by Eric Flint
There are warehouse costs for those magazines that are neither sold nor pulped.
And a month later, every copy has vanished from the newsstands and bookstores, to be replaced by the next month's issue.
Now let's take a look at how these expenses effect Jim Baen's Universe:
There is no office expense and no overhead, because Eric, Paula, me, all of us, work out of our houses.
There are no editorial salaries for Eric, Paula or me. We're so confident that the magazine's going to make money that we each opted to get a piece of the profits.
There are no paper expenses, because the magazine doesn't appear on paper.
There are no color separations, because we simply post the artwork right on the screen.
There are no printing expenses, because the magazine is not printed.
There are no shipping costs, because the magazine is not shipped.
There are no national or local distribution costs, because JBU is not distributed. It's right here, and we don't have to pay anyone to put it in your physical proximity.
There is no cut for the bookstores, because we are not sold in bookstores. Or newsstands. Or supermarkets. We're right here on line. You pay us, and we give you the magazine, and there are no middle men. (You might think about that. You pay $4.95 for a digest magazine, they might wind up with about $1.85 of it; you pay us $5.00, we keep $5.00.)
There are no warehouse costs, because the magazine exists in electronic phosphors, not paper pages. We'll post another issue in a couple of months, but this one won't be through earning us money, because it will always be available for anyone who wants it. It just won't be the new issue on the website.
Do you begin to see where the print magazines are at a bit of a disadvantage?
Now, there is one expense that they and we both have, and that's content, which is to say, the stories that are our reason for existence.
The three digest magazines pay seven to eight cents a word. It seems reasonable. Hell, when you look at their expenses and their diminishing print runs and sales, it seems positively generous, almost philanthropic. How can JBU possibly compete with that?
Easy. By paying our major writers three times as much, and by paying every writer, even our rank beginners, at least as much as the digests.
Remember: they're paying overhead, color separations, editorial salaries, paper, printing, shipping, national distributors, local distributors, bookstores, warehouses, and authors.
And us? We're paying . . . authors and artists. Period. And we won't be happy until our best authors are getting 50 cents a word, and all of our authors are getting at least twenty cents. Give us three years; we're working on it.
Next question: is there enough of a cyber audience to keep an e-zine in business?
I didn't know until a couple of months ago. Now I do.
Let me tell you about that. There's a young man named Steve Eley who runs a podcast site called EscapePod. Last year he asked me for a story. At the time I didn't pay much attention to it. I mean, who the hell listens to podcasts? Then a French producer/director who had never been able to get the magazine my story appeared in heard the podcast and optioned the story for maybe 75 times what Steve had paid for it. So of course I instantly became a huge supporter of podcasting, sent a bunch of top writers to Steve, sold him a bunch more stories, gave out podcast interviews all the hell over . . . and couldn't help wondering if anyone except the occasional French movie producer actually listened to these things.
So I asked Steve if he had any figures. He said yes, that "Travels With My Cats," my second Escape Pod story, had 22,000 hits in its first month.
22,000 hits? I couldn't believe it. It had appeared in Asimov's. If every single person who bought that issue read the story—and my guess is that probably a quarter of them didn't—that was still only 18,556 readers according to this month's Locus.
More people heard the story online in one month—and of course it's still being heard months later—than read it!
Okay, I said to myself, the story was a Hugo winner and Steve advertised it as such. For whatever reasons—its content, its awards—it touched all the right buttons. But surely not every story on this one little web page could do that.
So this month he posted another of my stories. It's a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale. It won no awards. It was written for teenagers. It has nothing in common with the other story.
I couldn't even wait for an entire month. I e-mailed Steve after two weeks to ask how many people had downloaded it. (Hold onto your hats.)
14,000!
14,000? This is me. Not Anne McCaffrey. Not Kevin Anderson. Not Mercedes Lackey. Not Robert Jordan.
Are the readers out there in the ether?
You betcha. In vast quantities.
Are we positioned to find them?
We think so. We hope so. And if we're wrong, then the next e-zine to come along will find them (or be found by them), or the one after that.
