Talk:Baen Books/Web References

David Drake OBIT page
... ''with a proposal to start up a new company named Baen Books and provide Simon & Schuster with an SF line to distribute instead."JIM BAEN October 22, 1943 - June 28, 2006", Baen's obituary by David Drake, david-drake.com. Jim Baen called me on the afternoon of June 11. He generally phoned on weekends, and we'd usually talk a couple more times in the course of a week; but this was the last time.
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In the course of the conversation he said, "You've got to write my obituary, you know." I laughed (I'll get to that) and said, "Sure, if I'm around--but remember, I'm the one who rides the motorcycle."

So I'm writing this. Part of it's adapted from the profile I did in 2000 for the program book of the Chicago Worldcon at which Jim was Editor Guest of Honor. They cut my original title, which Jim loved: The God of Baendom. I guess they thought it was undignified and whimsical.

The title was undignified and whimsical. So was Jim.

James Patrick Baen was born October 22, 1943, on the Pennsylvania - New York border, a long way by road or in culture from New York City. He was introduced to SF early through the magazines in a step-uncle's attic, including the November, 1957, issue of Astounding with The Gentle Earth by Christopher Anvil.

The two books Jim most remembered as formative influences were Fire-Hunter by Jim Kjelgaard and Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C Clarke. The theme of both short novels is that a youth from a decaying culture escapes the trap of accepted wisdom and saves his people despite themselves. This is a fair description of Jim's life in SF: he was always his own man, always a maverick, and very often brilliantly successful because he didn't listen to what other people thought.

For example, the traditional model of electronic publishing required that the works be encrypted. Jim thought that just made it hard for people to read books, the worst mistake a publisher could make. His e-texts were clear and in a variety of common formats.

While e-publishing has been a costly waste of effort for others, Baen Books quickly began earning more from electronic sales than it did from Canada. By the time of Jim's death, the figure had risen to ten times that.

Jim didn't forget his friends. In later years he arranged for the expansion of Fire-Hunter so that he could republish it (as The Hunter Returns, originally the title of the Charles R Knight painting Jim put on the cover).

Though Clarke didn't need help to keep his books in print the way Kjelgaard did, Jim didn't forget him either. Jim called me for help a week before his stroke, because Amazon.com had asked him to list the ten SF novels that everyone needed to read to understand the field. Against the Fall of Night was one of the titles that we settled on.

Jim's father died at age fifty; he and his stepfather didn't warm to one another. Jim left home at 17 and lived on the streets for several months, losing weight that he couldn't at the time afford. He enlisted in the army as the only available alternative to starving to death.

Jim spent his military career in Bavaria where he worked for the Army Security Agency as a Morse Code Intercept Operator, monitoring transmissions from a Soviet callsign that was probably a armored corps. One night he determined that 'his' Soviet formation was moving swiftly toward the border. This turned out to be an unannounced training exercise--but if World War III had broken out in 1960, Jim would've been the person who announced it.

Jim entered CCNY on the GI Bill and became a Hippie. Among other jobs he managed a Greenwich Village coffee house, sometimes acting as barker as well: ‘Come in and see tomorrow's stars today!' None of the entertainers became tomorrow's stars, but that experience of unabashed huckstering is part of the reason that Jim himself did.

Jim's first job in publishing was as an assistant in the Complaints Department of Ace Books. He was good at it--so good that management tried to promote him to running the department. He turned the offer down, however, because he really wanted to be an SF editor.

In 1973 Jim was hired at Galaxy and If magazines when Judy-Lynn Benjamin left. He became assistant to Ejler Jakobson, who with Bernie Williams taught Jim the elements of slash and burn editing.

Unfortunately, this was a necessary skill for an editor in Jim's position. The publisher wasn't in a hurry to pay authors, so established writers who could sell elsewhere preferred to do so. Galaxy and If published a lot of first stories and not a few rejects by major names. Material like that had to be edited for intelligibility and the printer's deadline, not nuances of prose style.

Apart from basic technique Jim had very little to learn from his senior, who shortly thereafter left to pursue other opportunities. Jim's first act as editor was to recall stories that his predecessor had rejected over Jim's recommendation. When in later years I thanked him for retrieving the first two Hammer stories, Jim responded, ''Oh, David--Jake rejected much better stories than yours!" (Among them was Ursula K LeGuin's Nebula winner, The Day Before the Revolution .)

