This morning I received a link to Sourcebooks' online catalogs for Fall 2008.  This is huge, people.  Publishers spend beaucoup bucks designing, printing and distributing catalogs of their upcoming book offerings to buyers, librarians, booksellers, agents, authors and other publishing professionals.  Big dollars.  But Sourcebooks, ever the pioneer, is the first I know of who has decided to save money AND the environment by making their catalogs paperless.  HOORAY!  I for one am tired of the paper clutter of all those huge tomes.  Yes, I need the information.  No, I do not appreciate the format.  I cringe every season when I have to dump all those hefty catalogs into the recycling bin.

At the upcoming RWA conference, convention management asked the attendees well in advance if they'd be willing to download the speaker handouts instead of picking up hardcopies at each workshop.  Those savvy, eco-conscious romance writers said, "you betcha."  Since this is a member-funded organization, the members realized that the less spent on printing handouts, the more available for promotion and other more valuable services.  Way to go!

Believe me, the rest of the industry is going to be watching these projects for either praise or condemnation.  I say, let's go there.  There's plenty of room at the table for paper books, catalogs and handouts as well as their ebook, .pdf and podcast siblings.

It's been a busy summer.  Sold an option for Vampire High to turn it into a musical (with Chris Columbus directing no less) and am working on a television option for one of my other clients (can't tell you who yet or I might jinx the deal!)  Also, many of you will be thrilled to know that three more Jaz Parks urban fantasies have been purchased by Orbit.  So Jaz will be in operation for at least another two years!  And I secured a new two-book deal for Jill Sorenson's romantic suspense novels with Bantam/Dell.

And the hits just keep rollin'.  Tomorrow I'll be at the Book Passage Children's Book Conference in Corte Madera, California and all next week I'll be at, drum roll please, the annual Romance Writers of America national conference in San Francisco.  If you're near either of these places, stop by and say hi.  You can learn more about these two wildly different events here Book Passage and here RWA.

If you're waiting for me to read your latest submission, please give me an extra week.  My peepers are tired!

A powerful image...

Saving books from rising floodwaters became a labor of love, speed, and efficiency for bibliophiles last week. The Des Moines Register reported that there was a "snaking line going up the steps of the Main Library at the University of Iowa on the banks of the flooding Iowa River. Hand over hand; all man's ideas were handed. Philosophy and theatre, science and religion. Books rising from the basement to a higher level."

Librarians had been moving manuscripts and theses out of the basement all week, but they asked for help when it became clear that the river was going to rise higher than anticipated.

"All of the sudden, 'whoosh' all these people showed up," said Nancy Baker, university librarian. "This is where it shows up for people, library books. They are very powerful for people. Many things can be replaced but not some of these books."

from Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2008:

DailyLit, which publishes books in serialized digital format and then e-mails them to customers, is launching a reading group on the social networking site, Twitter. Through the effort DailyLit will release three titles--Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Tom Peters' 100 Ways to Succeed/Make Money and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice--in free downloadable snippets starting on June 16. Twitter users, who communicate about daily activities and other odds and ends with friends (a la Facebook or MySpace), can sign up to receive the installments through alerts, or "tweets," sent to them on instant messenger or on their cell phones. The installments will be sent out to all members of the groups at the same time, so readers can discuss the works, in real time, on Twitter forums. "We're interested in exploring new ways to make books more accessible to readers, and sending book installments via Twitter is an innovative way to do just that," said DailyLit CEO Susan Danziger. 

I love this idea.  Sign me up!

Here's an interesting stat-filled tidbit from the June 12th Publishers Weekly:

April Bookstore Sales Show Unexpected Strength

Although booksellers and publishers alike said April was a very slow month, preliminary bookstore sales from the U.S. Census Bureau show a healthy month. According to the figures, bookstore sales jumped 8.0% in April, to $1.0 billion, while sales for the entire retail segment increased 3.6%. The Census Bureau did revise downward its estimates for March, to $1.02 million, putting sales in that month equal to sales in March 2007. For the first four months of the year, bookstore sales were up 5.4%, to $5.45 billion, while sales for all of retail rose 3.9%.