The one thing you can be sure of is that JBU and its electronic imitators will bring you the very best writers and artists around.
After all, we've got nothing else to spend it on.
—Mike Resnick
Stephen Euin Cobb—April 2007
Written by Stephen Euin Cobb
Listen as David Drake, Alan Dean Foster, Dave Freer, Ginjer Buchanan, Paul Levinson and Lucienne Diver describe many of the technological and social changes which will alter your life during the next few years.
The Future And You is an award-winning audio podcast about the future which may be downloaded and enjoyed, or even copied and shared, for free. Every episode contains many interviews which reveal a wide variety of ideas and opinion from a wide variety of people.
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The April 1, 2007 episode includes all of the following and more:
Apartheid ended thirteen years ago, so what are the trends within South Africa today? And what misconceptions do outsiders have about South Africa? Dave Freer, who was born and raised in South Africa, talks of this as well as his scientific profession: ichthyology (the study of fish), and the thousands of times he has been scuba diving, and one dive in particular when he got his arm caught in a shellfish tunnel and very nearly drowned.
With half the Japanese populous reading eBooks on their cell phones and Steve Jobs intent on combining cell phones with iPods for computerless downloading of music, podcasts and audio books, just how fast are the changes coming? Ginjer Buchanan (Senior Executive Editor and Marketing Director of Ace and ROC books) talks of this as well as: why William Gibson is a national hero in Japan, the increasing feminization of America, the Vatican's website, why young editors must create for themselves a niche, and her fear that unemployment is the fate of all those who create, transport and sell physical books: from press operators and truck drivers to clerks in the giant chain bookstores.
Less-than-lethal weapons will soon take their place on the battlefield, but will they actually change anything? No, says Alan Dean Foster, and he explains why. He also addresses the probability of the world entering a new dark age, and he disagrees with the host's notion that New Orleans can be used as a miniature example of the fall of civilization.
Are SF writers really trying to predict the future? Hugo Gernsback thought he was predicting, but were H.G. Wells or Jules Verne also trying to be predictors? Many people think so but David Drake says no and backs it up with specific examples.
Have audio book downloads become a bigger trend than eBook downloads? What about giving away free eBooks? Lucienne Diver, one of America's top literary agents, talks of this as well as her frustration with the large pharmaceutical companies and her skepticism over whether or not future medicine will ever provide a cure for the cryonics process.
Does the world need more people rather than less? Paul Levinson suggests that, since intelligence is our best resource then more people will produce more intelligence, more innovation and a more rapid improvement to the human condition. He also address
es other questions: Is another dark age unlikely because (unlike in the ancient world) today there are so many copies of humanity's collected knowledge? And is the fall of New Orleans (due to hurricane Katrina) a good example of how civilizations fall? And if so what can we learn from it?
We also include another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton do their bit to let the world at large know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe.
News items in the April 1, 2007 episode include: (a) TV channels from around the globe may be watched online for free by going to MyEasyTV.com; (b) your humble host proposes his fix for the confusion produced by dropped cell phone calls; (c) your host's latest, and shortest, test for social equality; and (d) your host will appear at RavenCon in Richmond VA, USA (April 20-22, 2007) and at ConCarolinas in Charlotte NC, USA (June 1-3, 2007).
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And if the current episode's ideas and opinion are not enough to satisfy your curiosity about the future check out the previous month's episode which contains John Barnes, Kim Stanley Robinson, Elizabeth Bear, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Stoney Compton and Ginjer Buchanan discussing all the following and more:
Everyone agrees that Generation Y is the most connected Generation ever, but are its members so obsessed with being in complete consensus on everything that they are horrified of being in open disagreement? And if so, how will this alter America ten years from now when "Generation Y" will comprise 40% of all American consumers? John Barnes is a consulting semiotician and has done a great deal of study on this subject.
What if everyone hypertexted within all their conversations? What if you never had to define your terms because those not familiar with them could look them up faster than you could have provided the explanation. Might those people hypertext-enabled become frustrated at the slowness of your conversational data rate if you did pause to define them? Elizabeth Bear thinks so, and has many other ideas about the future and the Singularity.
