Is This What They Call Southern Food?

In the month of October, I've been in grocery stores far away from home several times -- once each in a Publix, a Winn-Dixie, and (just tonight) a Piggly Wiggly.

Is there some particular reason why two out of the three of those have severely odd names? Up North, I'm used to supermarkets being named things like Stop & Shop, or ShopRite, or something daring and flashy like Foodtown. But simple and declarative just doesn't work Down South, I guess...

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/15

Those of us who review books are cursed by our mail carriers: we're always getting packages, sometimes a giant pile in one day, and sometimes a constant trickle. I'm no different -- oh, I don't know for sure that my mailman hates me, but I certainly suspect it. And none of us ever get to review everything; there's just not enough hours in the day, or willpower to force us to look at some of the things we see.

But I always want to list and note books as I see them -- both because I'm an inveterate list-maker, and because every book has a reader -- so I post something like this every week. It's Monday morning, so here's what showed up on my doorstep last week:

I finally figured out how to get in touch with Fantagraphics -- I freely admit that webforms have been known to send me into an atavistic "Mongo smash!" mentality -- and they were kind enough to send me several things this week. (I expect some or all of them will be reviewed at ComicMix, as soon as I can get to them.) The one that made me let out a squeal of glee -- no, really; ask my wife, she'll back me up -- was Popeye Vol. 3: "Let's You and Him Fight!" by E.C. Segar, which Fantagraphics published in November as a very nice oversized hardcover. I read the first volume a few months back and thoroughly loved it, so I've been thinking that I should buy the second volume. Well, now I have to, because I have Vol. 3 waiting at the end of it. Don't wait for me to review the later volumes -- go back to see what I said about the first one, and, if that sounds at all interesting to you, go out and get it. Seriously -- E.C. Segar was a great cartoonist, and it's a damn shame how the corporate Popeye is a pale, emaciated shadow of his original creation.

Also from Fantagraphics, and only mildly less awesome (since it's a collection of a story I already have in at least one form) is the special tenth eleventh anniversary edition of Ghost World: the Special Edition. It's by Daniel Clowes, of course, and this new edition includes the original graphic novel, the screenplay for the 2001 movie based on it, a couple of pages of new Clowes comics, a rare strip created for the movie's soundtrack, and whatever other related stuff Clowes and Fantagraphics could find. The whole thing was published in hardcover in October.

The book I actually asked Fantagraphics about was Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button, which seems to be (so far, at least) the big graphic novel of 2008. (And, since I'm judging an award that includes various categories it might be eligible in, I thought I should check it out. Plus, you know, it's supposed to be really good.) It's some kind of huge family story, and it was originally published in trade paperback in June.

And also from Fantagraphics is the all-prose Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert by Bill Schelly, which they just brought out in trade paperback. I've only just looked at it for a couple of minutes, so I don't have any real opinion on it -- though I did wince a bit at a disclaimer on the copyright page that "Marvel" and "DC" are used throughout the book to describe the predecessor companies and administrations of the entities that currently bear those names. I'll withhold judgment until I read, since that may just be to simplify background details -- but, in general, when a narrative nonfiction book tells you up front "I'm not paying attention to these issues," it's not the best sign.

Moving on into a very different genre -- too-tightly defined fantasy anthologies -- we have Catopolis, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Deaver-Pack. Catopolis contains "seventeen original tales about the "city of cats" that exists on the same plane with humans, yet is hidden from us." I think you and I both know the kind of people who are going to buy this book, right? So let's just snicker quietly and move on -- Catopolis will be published in the ever-popular mass-market format by DAW in the chilly month of December.

Also in mass market is Laura E. Reeve's Peacekeeper, the first in a new military SF series and -- I think -- the author's first novel. The heroine is an ex-war criminal (according to some people, at least) who gets dragged back into military affairs a decade later when her old compatriots start being assassinated by mysterious forces. Peacekeeper will be published by Roc in December.

