Jim Baens Universe-Vol 1 Num 6

by Eric Flint

  3) Finally, the books are designed to be as user-friendly as possible. Baen will provide the text in any one of five popular formats, some of which are completely unencrypted. No restrictions are placed on the customers' use of the books thereafter. They can do whatever they want with them, just as they can with paper books.

  Given all that, who is going to bother to steal a Baen title? How many people with enough intelligence to read a book in the first place are going to go through the time and effort to find a pirated edition of something that they could have obtained legally—very easily and quickly, at a stable and well-known Web site—for five dollars or less? An edition, furthermore, which has been professionally prepared and doesn't carry the same sort of frequent OCR-scanning errors that most pirated editions do?

  Some, sure. There are always a few fruitcakes here and there. But not enough ever to be anything more than a minor nuisance, at worst.

  The kind of thing you run across—very occasionally—is exemplified by a case that happened about four years ago. A well-meaning person sent me and Jim Baen a somewhat breathless e-mail warning us that some rascal had taken one of the free CDs containing many electronic texts that Baen often distributes in hardcover editions and had put it up for sale on eBay for $100.

  I called Jim on the phone to see if he wanted to do anything about it. Not to my surprise, however, his reaction was the same as mine. "Why the hell should I waste my valuable time trying to prevent someone from earning the Darwin award? If somebody out there is stupid enough to pay $100 to get an illegal copy of something they could have gotten perfectly legally by buying a $25 hardcover, let 'em and be damned."

  My attitude toward so-called electronic pirates—these virtual Bluebeard wannabes—is one of cheerful contempt. Contempt, because they're jerks. Cheerful, because their periodic vainglorious boasts about "destroying copyright" are the equivalent of so many mice chittering at an elephant.

  Don't bother pirating my books, you pipsqueaks. I automatically put all of them up for free online about three months after the paperback edition comes out anyway. Because I know perfectly well that I'm generating far more sales from the wonderful—and dirt-cheap—promotional value than I'm losing to so-called pirates.

  That's the key to the whole thing—as we will see, again and again, in the essays that follow. The way you deal with the problem of electronic copyright infringement is not by a futile—and politically dangerous—attempt to place greater and greater legal restrictions on the public's access to reading material. The way you do it is by recognizing, cold-bloodedly, certain fundamental economic principles and guiding yourself accordingly. By doing so, you cut the ground right out from under the problem.

  Two other things will happen if you do so. The first is that, in purely and immediately financial terms, you will generate a lot more income than you will by following the Pied Pipers of DRM. It is a fact that Baen's way of selling e-books generates more income per unit sold for the publisher—and royalties for the authors—than the DRM methods used by other publishers. Those profits and royalties are still small, of course, compared to the profits and royalties earned by paper editions. But that's inevitable, so long as the electronic market as a whole remains stunted and tiny.

  The second thing is that you will generate a lot of goodwill among your customers, where DRM policies infuriate those same customers. And while it's not easy to assign a precise value to "goodwill" in a balance sheet, no one with any sense doubts that it's a very real—and major—asset for any business.

  We couldn't have launched this magazine without that asset. We knew from the beginning that we'd have an uphill struggle, trying to create a successful online science fiction magazine that paid better rates to authors than any other magazine, given the small size of the electronic market. But we also gauged that Baen Books had, over the years, generated enough goodwill and trust among its core customers that we could get the support we needed for the Universe Club—given that we'd be publishing the magazine along the same well-established anti-DRM principles that Baen has always followed.

  And so it proved. About half the income the magazine receives comes from the Club, with the other half being provided by subscriptions. That's what has so far enabled us to weather this very hard initial period in the magazine's existence—and the reason we're confident we're going to be successful in the long run.

  Everyone should understand one thing, if nothing else. The only reason this debate over DRM as it applies to electronic text is still going on is simply because our opponents have what amounts to a quasi-religious and sometimes downright hysterical blind faith in the magic powers of DRM. As a test of competing business strategies in the real world of economic intercourse, the debate is over.

  Finished. Done.

  We won, they lost—and it was a rout.

  In my next essay, I'm going to pursue this question further—by "question," meaning the whole issue of how electronic publishing should be used. In this essay, I only dealt with it negatively, so to speak, by exposing the logical absurdities of the arguments advanced in favor of DRM. What I want to do next is look at the positive ways in which electronic publishing can—if you follow the right strategy—serve as a counterbalance to many of the difficult economic problems that are today facing the publishing industry and its authors and readers.

  Barry N. Malzberg —Arias & Barcarolles

  Written by Barry N. Malzberg

  From its inception as a category of publishing in this country (the first issue being Gernsback's April, 1926 Amazing Stories), science fiction was a literature of ideas. Just ask the idea people. Consider the founding editors: for Gernsback it was a literature of scientific advance, which would encourage young boys to become engineers. For Orlin Tremaine it was the thought variant, stories that would redefine or expand reality. For John Campbell it was a literature of technology's effect on human emotions, progress, way of life. For Anthony Boucher, a quaint quality old Curiosity Shoppe incorporating societal or technological change. For Horace L. Gold, the bitter comedy of it all, the expansion of the practice of human folly, stupidity, and exploitation on a twisted, multihued background. For Donald A. Wollheim, a means to show the corruption and hypocrisy of capitalist culture.