What if Russia still owned Alaska? What if Lennon and Trotsky had remained nobodies and the Czar and Czarina ruled to this very day? Understanding how history pivots on trivial occurrences can provide insights into the changes we will all face in the future. Stoney Compton, a life-long student of history and alternate history, talks of both and shares a few personal anecdotes about Alaska and its native Athabaskan Indians.
Imagine you're standing in line in a cafeteria but federal regulations will not allow you to buy any kind of soft drink or any kind of fried food. Now imagine that there are tens of thousands of similarly restrictive cafeterias all across America. How can this be? Simple, these are the cafeterias in public schools. To learn the trends our future wage earners are experiencing I spoke with Ricki Dean, manager of a high school cafeteria in Columbia County Georgia.
Many full-time authors saw their careers come to an abrupt end when sales of horror books collapsed in the 1980's. Could this happen all over again to one of the other genres? Ginjer Buchanan, Senior Executive Editor and Marketing Director of Ace and ROC books, talks of this as well as the rapidly growing popularity of audio books: a trend the big houses have spotted and are making a serious effort not to be left out of.
What would you do differently today if you knew for certain that your generation would live three hundred years? Kim Stanley Robinson tackles this question and its social ramifications since he sees it as a genuine possibility based on what he has been hearing from his friends within the field of biotechnology. He also covers cryonics, SETI and our next earth.
Stores and shops are filled with every variety of goods, but does this variety give us only the "Illusion of Choice?" L.E. Modesitt Jr. suggests that it does. He also talks of his concern that we will be forced to rely on fossil fuels much farther into the future than anyone would like to admit.
We also include another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; as well as the official segment from Jim Baen's Universe in which Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton take us inside the greatest online science fiction and fantasy magazine in the world, this time by presenting a reading by Louise Marley of the opening scenes of her short story The Spiral Road which is in the February 1, 2007 issue of Jim Baen's Universe magazine.
News items in this episode include: (a) your host will appear at RavenCon in Richmond VA, USA the weekend of April 20-22, 2007; (b) a new version of Death Stacks which you may play online for free and which requires no download; (c) how you may prove for yourself that there's no such thing as a Chinese Journalist; and (d) why there is a 15 percent probability that Al Gore will be the next US president.
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Here's a bit more detail on two of the news items from these two episodes:
You may now play Death Stacks online (without downloading anything). A web based version of this strategy board game—which was invented by the host of The Future And You, Stephen Euin Cobb—has been created by the same artificial intelligence programmer who released a downloadable version (which is still available). Those who wish to may read more about Death Stacks in the Wikipedia article. No word yet if the programmer intends to enter his heuristic software to compete in the—so far, human-dominated—Annual Death Stacks Tournament which is only a few months away and will be held at the Marriott Executive Hotel in Charlotte NC as part of the SF&F convention ConCarolinas.
Listeners may visit with the host of The Future And You at any of the following SF&F conventions: RavenCon in Richmond VA (April 20-22, 2007), ConCarolinas in Charlotte NC (June 1-3, 2007), LibertyCon in Chattanooga TN (July 27-29, 2007) or DragonCon in Atlanta GA (August 31-September 3, 2007).
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And finally, here's a little throwaway idea I came up with on March 16, 2007.
Lately I've been seeing a lot of TV commercials about cell phones in which the signal is lost and the call is dropped which causes terrible misunderstandings such as failed romances or someone losing their job. Obsessive problem solver that I am, this started me thinking of how the problem could be fixed. After two minutes of thought the solution became obvious: cell phone software should be redesigned to let every user choose their own personal background music which will play softly and constantly throughout every phone call they make and will be transmitted in the same signal that carries their voice. This way, if the connection is lost, even for a fraction of a second and even if they are not talking during the loss, the other person will know instantly that the connection was lost because the music was not transmitted and fell silent. Never again need anyone spend thirty seconds talking to dead air.
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You can learn more about this podcast here, or here or even here.
Or learn more about its host here or here.
THE END
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