Jim Baen's Universe had its origins in a series of discussions in the fall of 2005 between Jim Baen, David Drake and myself. All of us were concerned about the dismal state of the market these days for short fiction in science fiction and fantasy. Most people familiar with F&SF know that short form fiction has been declining steadily for decades, in our genre. All four of the major paper magazines still in existence—Analog, Asimov's, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Realms of Fantasy—have been struggling against declining circulation figures for a long time, with no end in sight. Many smaller magazines have folded altogether. And the one major online F&SF magazine that had been paying the best rates in the industry, the Sci-Fi channel's SciFiction, recently closed down.
Our concern wasn't particularly personal, since none of us were directly affected all that much. Baen Books' income as a publishing house comes almost entirely from novels, as does my income and Dave Drake's as writers—and the market for science fiction and fantasy novels is doing quite well nowadays.
Still, these difficult times for F&SF magazines has an impact on everyone in the field, indirectly if not directly. It's extremely damaging, and for two reasons—one which affects authors directly, the other which affects the readership base of the genre and therefore its future.
The absence of a large and vigorous market for short form fiction hammers authors directly. That's because it makes F&SF authors almost completely dependent on the novel market. And, while the novel market is and always will be intrinsically more lucrative than the short form market, it is also an extremely harsh environment for authors.
Why? Well, simplifying a lot, it's because of the fundamental economics involved. Novels, unlike washing machines and toasters and automobiles, are unique, each and every one of them. Not "unique" in the sense that they don't have generic similarities, but unique simply in the obvious fact that each and every story has to be different or nobody is going to want to read it.
When you walk onto the parking lot of an auto dealer, the last thing you want to hear the car dealer tell you is that "this car is unlike any other." Translation: it's a lemon. But when you walk into a bookstore, that's exactly what you want. A story that, at least in one way or another, is different from any other.
What that means, however, is that the book market is incredibly opaque. Even in the largest car dealership, there won't be more than a relative handful of models available to choose from. A dozen, let's say. Two dozen, at the most. Whereas any Barnes and Noble or Borders in the country is likely to have 100,000 different "models" in stock.
How are you supposed to choose between them? Well, you can't, that's all. What happens in the real world is that almost all book-buyers, except a small percentage of unusually adventurous ones, will stick almost all of the time to buying only those authors they are familiar with.
What this creates, willy-nilly, is a hierarchy among authors in the marketplace that is...
"Extreme," is the only word I can think of.
Everybody familiar with the publishing industry knows the basic facts of life:
All of a publisher's profits and about half of the operating expenses are covered by the sales of a small number of so-called "lead" writers. And it's a very small number of authors. In the case of Baen, not usually more than half a dozen. And even a big corporate publisher won't have more than a dozen or so lead writers.
Midlist writers generally do well to make a small profit for the publisher, or at least break even. Sales of their books—all told—cover the other half of operating expenses.
New writers, and first novels, generally lose money for a publisher.
Those are the cold, hard facts. What it means for authors is that developing a career is a very chancy business nowadays—and it was always chancy to begin with. Because what happens is that even after you get a first novel published, you still have to overcome what Mike Resnick calls "the fourth book hurdle."
The hurdle is this: A publisher will generally give a new author an average of three books to demonstrate if they can become lead writers. If they can't, they're out the door and the publisher will try a new writer to see if they might be able to do it.
Yes, it's heartless. But there's an underlying economic reality for that practice, it's not because publishers are being mean for the hell of it. It's simply a fact that, as a purely mathematical exercise in calculating profits, it makes real sense to toss writers overboard—even good ones, selling fairly decently—if doing so might improve your chances of grabbing the lead writer lottery ticket that generates Ye Big Bucks in novel publishing.
Granted, not all publishers are the same, and they don't all follow exactly the same practices. A midlist writer will sometimes find a smaller independent publisher like Baen or DAW a less unforgiving environment than most of the big corporate houses. And there are some big houses that make a genuine effort to cushion midlist writers against the cold realities of the marketplace. Still, for any commercial publisher, the underlying economics of novel publishing remain stark and unforgiving. "Make it big or die on the vine" is still the rule, even if an author can linger on the vine longer at one house than he or she might be able to at another.