Does this mean that one side-effect of high gasoline and food prices is people have embraced books as economical home-based entertainment?  I sure hope so.

Published New Zealand fantasy author (and my client) Philippa "Pip" Ballantine was the Guest of Honor at Conclave, the National Science Fiction Convention of New Zealand. I thought it might be fun for my blog readers to hear what she had to say about her down-under experience. Here's her report:

"I got to share the dais with one of my literary heroes, Elizabeth Moon, who had flown in from Texas to be the headline International Guest. Also the fabulous team of Doctor Who writers, Jon Blum and Kate Orman, came over from Australia.

"I gave my speech about being a writer and podcaster based in the southern hemisphere. There was a good balance of questions on writing and podcasting, and I made sure to let people know that my novel Chasing the Bard was about to be released as a podiobook (www.chasingthebard.com)

(LM Note: the sequel to Chasing the Bard, Digital Magic, will be out later this year from DragonMoon Press)

"I had a panel where we read page 119 of a novel and tried to identify it and decide if it was good. Very fun. Then I participated in a panel on writing female characters, which turned into a lively discussion that Ms. Moon made sure was not centered around her--though we could have listened to her opinions for hours.  She made sure we other authors got equal time.  It was the kind of discussion that you wished could continue forever.

"My slice-of-reality podcast Whispers at the Edge was up for the Sir Julius Vogel best fan writing, and though it didn't win it was great to see more entries for all the SJVs. As always I came away learning more than I expected and riding a wave of good feelings toward both fans and my own writing."

Thanks for sharing, Pip.  If anyone hasn't attended a fantasy or gaming convention here in the U.S., you should. They are a ton of fun and an intense way for writers to meet their current or future fan base. And if you don't know what podcasting is, a lot of writers are beginning to record their own subscription-based chapter-by-chapter podcasts. I'm definitely keeping up on this trend.

Two things happened this morning to prompt this blog entry. First, all the emails I sent to hotmail accounts yesterday were returned as delivery failures with the same message: The mail server IP connecting to Windows Live Hotmail server has exceeded the rate limit allowed on this connection. Now I sent these emails at various points throughout the day, so I think Microsoft's Hotmail division was just having a gruesome day. Also, I received a tirade from a hotmail patron who was livid because I had not replied to his query from two weeks ago. I love emailed submissions because with one mouse click I can sort by email address and find an answer, rather than bemoan the fact that I recycle all paper submissions once I've made a decision and can no longer know for certain if that reply letter went out or not. Sure enough, I had two emails regarding this writer--one was his submission, the second was a "delivery failure" message from the hotmail uber-server. Thus this blog entry.

There are many reasons you might not get a reply from an agent. Sure, there are some agents who just don't reply unless they want to see more of something. But they are few and far between. Most agents spend an inordinate amount of time reading and considering every single submission they receive. I know I do. I spend hours a day doing this activity hoping to find a diamond in the rough. Usually I do this at night or very early in the morning. What used to be personal time. But I have too much client work to do during the day to perform what we agents call "new client acquisition" research between 9 and 5. Perhaps the post office lost the rejection letter. It HAS happened. Or an email reply landed in your spam folder. You know. The one you never check but just hit "empty" without reading?

I don't want to belabor a point, especially since the flame emails I get are rare. I merely want to remind everyone to take a deep breath before you berate an agent on Absolute Write Water Cooler. Or send that hate email that gets read in front of hundreds at that agent's next query letter panel. We're all on this space ship together. And you know what happens when you assume...

My client, Linda Wisdom's, March-release paranormal romance, 50 Ways to Hex Your Lover, was reviewed in the January 14th issue of Publisher's Weekly.  A book review in Publisher's Weekly is akin to catching the brass ring on the merry-go-round, and a positive one is golden!  I offer the review here as an homage to a lot of hard work paying off.  Great job, Linda!