I also have before me John Zakour's The Flaxen Femme Fatale, sixth in a series about the last private eye in a post-something world six decades in the future. (They don't seem to be entirely serious books, and I suspect there may be a Ron Goulart influence lurking in them.) The first three books in the series were co-written with Larry Ganem (who, long ago and when we both had other lives, used to sell books to me), but Larry's dropped out by this point. I also note that Zakour writes the daily single panel Working Daze (mostly I note this because I only recently realized it myself). Flaxen Femme Fatale is another mass-market paperback -- so much reading, so cheap! -- coming in December from DAW.

And I'm not done with the mass-markets yet! I also have Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar edited by Mercedes Lackey, which contains...well, tales of Valdemar, and you should have figured that out by yourselves. I won't pick on Valdemar -- though it it easily pickable for a cynical bastard like me -- since I've read nearly all of the books and liked most of them quite a bit. Call 'em guilty pleasures, if you must -- but they were certainly pleasures. This one will have only a tincture of pure Lackey, and so probably won't be as potent, but you take what you can get. It's coming from DAW in December.

The fourth in E.E. Knight's "Age of Fire" series is Dragon Strike, which indeed does have a striking dragon on the cover. But I don't really have anything more than that to say about it. Roc is publishing this one in trade paperback in December.

I've been trying to push the boundaries of the books I cover here at Antick Musings, outward from the realms of SFF (where I've got a thousand contacts from my SFBCdays) and comics (which usually feeds my ComicMix reviews). So I'm always happy when publishers come to me with things outside those areas -- particular with books that look as fascinating as Mac Motandon's Jetpack Dreams. Montandon has traced the history of the jetpack -- mostly in fact, but apparently a bit in fiction as well -- to explain why we all don't have them already, and who does have them. I've been reading a lot of narrative nonfiction lately anyway, so it's great when books I might otherwise miss come aimed right at my head. (Figuratively.) Jetpack Dreams was published in October by Da Capo, and it looks deeply awesome.

Harry Turtledove writes novels nearly as quickly as most men eat hot dinners -- I don't know how he does it, but I've seen his large array of daughters, and I suspect the financial strain of putting them all through college and saving for their presumptive nuptials has something to do with it. And maybe Harry just really does write that fast, and enjoys it -- I haven't been able to read Turtledove as quickly as he can write Turtledove, but the recent books of his I've read (like Beyond the Gap) have been fun and thoroughly entertaining. Anyway, the Great Turtledove Machine has brought forth another novel, The United States of Atlantis. This is an alternate history -- you guess that, didn't you? -- set in a world where the eastern seaboard of North America is a separate mid-Atlantic continent, and the sequel to Opening Atlantis. Roc is publishing it in hardcover in December.

Watermind is the first hardcover by M.M. Buckner, who won the Philip K. Dick award for her previous novel, War Surf. (The PKD is a self-destructive award these days; it tends to bring enough attention to its recipients that they're no longer published in paperback, and so no longer eligible for the PKD. I think Dick would appreciate that touch.) It's a near-future SF novel about a self-organizing intelligence born out of the flushed nanotech, genetically-modified organisms, and what-not that landed in the Mississippi Delta. (No word as to whether everyone that knows fear burns at its touch, or if it's merely a muck-encrusted mockery of a man.) Watermind will be published by Tor in November, and I hope they sell a Heap of them.

I seem to have gotten a high enough profile that people seek my reviews out, at least some of the time. That's gratifying, especially when those projects are as unique and interesting as Jobnik!, Miriam Libicki autobiographical comic about her two-year stint in the Israeli army. (She grew up in the US and currently lives in Canada, so she's even more "one of us" than a born-and-bred Israeli would be.) Libicki's own press, Real Gone Girl, will publish Jobnik! in December as a trade paperback. It'll be available through Amazon and, via Diamond, though more discerning comics shops. (But probably not through other standard book-industry sources.)

And last this week are two books by Scott Morse -- whom I've heard of, and read some work in anthologies, but whose books I'm not familiar with yet -- the creator of Magic Pickle and Southpaw, as well as being an animator and filmmaker. They're Tiger!Tiger!Tiger! and Notes Over Yonder; the first an album-sized collection of semi-autobiographical stories and the latter a wordless story of jazz, cats, ukuleles and beach bums told wordlessly in full-page panels. Both are published by Morse's Red Window imprint and distributed by AdHouse Books. Notes shipped in October; Tiger! will ship in December.