Leaving aside issues of unfairness—and, no, it ain't fair, not even close—this reality has a negative impact on the field as a whole.
First, because it's incredibly wasteful. Not all writers develop their talents at a rapid pace, even leaving aside the fact that there's always a certain amount of pure luck involved. For every Heinlein, there's a Frank Herbert, who needed years to make it big. In today's environment, I'm not at all sure Herbert would have had that time—and we'd be short Dune as a result.
But it's also detrimental the other way around, because it places such pressure on lead writers that they very often react by becoming extremely conservative in what they write. Not all do, to be sure. I don't, and neither do a number of other lead writers. But even relatively adventurous lead writers stick most of the time to the tried and true approaches—and there are a lot of lead writers out there who are scared to death to vary at all from the type of story that enabled them to become lead writers in the first place.
In short, the situation is lousy—and the steady collapse of the paperback market is making it even worse. Mass market paperback sales today are probably half what they were a few years ago, and there's no sign I can see that that's going to turn around any time in the foreseeable future.
There's no magic in the real world, however much there may be in fantasy novels. The vanishing of SF paperbacks and magazines is due to profound changes in the economic and social structure of the Unites States. (And the rest of the world's industrial countries, to one degree or another.) Put simply, it's just the literary equivalent of the same dynami c that has seen McDon ald's and Burger King supplantin g thousands of independen t little diners and restaurant s, and has seen Home Depot and Lowe's replacing thousands of little hardware stores.
What's happened is that the big retail outlets essentially forced what had once been a sprawling distribution industry with almost five hundred separate companies in North America to consolidate into a handful of companies—and then told them they only wanted bestsellers. Within a few years, F&SF magazines began vanishing from everywhere except book superstores, and so did most paperback titles except for those written by bestselling authors.
To put it another way, the sales of most books and specialty magazines have imploded into the superstore book chains (Barnes & Noble, Border's, Books-a-Million, etc.) From the standpoint of hardcover sales, especially novels, that's been quite a good development. So if you publish a lot of novels, as is true for lead writers like myself and David Drake, you're doing fine. But it's a terrible situation for most midlist and new writers. Midlist writers working at novel length usually live and die on their ability to show they can do well in paperback, so a publisher will give them a shot at a hardcover. That was never easy at any time, and today it's gotten a lot worse.
In decades past, it was the size and health of the magazines that cushioned all of these problems. They allowed midlist writers a place they could keep getting published, gain perhaps slow but steady public recognition, and improve their skills—without being under the "fourth book" guillotine. And, while it was always very hard even in the salad days of the magazines for an author to make a full-time living as a short fiction writer (at least, unless you could sell to The Saturday Evening Post), they could bring in enough of an income to take a day job that allowed them as much freedom to write as possible.
On the flip side, the magazines provided lead writers with a place they could stretch their skills if they wanted to, without running the risk of falling off that precious lead writer sales plateau.
Okay, so much for the writers. Now I want to explain how the decline of short form fiction has been hammering the field as a whole.
It's not complicated. It's what's often called the "graying of science fiction." Put crudely and bluntly, the average age of science fiction and fantasy fans keeps rising. Once the quintessential genre of choice of teenagers, it's now a genre that's developed a great big middle-aged potbelly.
What do you expect—when the entry level purchase, nowadays, is likely to be a $25 hardcover? And, to make things worse, you have to drive an average of seven miles to get to a superstore that'll even carry a science fiction title at all? (And that's the national average. In some areas of the country, you have to drive a hundred miles or more.)
That's not how I got introduced to science fiction, as a twelve- year-old, I can tell you that. I got introduced through magazines and cheap Ace Double books on the wire racks of my local drugstore, in a small town in rural California. Which...
Don't exist any more. The books and magazines, I mean. The small town is still there, and so is the drug store—but it no longer carries any SF titles.
The problem isn't even the price of a paperback, as such. That hasn't actually risen any, over the past half a century, measured by the only price criterion that matters. To wit, today a paperback novel costs just about the same as a movie ticket. And, fifty years ago... it cost just about the same as a movie ticket did then.