  And the writers. Lots of writers. "Variegate" is the word; a tumble of writers. Engineers, sociologists, comedians, pratfall artists, feminists, masculinists, satirists, parodists, tragedians, sexual crusaders. The magazine stories and eventually the novels were filled with ideas, trembled with concepts. The prose and characterization might have often been distressingly unachieved, but this bothered the editors as little as it seemed to concern the readers. (Of course even in these early decades much was achieved. What Kuttner and Sturgeon, for instance, were able to accomplish within a span of two decades from the origination of the category is still an astonishment.)

  Of course there were some anti-idea editors as well. Raymond Palmer, William Hamling, James Quinn. "Just a good story, please." Or, in Palmer's case the Shaver stories of the late 1940s, pre-von Danikin replete with cave-dwelling deteroriated robots. But in the grim joylessness with which the agenda was stated ("Just entertain us," Hamling would write in editorials, biting his lip), it could be theorized that the anti-ideas were themselves ideas. Most light or humorous science fiction had the dedicated, desiccated aspect of children's entertainment night at the 195l New York Lumber Trade Association annual. (Tip of the Hatlo Hat to my old man. That year my party favor was a chemistry set. That and trips to the Gilbert Hall of Science convinced me that I was underqualified to reassemble the universe.) A literature of ideas, all right. That was science fiction at the creation, and we still live, read, and write under that penumbra. A dreadful Young Laborer's League earnestness still pervades; Sheckley's silliness is endured and sometimes admired (although it was not admired by James Blish), but even in its time was often marginalized or dismissed as peripheral, as an indulgence. That silliness—or Horace Gold's acidity or Boucher's literatur
e of (Mark Clifton's phrase) "wine and decadence"—were never part of the Grand Plan, not even for Gold, Boucher, or their writers. These were stories that worked the margins, that made extrapolation more a matter of technique and cleverness (The Demolished Man is an elegant and formulative novel, but its telepathic-dominated corporate future has never been argued as a plausible projection. No less than Pohl's "The Midas Plague" or Tenn's "Firewater," gaudy social satires both, it is a product of pyrotechnic as opposed to the rigors of Mission of Gravity—and Bester's later commentary well shows that he knew it.)

  What was the real Grand Plan? (Practical as opposed to showing off in Bester's fashion.) Clearly, it was to reorganize the present in light of a dominating future. If the present was important, it was only because it foreshadowed the future, implied aspects of that gleaming future in situ. Science fiction—a rank generalization—regarded present technology or social formulation as transient, important only for the signals it would give in that transience. It was the present that would make the future go but it was only the future that would eventually explain or justify the present.

  The effect all of this cogitation and programmatic insistence had upon the personalities of the writers and the social life of science fiction was, of course, profound. Could be argued that it was inevitable. From Slan Shacks to the Hydra Club, from the Futurians to Dianetics, from the evolving and ever-more-complex bylaws of the World Science Fiction Convention to the convulsions of The Immortal Storm, many of our writers, editors, fans, readers dwelt within increasingly baroque social and psychological struggles and also exhibited—in their public if not private lives—megalomania , self-fixation, pomposity, an insistence upon the arcane. If science fiction was not the world in 1926, in 1945 the world became science fiction. Steam engine time. "Suddenly," Asimov wrote in retrospect, many years later, "science fiction was no longer a bunch of crazy stories for kids, it was the only medium which could explain what was happening." Science fiction, to the mainstream critics who came to the Healy & McComas Adventures in Time and Space, was to be seen as a candle to light us to bed or breakfast.

  There has always been a struggle amongst the idea, the anti-idea, and the gadflies for the terrain of science fiction; it is, of course, irresolute and from that struggle and irresolution has come not only the tension but much of the achievement of science fiction. Like no other, this is a conflated genre, perhaps one that was always more improvised than evolved. And we can see its consequence now throughout this shrinking terrain, these ravaged borders:

  Conceptually and in terms of definition we are just about out of ideas.

  Leave to the mainstream a literature of exhaustion. What we have—call it sired by Campbell, pranked by Gold—is an agenda of exhaustion. After shock and fury: home there is no returning.

  Mike Resnick —April 2007

  Written by Mike Resnick

  Okay, I hear you ask, how the hell can Jim Baen's Universe pay such phenomenal word rates? Are we just a loss leader for Baen Books?

  The answer is that we're not a loss leader for anybody. We intend to make a profit, and I'll show you exactly how. But first let me tell you a little story about the sex industry. (Yeah, I could explain it just as easily without sex, but Topic Number One does tend to capture the attention.)