Ace Books, in many ways the standard bearer of SF paperback publishing in the Fifties, had fallen on hard times in the Seventies. Charter Communications bought the company and installed Tom Doherty as publisher. Tom hired Jim to run the SF line. The first thing the new team did was to pay Ace's back (and in some cases, way back) royalties. By the time the famous SFWA audit of Ace Books was complete, the money had already been paid to the authors; a matter of some embarrassment to the SFWA officers who were aware of the facts.

Ace regained its position as an SF line where readers could depend on getting a good story. (To Homer, that was the essence of art; not all writers and editors of more recent times would have agreed.) As well as pleasing readers, the Ace SF line made money for the company; unfortunately (due to decisions from far above the level of publisher) SF came to be the only part of the company that did make money. Tom left Ace in 1980, founded Tor Books, and hired Jim to set up the Tor SF line.

Which Jim did, following the same pattern that had revived Ace: a focus on story and a mix of established authors with first-timers whom Jim thought just might have what it took. It worked again.

In fact it worked so well that when Simon and Schuster went through a series of upheavals in its Pocket Books line in 1983, management decided to hire Jim as their new SF editor. Jim thought about the offer, then made a counter-offer: with the backing of two friends, he would form a separate company which would provide S&S with an SF line to distribute. S&S agreed and Baen Books was born.

Jim used the same formulas with his new line as he had at Ace and Tor, and again he succeeded. If that were easy, then past decades wouldn't be littered with the detritus of so many other people's attempts to do the same thing.

Even more than had been the case at Ace and Tor, Jim was his own art director at Baen Books--and he really directed rather than viewing his job as one of coddling artists. Baen Books gained a distinct look. Like the book contents, the covers weren't to everyone's taste--but they worked.

Jim had the advantage over some editors in that he knew what a story is. He had the advantage over most editors in being able to spot talent before somebody else had published it. (Lois Bujold, Eric Flint, John Ringo and Dave Weber were all Baen discoveries whom Jim promoted to stardom.)

Furthermore, he never stopped developing new writers. The week before his stroke, Jim bought a first novel from a writer whom Baen Books had been grooming through short stories over the past year.

The most important thing of all which Jim brought to his company was a personal vision. Baen Books didn't try to be for everybody, but it wa s always true to itself. In that as in so many other ways, the company mirrored Jim himself.

When Jim called me on June 11, he told me he was dying. I thought he was simply having a bad interaction among prescription drugs. Though the stroke that killed him occurred the next day in hospital, Jim was right and I was wrong--again.

After that opening, Jim said, "I'm just going to say it: we've known each other all these years and you seem to like me. Why?"

That's a hell of a thing to be hit with out of the blue. Jim had always known that he was socially awkward and that he not infrequently rubbed people the wrong way, but it wasn't something we discussed. (And it's obviously not a subject on which I could be of much help.)

If I'd been a different person, I'd have started out by listing the things he did right: for example, that I'd never met a more loving father than Jim was to his children (Jessica Baen, 29, Jim's daughter with Madeline Gleich, and Katherine Baen, 14, Jim's daughter with Toni Weisskopf). Being me, I instead answered the question a number of us ask ourselves: "How can you like a person who's behaved the way you know I have?" I said that his flaws were childish ones, tantrums and sulking; not, never in my experience, studied cruelty. He agreed with that.

And then I thought further and said that when I was sure my career was tanking--

" You thought that? When was that?"

In the mid '90s, I explained, when Military SF was going down the tubes with the downsizing of the military. But when I was at my lowest point, which was very low, I thought, "I can write two books a year. And Jim will pay me $20K apiece for them--"

"I'd have paid a lot more than that!"

And I explained that this wasn't about reality: this was me in the irrational depths of real depression. And even when I was most depressed and most irrational, I knew in my heart that Jim Baen would pay me enough to keep me alive, because he was that sort of person. He'd done that for Keith Laumer whom he disliked, because Laumer had been an author Jim looked for when he was starting to read SF.

I could not get so crazy and depressed that I didn't trust Jim Baen to stand by me if I needed him. I don't know a better statement than that to sum up what was important about Jim, as a man and as a friend.

--Dave Drake

Toni Weisskopf and Dave suggest that people who wish to make a memorial donation purchase copies of THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN and donate them to libraries or teenagers of their acquaintance.