In Charleston

I'm here, I just finished my usual Monday-morning post, and I'm too tired to blog anything else.

So call this a mulligan. Maybe something bloggable will happen tomorrow.

Before It Disappears...

I did this for "Mount Gaiman," a couple of years ago, so here's this month's statistics for Antick Musings, mostly in the wake of "On Being Skipped." (The highest point is the Monday after the Friday night when I posed it -- again, you can see my fiendish plan for Internet domination is based on dumping soon-to-be-popular posts late in the evening at the end of the week.)

As you can see, the numbers are high only for me; even that spike didn't throw me into Making Light territory. That's to be expected, and there are many more people reading Antick Musings than I ever expected when I started it. I'm glad you're all finding something of interest here -- whatever that is.

The Economics of Jerry Seinfeld

So Jerry Seinfeld might be getting seven to eight million for his proposed new book -- at least that's what GalleyCat reported.

And Editorial Ass, whom I usually agree with, let out a shriek of anger.

But I don't think she's right in this case. Her objection -- and the objection of the commentors elsewhere -- seem to boil down to "Jerry Seinfeld already has enough money." That's true, but it has nothing to do with this particular case: an advance is based on the expected sales of a book, not some philanthropic idea of what a particular person "should" get.

Publishers throw large sums of money at authors for one reason: because they think those authors will sell large quantities of books. Sometimes that's because the author sells large numbers of books regularly, such as James Patterson or the late Michael Crichton -- both of whom I would not be surprised to hear made on the order of $7 million for a single book -- and sometimes it's because the author is very famous for doing something else (being President, winning a TV show, yelling a lot on the radio -- generally something in the media, though major business leaders also get in there).

The latter is more of a crapshoot -- it doesn't usually matter if the "author" can actually write a book (there are people to do that for them), but sometimes the audience won't follow that particular person enough to buy a book.

There was a big surge in books by comedians in the early to mid-'90s, led by Seinfeld's own SeinLanguage in 1993. That trend eventually cratered with Whoopi Goldberg's Book in 1997, which could be found on remainder tables from almost immediately afterward to just a year or two ago. The field has been more modest since then, but it's still there -- comedians have fans, and they actually do write, which makes them better bets to translate to book form than some celebrities (such as the young women in the UK who get major book deals for being young, pretty, on TV, not overly burdened with modesty and in possession of notable curves).

So: on the positive side, Seinfeld wrote one book, which was an immense success. On the negative side, it was fifteen years ago, when he was the titular star of a top-five TV show. (And top-five TV shows meant more back then, too.) Giving him a big advance for a new book looks like a no-brainer to me, but the question is whether this (rumored) advance is big but reasonable or far too big for plausibility.

Here's what we don't know:

• what SeinLanguage actually sold, back in 1993 and long before BookScan (my memory is that it was huge -- double digit millions in hardcover and probably more than that in mass)
• how this new book will perform in 2009 (long after his TV show went off the air -- but we never know how any new book will sell)
• what, precisely, is included in that seven or eight million -- it could be world rights in all languages, or it could be much less than that. If the publisher can turn around and sell the UK, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and a fistful of translation rights, seven million might be earned back even before the presses run.

(Note that Seinfeld's agent -- and thus the people he's negotiating with -- know exactly what #1 and #3 are in this case. Nobody ever knows #2; this is no different from any other book deal.)

I'm going to assume the simplest, most pessimistic rights case: that the advances being talked about are for US hard/soft only. (But I'm also going to assume that Seinfeld's popularity is still strong, and that this new book will sell well -- a book that sells poorly was a bad decision, no matter how high or low the advance, so that scenario doesn't mean much.)

So let's say, using Moonrat's numbers, that Jerry Seinfeld's Book is published in hardcover in mid-2009 at $24.95, with a 15% flat royalty rate. (The latter won't be true, but it helps to simplify things, and will get us into the right ballpark.) And let's say that Jerry Seinfeld's Book sells a million copies, which is what the book by his missuz, Jessica (Deceptively Delicious) sold last year. I'm assuming a large part of the interest in Deceptively was because she was Mrs. Seinfeld.