  Move the clock back to 1965 (and how I wish we could – at least when I look in the mirror). I'm a 23-year-old kid, and I've landed my first job in Chicago's publishing industry. None of the legitimate papers or magazines had any openings, so suddenly I find myself editing The National Insider, which is just like The National Enquirer only worse. The first thing I learn is that the only number that matters in my little universe is 41. That's the break-even point. For the Insider to stay out of the red, we have to sell 41% of our print run . . . which is to say that the cost of printing, shipping, distributing, editorial, overhead, everything added together, gets covered only if we sell 41% of our print run, which was about 400,000 back then. (Don't drool; we only sold for 15 cents an issue.)

  We were selling about 38% when I took over. I figured that if one naked lady was good, six were better; if one silly story about saucers flying off with Jackie Kennedy was good, four were better; if one Hollywood gossip column filled with innuendo was good, lots were better. And I was right. Suddenly the paper was regularly selling between 70% and 75% every week.

  Okay, move the calendar ahead to 1969. I've quit my job and gone freelance. Doing what? Same damned thing. I'm packaging four monthly (and later bi-weekly) tabloids out of my house in Libertyville, Illinois. But there is a huge difference. Now my magic number is 9.

  You see, now I am working for Reuben Sturman, the true kingpin of the American porn industry (though my tabloids are his one non-porn publication. We're just sexy, thank you very much.) Now, Reuben wasn't born the kingpin of porn; he was a self-made smut king. He'd been a comic-book jobber in Cleveland in the 1950s. Then one day the major distributors decided they wouldn't handle a bunch of "muscle books"—we'd call them bottom-level body-building magazines today—and Reuben volunteered to distribute them, You know how the New York Times prints "all the news that's fit to print" and the National Enquirer prints the rest? Well, the major distributors handled all the material that was fit to display on your local newsstand or in your local supermarket, and Reuben handled all the rest, especially those with (*sigh*) naked ladies.

  And got rich. And started a whole chain of what were known as secondary distribution agencies. When the dust cleared in the early 1960s, there were 65 secondary agencies nationwide, and Reuben, under various corporate veils, owned 59 of them. He figured if it would work for distribution, it would work for retail outlets, and soon, of the 800 adult book stores in the country—I haven't been to one in thirty years, but they were the kind where men in raincoats paid a dollar to browse and got it back if they bought something—Reuben owned over 600. He also invested in a printing plant.

  Back to the new magic number: 9. My break-even point for Reuben's tabloids was 9%. That's right; we could pulp 90% of our print run and still show a profit.

  How? Simple. He got rid of the costs that others had to pay. (Remember that: we'll come back to it later). He didn't pay a printer anything but the cost of paper, because he was the printer. He didn't pay a national distributor because he was the national distributor. He didn't pay the local distributor (the equivalent of Charles Levy in Chicago, or Long Island News Agency in New York) because he was the local distributor. He didn't have to give the bookstore its usual percentage, because he was the bookstore.

  9%. Simple. And then he made sure of his profit by forbidding any of the 600 bookstores, or any of the 59 secondary agencies, to sell a single copy of a rival tabloid—all of which had to use his services—before we'd sold half of our own print run.

  (Sound familiar? If you're a Resnick reader it should. The protagonist of my 1984 science fiction novel, The Branch—which is being reprinted by Pyr in 2008, hint, hint—was based on Reuben, and his business was lifted lock stock and naked ladies from Reuben's.)

  We're going to talk about science fiction magazines now. I'm inclined to say something flip, like "Back to the real world," except the point of all this is that what I just related to you was the real world. My first publisher went belly-up a few years after I left because the expenses whelmed him over; Reuben stayed profitably in business until the Feds finally nailed him for tax evasion. (He died in jail.)

  The way I see it, the great printzines—Asimov's, Analog, F&SF—are my old Chicago publisher, and Jim Baen's Universe is Reuben Sturman.

  Let's see if I can explain—and please understand, I love those three magazines. I've been reading two of them all my life, and the third since its inaugural issue thirty years ago. I've sold to all of them. I have won five Hugos, and each winner was from one of them. I will never refuse a request from one of their editors, and will write for them right up to the end. I will weep bitter tears when they die—but die they will, and for much the same reason my Chic
ago tabloid publisher died.

  And Jim Baen's Universe, or some as-yet-unborn JBU clones, will live and prosper, for the same reason Reuben Sturman's publishing empire lived and prospered.

  Consider: what does it take to get a copy of Asimov's or one of the others into your hands?

  Well, there's an office, which means an overhead.

  There's an editor, a top-notcher, who has to get a salary commensurate with his or her talent.

  There's paper for the magazines to be printed on.

  There are color separations for the covers.

  There is the cost of printing tens of thousands (formerly a couple of hundred thousand) of copies of the magazine.

  There are shipping costs. The subscribers don't drive to the printing plant to pick their copies up. Neither do the distributors. Neither do the stores.

  There are the distribution costs, both for the national and local distributors. They're good guys, but they don't place the magazines in the stores for free.

  There are the stores themselves. If they sell a $5.00 magazine, most of them are going to want $1.50 or thereabouts for their troubles.