimately to be very much alike, doing as little to compete as they can get away with.  Just like one airline seats by rows and another windows in, one publisher pays an export royalty based on a smaller percentage of cover price and another based on a higher percentage of net receipts.  Especially since not every publisher wants every book, we don't often have much choice on where we sell books to, just like we have little choice on how to sell an e-book if we don't sell it through Amazon.  It's not a healthy market, neither Hachette nor Amazon are 100% saint or 100% sinner, and however their battle plays out it still won't be a healthy market.  But there is one thing that we at JABberwocky have in common with Hachette and not with Amazon.  We are a "single play" company.  We make money by having people buy books, and only by having people buy books.  Not by selling them memberships.  Not by selling toasters.  Not by selling cloud computing services.  Hachette has more of an interest in having a healthy overall marketplace for books, while Amazon can survive very nicely without a prospering book industry, which is a much bigger thing than selling books through the Kindle store.

Balticon Schedule

I have a nice schedule at Balticon this year, with seven panels, all looking interesting, and I hope I'll have a chance to meet some of you this year.  And if you don't see me at a panel -- hey, I'll be around the bar or the dealers room or looking for a game of something in the games room.

Balticon 48 is a four-day extravaganza that takes place from Friday May 23, 2014 thru Monday May 26, 2014 at the Hunt Valley Inn, in Hunt Valley, MD.  Of the long-time conventions in the Northeast, I think it's done the best job of integrating games, anime, podcasting, and all sorts of other things of interest to the newer generations of sf fandom with the classic elements of regional sf conventions as they came together in the years after World War II.  I always have a blast, and this looks like one of the best personal schedules I've had at the convention.  Though they do seem to have a lot of the publishing panels in the early hours.

All times are Eastern, and all room assignments are at the Hunt Valley Inn:

1700 Saturday May 24:  In the Hot Seat (Panel) (Participant), Sat 17:00 - 17:50, Belmont Room

1800 Saturday May 24: Forgotten Works in Sci-Fi / Forgotten Works in Fantasy (Panel) (Participant), Derby Room

0800 Sunday May 25: Finding an agent (Panel) (Participant), Derby Room

0900 Sunday May 25: Editors Q&A (Panel) (Participant), Salon B (lower level)

1000 Sunday May 25: How NOT to Break into print- The Bad Advice panel (Panel) (Participant), Salon A (lower level)

1100 Sunday May 25: Dealing with Problematic Authors (Panel) (Participant), Derby Room

0800 Monday May 26: Long-term Career Planning for Creatives: Surviving the Next 10 Revolutions (Panel) (Participant), Chase Room

Several other JABberwocky clients will be attending Balticon this year.

Brandon Sanderson is the Author Guest of Honor.

Myke Cole is the winner of last year's Compton Crook Award, given at Balticon.

Jon Sprunk celebrates the launch of Blood & Iron.

Joshua Palmatier celebrates the launch of Zombies Eat Brains, ahead of the fall publication of his new novel Shattering the Ley.

Peter V. Brett may not be on the programming, but will be around the con.

Our friends at Graphic Audio will be around for Brandon Sanderson's signing on Saturday, so you can sample their dramatic abridged audio editions of his work.

The Devane and I

Watching the premiere of 24: Live Another Day earlier in the week gets me to thinking where it is that I have heard the name of William Devane before...

Once Upon a Time, 24 years ago strangely enough, in September 1990, a client of mine named Barbara Paul called to say that there was a TV movie on NBC by the name of Murder COD being previewed in TV Guide that sounded a lot like her book Kill Fee.

The TV movie and a perfectly respectable cast.  Patrick Duffy, still on Dallas, starred as a police detective, and one William Devane was the bad guy.  Devane was on Knots Landing.

And if it sounded a lot like Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee -- well, that's because it was.

The book had been under option for a while.  The option had, if memory serves, expired on September 10, which was now a few days in the past.  The producers of the TV movie had not quite forgotten to pay the purchase price for the TV movie, which they should have done months before when the started filming the movie.  And now, the check really was in the mail.

I don't know how it would have played out if they had sent their late check even a coupe of weeks or a month sooner, when the check would have been late but at least within the option period.  Had it come in before we knew the movie and actually been shot and delivered we almost certainly would have cashed it and then been a little perturbed to find put two weeks later that they had screwed us a bit.

But here, the option had expired, the producers had no rights to the movie, and they were planning to show it on NBC in a few days.  So of course the check was returned.

We ended up getting a few dollars more.  Not a lot, I wonder if we could have held out longer and gotten more, but as little as it was it represented a 60% increase in what they needed to have paid had they done so just that wee bit sooner.

So this is my William Devane story that had absolutely nothing to do with William Devane.

You can give a listen to the Audible audio edition of Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee.

Noah

Not sure I would have seen Noah otherwise, but there was a preview screening at the Museum of the Moving Image.

It's an interesting movie, in a better way than when your spouse is saying your banana bread is interesting, but I'm still not sure it's actually a good movie.

But interesting.