Seinfeld will do a lot of media to promote a new book; he can get on any late-night or morning show pretty much by asking, and on nearly anything else almost as easily. (Publishers kill for authors with that kind of platform.)

With those assumptions, we've got $3,724,500 in earned royalties for the hardcover. That's a nice pile of change, but it's only about half of the rumored advance.

But, wait! We're assuming this is a hard-soft deal. (Hardcover-only deals have mostly gone the way of the dodo; you're not going to see them from a big New York house, if you see them anywhere.) So let's say there's a trade paperback of Jerry Seinfeld's Book in mid-2010, priced at $15.00 and with a 15% flat royalty rate as well (we're assuming the publisher throws this in -- it's pretty generous -- to help make the deal with Seinfeld and his agent), which sells about two million copies.

That's an additional $4,500,000 in earned royalties for the paperback, pushing the total earned to $8,224,500. (And that's actually above the numbers quoted -- probably because I'm using very rosy sales assumptions, but so will the publishers running P&Ls to justify buying this.)

And there will be a mass-market edition as well: let's assume that comes along in mid-2011, priced at $8.99, with a flat 10% royalty rate. I'm assuming that mass-market distribution hasn't completely collapsed by then -- which may be an unwarranted assumption -- so let's let that chill our numbers a bit, and only assume another million copies sold.

That will be another $899,000 in earned royalties, for a total of $9,123,500.

Voila! Jerry Seinfeld's Book more than earns out, in three editions. Using more pessimistic assumptions -- for a book at this level, most publishers do several P&L scenarios -- with sales at only about two-thirds of what I originally estimated, it would still earn over six million.

And the publisher's revenue?

Using my original rosy assumptions:

Hardcover: $24.95 list; average 55% discount (it'll be sold into the various outlets in truly epic quantities) for an income of $11.2275 per book and total revenue of $11,227,500. Let's assume the total in-print quantity was about a million and a half, with a pp&b (cost to produce the book) of about $2.00 (lots of special effects on this baby, but huge print runs and a short book), a media spend totaling a cool million dollars, and that remainder revenue covers miscellaneous costs. That's $4,000,000 in costs.

Trade paperback: $15.00 list; average 55% discount (same assumptions) for an income of $6.75 per book and total revenue of $13,500,000. Pp&b will be under a buck, so let's call it $1.00 even, and assume total in print is about two and a half million. Let's say they spend half a million this time around for media and publicity. Remainders should be negligible; this edition will backlist indefinitely. (SeinLanguage is available in both mass and trade even now; the trade is a new edition from this September.) So that's another $3,000,000 in costs.

Mass-market: $8.99 list; average 60% discount (I'm running high, since I have no idea how the mass-market is going these days) for an income of $3.596 per book and total revenue of $3,596,000. I'm just going to say additional costs will run about a million -- another strong (but smaller) ad spend, and cheap printing for a cheap book.


To add those up:
Hardcover revenue: $11,227,500
Trade pb revenue: $13,500,000
Mass pb revenue: $3,596,000
Total revenue: $28,323,500

Advance: $8,000,000
Hardcover costs: $4,000,000
Trade pb costs: $3,000,000
Mass pb costs: $1,000,000
Total costs: $16,000,000

Revenue minus costs; contribution to overhead and so forth: $12,323,500.

That's spread over three fiscal years, and it's based on my very loose and back-of-the-envelope numbers, but this is definitely a book that could be quite profitable for the right publisher.

So, yes -- it does make sense to spend seven or eight million on an advance for a new book by Jerry Seinfeld. I think so, anyway.

ComicMix Aten't Dead

Nobody has actually asked me, but I'll say anyway that ComicMix is still chugging along, and I'm chugging there with them. (See Heidi MacDonald's report for The Beat for the original doom 'n gloom report.)

Why, only today there's another installment of my Manga Friday column, covering the fourth volumes of Alice on Deadlines, Black God, and Zombie-Loan.

And I intend to keep reviewing books for them as long as they're willing to have me and publishers are willing to send books for review.

Anatomy of the Month from Hell

I am far, far too busy this month.

I spent the 1st and 2nd preparing for the big family vacation to Orlando, and the 3rd through the 10th actually down there.