The Legacy of Jim Baen
The Editor's Page, 2 Vol 1 Num 2: August 2006 Columns The Editor's Page August 2006

Written by Eric Flint

The Legacy of Jim Baen

My original plans for this issue's "The Editor's Page" got swept aside last month by the death of Jim Baen, the man who launched the magazine and whose name is—and will remain—on the masthead. Jim lived just long enough to see the first issue of the magazine come out on June 1. Less than two weeks later, on June 12th, he suffered a massive stroke from which he never recovered consciousness. He died on June 28th.

That's not much of a consolation, but it's some. This magazine was important to Jim for several reasons, one of which I will spend most of this editorial discussing. He was only sixty-two years old when he died, after a life of many accomplishments, of which Universe was one.

And by no means the smallest, either. For Jim, the magazine was both a return to his own origins—he was the editor of Galaxy back in the mid-seventies, early in his career—and a continuation and expansion of a policy he had made central to Baen Books since the onset of the electronic era. That was his complete and total opposition to so-called Digital Rights Management and all the panoply of laws, regulations and attitudes that surround it. One of the reasons he asked me to be the editor of Jim Baen's Universe is because he knew I shared, in full, his hostility toward DRM. He wanted Universe, among other things, to be a showcase demonstrating that it was perfectly possible for a commercial publisher to be successful without soiling themselves with DRM. ("Soiling" is the genteel way to put it. Jim was far more likely, in private correspondence and conversation, to use a simpler Anglo-Saxon term.)

There are a lot of ways you can examine Jim Baen's life and his career. I spent some time thinking about how I would handle it, in this editorial. In the end, I decided I would concentrate simply on this one aspect of the man's legacy. Partly that was because I couldn't see where anything I could say in a general obituary would add anything to what David Drake already said in his superb one—which we are including in this issue of the magazine. And partly it's because I think talking about Jim's general accomplishments as an editor and publisher would fall in the category of hauling coal to Newcastle. Even leaving aside Dave Drake's obituary, many other people by now have said or written a great deal on the subject. Locus magazine's cover story this month is on Jim's life, with appreciations by people who'd known him for many years and worked with him, such as Tom Doherty, Lois McMaster Bujold, Harry Turtledove, David Weber and others.

So, I decided I would concentrate on just this one aspect of his life.

Jim's hostility to Digital Rights Management, along with the alternative approach to it which he developed as a publisher, will in my opinion eventually be accepted as his single most important legacy. It will take years before we know, but I firmly believe the eventual historical verdict will be that Jim Baen was a central figure in the fight to prevent giant corporations from hijacking humanity's common intellectual heritage in the name of "defending copyright from infringement."

Jim had many other accomplishments to his credit—but this is the one, and the only one, in which he played a unique role. As an editor, he was excellent, true enough. But there are other excellent editors. As a publisher, he carved out his own approach to fantasy and science fiction, which is in many ways quite distinct. But there's a difference between "distinct" and "unique."

There are other excellent F&SF publishers, too, as Jim would be the first to agree. And if none of them had exactly his emphasis, there was always a lot of overlap. Many titles published by Baen Books could easily have been published by another house, and vice versa.

But in his fight against DRM, Jim stood alone as a publisher. No other commercial publisher, so far at least, has done more than slide a toe into the DRM-free waters that Jim cheerfully bathed in for many years—and, in doing so, demonstrated in practice that all the propaganda that its advocates advance to justify the increasingly Draconian nature of DRM is, in addition to everything else, so much hogwash even on the practical level of a publishing house's profits and losses.

Here are the facts. They are simple ones, because Jim Baen made them so:

1) All Baen titles that are produced in electronic format are made available to the public through Baen's Webscription service, cheaply and with no encryption. That policy stands in direct opposition to that of all other commercial publishers, who insist not only on encrypting their e-books but usually making them ridiculously expensive as well.

2) That policy has been maintained now for seven years, uninterrupted, since Webscriptions was launched in September of 1999. Month after month, year after year, Baen has sold e-books through Webscriptions using this simple formula: "We'll sell e-books cheaply and unencrypted."