The first interesting thing is the complete lack of sugar coating.  We can spend so much time with bible stories growing up, the idealized kinds of stories suitable for children of all ages, that we can forget that most of the people in those stories are kind of crazy.  Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Noah certainly.  And the director Darren Aronofsky doesn't let us forget that about Noah.  Nor does the portrayal by Russell Crowe.  There isn't a thing about the movie that lets us forget that you have to be a certain kind of crazy to build an ark because God tells you to, and to do most of the things that Noah goes around doing in the classic bible story of Noah.  It's an interesting choice, and I respect it.  I'm so tired of heroes in cinema that I was kind of delighted here when Noah forces his son Ham to abandon his girlfriend, who doesn't fare well in the immediate aftermath.  Not what we're supposed to do, not what we're used to seeing, not what we like to think of when we think of God and doing God's work and being Godly.  But it's actually true to the nature of the Old Testament, where bad things happen to people.

It's interesting to see the use of classic elements of sf/fantasy to provide the presence of God in the movie.  You need the hand of God to make the story of Noah work.  To make it rain for those 40 days. To get Noah to build the ark.  To keep the ark from being attacked and destroyed by the saner people in Noah's universe.  So if you've got to have a supernatural entity casting its gaze and spirit over the movie, why not have it be a cross between Tolkien/Peter Jackson's ents and Brandon Sanderson's koloss.

The movie has a bad guy, and the bad guy isn't the strength of the movie in cinematic story terms.  But in the bibliical sense, the character makes for some itneresting parallels with the story of Adam and Eve, providing temptation which mankind has to either embrace or resist.  The decision on what to do in Noah is much more interesting than asking what card you have in your wallet.

I dozed off only briefly, and I could easily have gotten sleepy-eyed for a lot more of the movie than this.  It's an interesting movie.  I'm hesitant to give it a recommendation, but I wouldn't warn anyone against.

the royalty jar

Over the course of these royalty season posts, I have spoken a lot about the reserve against returns, and this entire post will deal with this.

The idea of the reserve is rooted in reality.  The books the publisher sends out can be returned for full credit by booksellers.  The publisher has to ave some protection against paying royalties on copies that might be returned.

But the reality of the reserve is that it is the publisher's cookie jar, a source of abuse, and like many things in the publishing industry a relic of a past age that doesn't want to come kicking and screaming into modernity.

Once upon a time, the fate of a book really was a mystery.  It isn't any more. With Bookscan and other direct ties between major retail accounts and major publishers, the big publishers know the fate of a book.  Maybe not by June 30 for a book that came out in May, and I can understand a bit if the reserve against returns on that first royalty report is high.  Yet, I will occasionally see publishers taking such large reserves that they pay royalties for fewer copies than Bookscan reports as sold through the end of the royalty period -- and way fewer than we know are sold by the time I am getting the royalty statement.  In those instances, on general principle, I complain to the publisher even about very small numbers of copies.  Paying my client a royalty for 2536 copies when we know the book sold 2682 -- that's not a reasonable reserve against returns.

I mentioned how DAW used to hand-write "too early to tell" for the rest report on every royalty statement.  Now, their default is to take a 100% reserve on print sales on the first royalty report, whether a book has been on sale for  six weeks or six months.  This used to matter less because the books would often not earn royalties on the very first statement even if the reserve was closer to 50% it becomes more likely that the client could get a small royalty check even from known activity on a short period of time.

25 years ago, retail distribution for books was hugely inefficient.  It could take months for information to flow from the corner drugstore to a small independent distributor to the publisher's warehouse.  Shipping fully returnable books into distribution channels that ranged from highly inefficient to somewhat inefficient with long lag time on information reporting -- you could understand why reserves had to be high in the early going.  Now, Amazon has a low return rate, and channels with higher returns like Costco and Walmart have pretty good IT and can provide Point of Sale information on copies sold to publishers very quickly.  But reserves are often still held as if average return rates are still what they were 40 years ago.

The purpose of a reserve against returns was to keep the publisher from being on the hook for paid royalties on copies subsequently returned.  But even though the typical novel is now published in multiple formats, including audio and ebook formats sold as digital downloads with few returns, reserves are held on each print edition as if the others don't exist. If you know a book is being published hard-soft, can't the reserve on the hardcover be moderated in anticipation of paperback royalties?  Many of our authors now sell over half their copies in ebook, so why take a print reserve at all when there will always be ebook royalties to make up the difference?

I don't expect publishers to do away with reserves entirely, but I sure think they should be held with a lighter touch in 2015 than in 1985.

We try in current contracts to specify that reserves not be held on digital products or after the first few royalty periods, or at least be justified upon request. But I feel like we need to get more aggressive in evaluating reserves held with a broader perspective with regard to the range of editions published.

But book by book, do you or your agent look at all your reserves against returns every period?  Do you check them against Bookscan?  Do you check the size of the reserve against actual returns? Do you peek inside the publisher's cookie jar to see if there are cookies?  In many instances, even if the reserve is reduced you may still have a negative royalty balance or be due so little money is isn't worth the fuss to complain rather than waiting for the reserve to be reduced on the next report. But sometimes you can get decent money in your hands months earlier if you just take the time to look in the cookie jar.