Back at work on the 11th, with a major meeting on the morning of the 12th, a lunch date and book-launch party on the 13th, and an off-site meeting this morning.

Tomorrow, the 15th, I'm driving the boys to Brooklyn to see their "Unca Dan's" apartment for the first and probably only time before he moves to Portland, and then taking Dan and some of his stuff back to my mother's for his birthday dinner and storage. (Note to self: need to get present.)

On Sunday the 16th, I fly to Charleston for the Blackbaud Conference for Nonprofits, and I'll be there through Wednesday afternoon.

On Thursday the 20th, I have an all-day mandatory HR training session.

Friday the 21st, so far, has nothing major. This must be a fluke.

On Saturday the 22st, I'll be driving down, as early in the morning as I can stand, to Philcon, where I will be until sometime Sunday afternoon. (And I'm currently light on dinner plans for Saturday night -- let me know if you'll be there and are free.)

Monday the 24th sees the fabled annual "Mill & Swill," a party hosted by SFWA. (Ditto on pre-party dinner plans.)

I'll then have the 25th and 26th to get done pretty much all of my work for the month, unless meetings start getting scheduled then as well.

The 27th is Thanksgiving, so I'll be at my mother-in-law's most of the day, eating myself into a coma.

The Wife is working the 28th and 29th, but I don't think I'm otherwise busy. Maybe the boys and I will go see a movie. Or maybe I'll let them run around the house randomly while I get other things done.

And on the 30th, we have tickets for Cirque Mechanics at the New Victory Theater.

(Normally, we'd go cut down our Christmas tree that weekend, but I don't see when we'll get to do that.)

And then the first week of December is the thrice-yearly Sales Meeting, which means I'll be in a hotel in Jersey City for several days straight. (And means I need to get a lot of preparation done before that.)

Ye gods! If you see me blogging over the rest of the month, I probably should be doing something more constructive instead...

Quote of the Week

"On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith."
- Malcolm Gladwell, "Late Bloomers," p.42 of the 10/20/08 New Yorker

Bloglines Is Down, Too

I guess the universe wants me to get work done this afternoon...

Two Things I Couldn't Tweet Because Twitter Is Down

1) I'm in Wiley's stump New York office for the afternoon, and was briefly the only one here. (Three people -- oddly enough, my boss, one of the editors she works with and his assistant -- came in not long after I did.)

2) I'm still trying to dig through the emails from my vacation, and one struck me as funny. A rep is asking my help to get a book to a professor, but it's not easy.

What makes it funny is that the book is Accounting for Managers. Of course! There's no accounting for managers!

Cheerleader Vampire-Slayer Mega Fun Comics!

That's what I think the Buffy tie-ins would be called, if she'd been created in '70s Japan.

If that makes no sense, just move on to my review for ComicMix of the new collection, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Vol. 3: Wolves at the Gate, by Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard, and Georges Jeanty.

Thought for the Day

What too many Science Fiction readers want is a book that will make them feel the way they felt when they were ten years old and just discovering SF. They look for that book in different ways: some want more adventures of the same people, some want neat-o keen-o new extrapolation, and some just want to wallow.

Being ten is nice, when you're ten. But it's good to set your sights a bit higher from that point on.

(Inspired by this Paul Kincaid column at Bookslut.)

Hey, Authors!

Do you agree with Seth Godin?

"Authors don't care about units sold. They care about ideas spread."

I publish entirely non-fiction these days, and I'm not sure my authors would consistently agree with him -- and I think the mostly fiction-writing folks who read this blog will be even more dubious.

Neil Gaiman News

I like to joke that every single Neil Gaiman book is completely different from the ones before it, and that every new Gaiman title is the first something-or-other that he's done -- and he just keeps giving me more ammunition!

Publishers Weekly reported last week that Gaiman has signed a deal with his longtime US publisher, William Morrow, for three nonfiction books -- the first will be titled Monkey and Me, be published in fall 2009, and combine Gaiman's love for the Chinese classic Journey to the West with his recent long trip to China.

The other two books are unspecified, but, if book one is a travel memoir, I expect the ever-new Gaiman will follow it up with a diet/exercise book, and then the story of his new dog. (And I'm only half joking.)