50 Ways to Hex Your Lover
Linda Wisdom. Sourcebooks/Casablanca, $6.99 (378p) ISBN 978-1-4022-1085-3

When she isn't getting into trouble with her oddball companions—a vicious pair of bunny slippers and a frustrated ghost who haunts her sports car—hot-tempered witch Jazz Tremaine earns money lifting hexes and driving limos for Southern California's All Creatures Limo Service. When the vampire cop she's loved and hated for centuries, Nikolai Gregorivich, seeks her help in catching a serial vampire slayer, Jazz fends him off to focus on her own problems (the sleazeball limo service owner; a client who generates supernaturally disgusting odors). She can't resist her sexy vamp lover for long, though, especially as clues in the killings point to an evil figure from her past. With clever writing, a high sensuality factor and an unfettered imagination, Wisdom makes a sparkling entry into lite urban paranormals. (Mar.)

Many genre fiction and children's books lend themselves splendidly to film adaptation, so I love to read about the deals behind book-to-film deals. It may have taken him a long, long time, but Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy has finally been made into a movie so he is reaping the rewards of his cut of the huge production budget as well as a big bump in book sales. This article in Publisher's Weekly was so great, it is offered here to my blog readers. Enjoy!

Long-Awaited ‘Compass’ Lands in Theaters

By Diane Roback, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 12/13/2007

After much anticipation and media attention, the big-screen version of The Golden Compass finally had its domestic premiere this past Friday, bringing in $26.1 million during its opening weekend. Variety called it “a soft debut” considering the film’s $180 million production budget. Though Golden Compass finished the weekend as the #1 movie in the country, the tally was a bit of a disappointment for New Line Cinema, which had reportedly had been hoping for box office receipts of between $30 and 40 million.

Reviews of the movie ranged from mixed to positive, with high marks given to the performances, the action sequences and the special effects. (The Boston Globe’s review notes, “The movie bats you about in good and bad ways, breaking free occasionally into the spectral awe we go to movies for, then screeching to a halt to download more exposition,” and the New York Times review concludes that the movie is “hampered by its fealty to the book and its madly rushed pace, which forces you to dash through the story like Lord Asriel.”) Author Philip Pullman’s storyline has come under fire in recent weeks for being anti-Christian, though that aspect was toned down to the point of near-invisibility for the film adaptation; nonetheless the movie saw fierce pre-release attack from some religious circles. The Catholic League and Focus on the Family urged parents to boycott the film and ban Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, efforts that garnered much national publicity (a typical headline: “Some fear ‘Compass’ points to atheism,” from California’s Ventura County Star).

So did the brouhaha have an effect? In USA Today, Rolf Mittweg of New Line conceded that it might have, though he noted the film’s $55 million worldwide gross to date, and told Variety they were hoping for “good word of mouth and slow build” for the holiday season Stateside.

Gregg Kilday, film editor of the Hollywood Reporter, told USA Today that church opposition “can’t be discounted” as a factor in the box office take, but added, “To claim it’s a victim of religious controversy, there’s no real evidence of that, at least not at this point.” Other potential reasons for the movie’s lack of blockbuster status include a possible audience overload on fantasy movies, the fact that Compass’s lead character is a girl (a possible turnoff for teen and tween boys), and competition from the hit movie Enchanted, which likely cornered some of the young female audience.

Compass’s underwhelming initial gross does call into question whether the trilogy’s two sequels, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, which have not yet been greenlighted, will get made. But as Mittweg told USA Today, that possibility hasn’t been ruled out. “There are always plans to do sequels,” he said. “We just have to figure out how to do them.”

The news was much brighter on the publishing front, however. Judith Haut, senior v-p, communications and marketing at Random House Children’s Books, reported that sales for Pullman’s books had jumped 64% for the week ending December 8, sales of the His Dark Materials omnibus edition jumped 79%, and overall Pullman sales are more than 500% ahead of 2006. And The Golden Compass is currently the top audiobook on iTunes.

From Halloween to November 15th I'll be exploring all things Celtic in Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland. Part of this is research for my own writing. Part of it is agent-related meetings with editors and other agents. Email is going to be spotty as I attempt to navigate the choppy waters of global communication via Internet pubs, hotel wi-fi and the like. So, bear with me if you need a quick answer to some burning question the first two weeks in November. I'll try to post to my blog if anything pops up along the way. But don't hold me to it! While I'm gone, I expect you all to do some serious writing.