No, the problem is availability. When I was a kid, SF magazines and paperbacks could be found all over the place. Today, with a few exceptions—and those, almost invariably, only a small number of top-selling authors—you can only find F&SF titles in bookstores, especially the chain superstores.
You can think whatever you want about this fundamental transformation of modern society. But facts are facts, and they are stubborn things. If you want to try to turn that situation around, with respect to our genre, you have to figure out a new approach.
Which, we think we have. Out of those discussions between the three of us in the fall of 2005, we developed the basic outline of a new business model for producing a major science fiction and fantasy magazine. The result was Jim Baen's Universe, and while we've refined the model in the light of practice since the first issue came out in June of 2006, the basic model has held steady.
Our strategy is to use the free entry and accessibility of the internet to substitute for the ready availability of paper editions of SF magazines in times past. This will be a big challenge, of course, because the electronic fiction market is still very small. But, by combining the advantages of electronic distribution with Baen's longstanding policies with regard to electronic publishing, we think we've got a good shot at pulling it off.
Essentially, what we're trying to do is circumvent the modern barriers to publishing short fiction in F&SF while paying good rates to authors—we pay the best rates in the industry to our writers—by taking advantage of two new factors in the equation:
The first, obviously, is the internet and the possibility for electronic publication. That eliminates, at one stroke, most of the tremendous costs and bottlenecks of distribution.
The second is that we continue with the magazine the same policies that Baen Books developed from the beginning of the internet era with respect to selling electronic books. Baen has always approached online publishing with a very different—almost diametrically opposed— philosophy than all major commercial publishers. The standard wisdom in the industry was that electronic publishing would be crippled by so-called "electronic piracy." As a result, all major commercial publishers except Baen adopted stringent encryption methods— what's generally called DRM, "digital rights management"—in order to combat electronic copyright infringement.
Jim Baen thought that was nonsense, and would have no effect except to strangle the electronic publishing industry while it was still in the crib. Instead, his publishing house adopted the following basic guidelines, from the very beginning:
1) Baen electronic titles would be published with no encryption.
2) Baen electronic titles would be sold cheaply. Depending on the package chosen by the customer—these range from monthly Webscriptions packages to the sale of individual titles—the cost per book would average somewhere between $2.50 and $6.00.
3) Baen would provide a hefty selection of sample chapters for every book, available for free online.
4) Baen would make available a large number of complete titles for free in the Baen Library.
The last two provisions are to enable online customers to do what customers in brick-and-mortar walk-in bookstores take for granted, which is being able to look through a book before buying it.
The end result was exactly what Jim expected. Baen's electronic sales today, adjusting for the number of titles produced, are far greater than those of other commercial publishers—and the royalties from electronic sales earned by Baen's authors are likewise far greater than those earned by authors from electronic titles produced by other publishing houses.
As a magazine, Jim Baen's Universe carries over all of those policies—and we added a new one. In order to make the magazine available to various categories of customers who suffer from particular pricing obstacles, we offer the magazine at steeply discounted subscription rates (as low as $6.00 a year for six issues) to the following people:
Jim Baen died in June of 2006, just a few weeks after the first issue of the magazine came out. His ashes were scattered, along with his mother's, at the roots of a southern red oak tree in David Drake's back yard, in a private ceremony that I attended along with a number of other people. By now, those ashes have long since vanished back into the universe that produced the man.
There is no memorial to him anywhere, outside of a small headstone at the base of the tree. But, as editor of the magazine, I like to think Universe is, if not a memorial for Jim, certainly something that continues his tradition.
If you enjoyed these stories, please consider subscribing to the magazine—or, better still, buying one or another level of membership in the Universe Club which supports it. You can do so simply by going online to:
www.baens-universe.com
Then, select "Subscribe" from the menu at the top.
You will be able to select from any one of several Club memberships, or select just an annual subscription ($30 for six issues), or one of the discounted subscriptions if you qualify.
As I write this afterword, Jim Baen's Universe has just successfully completed its first year of publication and we are preparing the June 2007 issue, which will inaugurate our second year. Join us!
Eric Flint
April, 2007