Eisner Award Judges for 2009

You might have heard elsewhere -- if you follow comics news, which I bet a whole lot of you don't -- that I'm one of the judges for next year's Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.

I had such a great time as a judge for the World Fantasy Awards a few years back that I just couldn't say no when I was asked this time. (Even though the Eisners have a vast and bewildering array of categories.) The good thing about the Eisners -- or maybe it's the weird thing about the Eisners; I'll see once deliberations start -- is that the judges don't pick the final winners. The judges narrow the whole field down to the nominees in every category, and then comics-industry voters pick the winners.

Anyway, here's the full press release, for the terminally curious:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Jackie Estrada
jackie@comic-con.org


JUDGES ANNOUNCED FOR
2009 WILL EISNER COMIC INDUSTRY AWARDS


SAN DIEGO - The judging panel has been selected for the 2009 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. This blue-ribbon committee will choose the nominees to appear on the Eisner Awards ballot. This year's judges are:

Amanda Emmert (formerly Fisher) has worked in comics retailing since she was 16. She owns Muse Comics & Games in Missoula, MT, which opened originally as The Splash Page in 1996. Amanda is currently the Communications Coordinator for ComicsPRO, the trade association for comic book retailers, which she helped to incorporate in 2004. Amanda also serves on the Free Comic Book Day Retailer Committee

Mike Pawuk has been a teen services public librarian for the Cuyahoga County Public Library for over 12 years. A lifelong fan of comic books and graphic novels, he's been recognized as one of the leading librarians in the country on this medium. Mike was the chair for the 2002 YALSA all-day preconference on graphic novels, and he regularly does presentations for libraries on building graphic novel collections. He is the author of Graphic Novels: A Genre Guide to Comic Books, Manga, and More, published by Libraries Unlimited. Currently, Pawuk does graphic novels reviews for the IVC2.com popular culture website and is serving on the American Library Association's Great Graphic Novels for Young Adults book selection committee.

John Shableski works for Diamond Book Distributors as a sales manager with a focus on the independent bookstore market and on public and school libraries. He's been a moderator and panelist at Book Expo and other trade shows, a guest speaker at library events and regional book shows, and a symposium coordinator. He is currently collaborating on several graphic novel symposiums across the country. After a career in radio broadcasting and in marketing and advertising, he landed at book distributor Brodart Co., where, with librarian Kat Kan he worked to develop their graphic novel program. He has been with Diamond since 2007. He is a regular contributing writer on the blog “Buzz, Balls and Hype,” where he posts columns on his perspective of the publishing world as “The Graphic Novels Guy.”

Ben Towle is a cartoonist and educator living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He's known primarily for his work with SLG Publishing, including the recent historical fiction graphic novel Midnight Sun as well as his earlier volume of comics folk tales, Farewell, Georgia. He's taught cartooning and comics classes at schools and workshops across the country and is the co-founder of the National Association of Comics Art Educators. Ben is currently hard at work on a creator-owned story about turn of the century Chesapeake Bay oystermen and also on a biographical graphic novel about Amelia Earhart for Hyperion Books.

Andrew Wheeler went almost directly from Vassar College to the Science Fiction Book Club, in an attempt to avoid the real world entirely. He worked at the SFBC for 16 years, rejuvenating the moribund graphic novel program there and eventually overseeing the Altiverse program, which featured comics, media tie-ins, and similar books. After rising to senior editor at the parent company of the SFBC he moved on to become a marketing manager at the 200-year old publishing firm John Wiley & Sons. His reviews of comics and manga have appeared at ComicMix.com.

The judges will meet in San Diego in late March to select the nominees that will appear on the Eisner Awards ballot. The nominees will then be voted on by professionals in the comic book industry, and the results will be announced in a gala awards ceremony on Friday, July 24, in Ballroom 20 at Comic-Con International: San Diego.

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (named for the comics and graphic novel pioneer) are presented under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and are considered the “Oscars” of the industry. This will be the awards program’s 21st year.

More information on the Eisner Awards can be found at www. comic-con.org/cci/cci_eisners_main.shtml.