Spread 'Em Wide

One of the reasons I have spoken a lot this week about royalties:  well, information is the mother's milk of literary representation, and along with the quality of the book itself, the three most important pieces of information we can use to sell an author are (1) the author's bibliography and biography (2) reviews (3) sales history.  Furthermore, if you want to gauge how much the market might pay for an established author you have to have a handle on actual expenses for printing books vs. actual revenue from selling them rather than royalties paid. And how do we figure out what an author's sales history is or how much revenue and expense the publisher has in printing and selling books, in both print and electronic forms?  Well, we gather that information from royalty statements.

And I learned early in my career at Scott Meredith that sales information isn't well kept by stacking piles of paper in a filing cabinet.  Those Penguin statements I was telling you about, that told you only the quantity of books "sold" in any given six month period -- well, back then we had many Ellery Queen books available in Penguin doubles, and if someone wanted to figure out how many Ellery Queen novels were sold, it meant collecting years with if little sheets of paper and manually adding up columns and columns of figures.

Suffice to say when I finally had a computer at my desk in the early 1990s, things changed.  I could at least put the figures into a word processing document so they could be added without having to retrieve little pieces of paper from the filing cabinet.  Eventually that gave way to tables within the word processing program, and eventually to tables in a spreadsheet.

And for a variety of reasons, not just out of habit, we continue today to process every incoming royalty statement on to our computers, just like I started to do over 20 years ago when I first had a computer on my desk.

Some of those reasons:

Publishers make mistakes.  It doesn't hurt to check their math, and spreadsheets enable us to do this.  Assuming, of course, that we set up the spreadsheets correctly.  There is this tendency to trust that the computer generated very official looki royalty statements the publishers provide always have the correct royalty rates.

As discussed in my previous post on current royalty statements, most are still seriously lacking in cumulative information on copies shipped and copies returned, and it's still very 1989 in needing to track that information someplace other than on piles of paper hiding in a file drawer for years or decades.

A spreadsheet will take the information I enter for Dead Until Dark and Living Dead in Dallas and start to turn that into a series total for the Sookie Stackhouse novels and an overall total for Charlaine Harris, and this information can then be used in our marketing of translation rights and film rights, or be of use when the Wall Street Journal calls to do a major profile on the author.

In that sense, I get a lot more out of what I put in than when I started to do this over twenty years ago.  Spreadsheet, and the world if ours!

All that said, there are times when I and my employees who now have to do a lot of the actual spreadsheeting work probably wonder why we bother.

Each publisher's royalty statements are different, and the royalty scenarios can be different within a publisher for mass markets, trade paperbacks, hardcovers, audios and e-books, so we have to have lots of different spreadsheet formats.

The benefits are invisible.  The company that is doing the Mistborn video game needs to go to its bankers and needs information on Mistborn copies sold for Brandon Sanderson, or the screenwriter with an option on Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population needs some information to present to producers with her screenplay, or we want to rough out a profit & loss statement to try and guess how much money DAW books can pay for the new Jim Hines, and we can do those things quickly and easily because we have impeccable spreadsheets.  But it is very easy to separate out those benefits from the time, heavily concentrated during the twelve weeks of royalty season, when it seems like we do nothing all day but spreadsheet royalty reports.

We can't predict.  It's our policy to do spreadsheeting for every piece of paper for everyone, because we don't know when Alan Ball will stumble across a novel in a B&N while waiting for a dentist appointment and be inspired to produce True Blood.  For more of our authors than not, the effort we do in spreadsheeting is ultimately futile. In that sense, even I must confess that I can't be sure that we wouldn't be better off doing time-consuming forensics to produce information when it's actually needed, rather than to have so much up-front investment to have good information for all of our clients.

It's just another variety of gibberish.  We can read our spreadsheets very well because we put them together.  For the many publishers that don't provide cumulative information on copies shipped and returned we like being able to give clients our spreadsheets as opposed to the underlying publisher reports.  But the fact is that our spreadsheets can still use some tutorials for people who don't know their way around Excel.

High maintenance.  The information doesn't flow up-hill on its own, so every time a publisher comes out with a new edition of a book we have to set up a new table and then plug the information from that table into at least one location in a summary table.  Dead Until Dark has had an e-book, a mass market with many different prices attached, a True Blood tie-in mass market, a hardcover, a trade paperback, another trade paperback, etc.  Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn a hardcover, a paperback, a promotional paperback, a YA trade paperback, an e-book, an audio.

But all that said, I like that we are able to get all this information to flow uphill to a nice single sheet of paper that gives the actual global sales totals for Brandon Sanderson or Peter V. Brett or Elizabeth Moon or Simon R. Green, based on actual publisher royalty reports, and that we can send that out to anyone who asks whenever they want it.  I doubt we'll stop spreadsheeting any time soon, certainly not for as long as the royalty statements we get are as generally unhelpful as they often still can be.