3) Baen earns more income as a publisher and pays its authors more in the way of royalty payments from Webscriptions than any other outlet for electronic books. Typically, a popular Baen author—I'll use myself as the example—will receive royalties from electronic sales that are well into four figures. Granted, that's still a small percentage of my income as a writer, but that's a given since the electronic market is so small. The fact remains, however, that as a percentage of my income, the royalties from electronic sales of my books are higher—considerably higher—than the overall sales of all e-books represent as a percentage of the entire book market.

4) The difference between the level and amount of these royalties and those paid by other publishers, who are still addicted to DRM, is stark. Actually, "stark" is the polite way of putting it. The more accurate way of stating this reality is that the royalties paid by other publishers in the way of e-book sales are derisively low.

I will give you two examples:

In one royalty period, from a major publisher who was not Baen Books—that was Tor Books, generally considered the most important publisher in the field—David Drake once earned $36,000 in royalties for the paper edition of a popular title, Lord of the Isles. The electronic royalties from that same book, during that same period, came to $28.

That's right. Twenty-eight dollars. Less than one-tenth of one percent of his paper royalties—where a Baen title, typically, will pay electronic royalties that are somewhere in the range of five percent or more, measured against paper royalties.

Five percent is still small, of course. As I said, that simply reflects the small size of the e-book market. But five percent reflects market reality, where one-tenth of one percent reflects nothing more than the absurdity of DRM—even on the practical level of making money for publishers and authors.

The second example, from my own experience, is not quite as extreme. My novel 1812: The Rivers of War was published by Del Rey, another of the major F&SF corporate publishing houses. In the first royalty report, Del Rey reported sales of the hardcover edition at slightly over ten thousand copies with earnings for the author of $27,810.65. The electronic sales for the same edition came to one hundred and twenty copies, with earnings of $545.30.

Translating that into percentage terms, again, that means that the electronic sales were two percent of the paper sales, in terms of money, and one percent in terms of actual sales. That's quite a bit below what Baen would have sold, but it begins to approach the ballpark.

I can't prove it, because I don't have access to the detailed records, but I'm pretty sure the difference between my sales and David's were due to the fact that several years elapsed between the two books coming out, over the course of which time other publishers were influenced by Jim Baen's policies. Del Rey agreed, after I requested it, to make at least one version of the electronic edition of Rivers of War available in an unencrypted format—something which I'm sure they wouldn't have done a few years earlier. The e-book was still grossly overpriced—they charged $17.95 for it, where Baen would have charged between $2.50 and $5.00—but it wasn't encrypted.

Before I move on, I should take the time to make clear that the problem here doesn't usually lie with the editors and managing staff of other publishing houses. All of these people, who have a hands-on relationship to fantasy and science fiction publishing, knew Jim Baen as a colleague and were often friends of his. In the case of Tom Doherty, who runs Tor Books, a very old and close friend. They followed what he was doing carefully. And, far more than the abstract arguments advanced in this debate by such vocal opponents of DRM as myself or Cory Doctorow or Charlie Stross, it was Jim's ability to demonstrate in practice that his alternative worked that made the key difference.

More and more often, the editors and managing staff of other F&SF publishing houses are starting to turn in Jim's direction. Or trying to, at least. The problem they run into, however, is that where Jim ran his own publishing house, the others are usually owned by large corporations—and, as is almost always the case, at the level of top executives of major corporations, DRM is considered Holy Writ.

Still, it's progress—and all of it was made possible by Jim Baen. It was his position as a commercial publisher that made him unique in the anti-DRM movement. That's because while an individual author who rejects DRM might risk as much as Jim, in the way of lost income, they simply can't prove their claim the way he could.

What an individual author does, however valuable, is one thing. What the head of a major publishing house does, is something else entirely. Today, measured in terms of titles produced every month, Baen Books is the second most important paper publisher in science fiction, after Tor Books. (A reality that is recently being reflected in Locus polls, I notice, whose readers are now listing Baen as their second most popular publisher.) And it is, easily, the pre-eminent F&SF publisher in the electronic market.

Having that publisher on your side of a debate as important to the public and far-ranging in its implications as the fight over DRM makes a huge difference. In fact, it makes a qualitative difference. Individual authors can be dismissed; lawyers can be dismissed; political pundits and theorists can be dismissed; anyone can be dismissed—except another publisher. Jim Baen was in a position to prove what others like myself could only argue; or, at best, demonstrate by such things as making many of my titles available for free in electronic format.

I've done that for years now, as have a number of Baen authors like David Drake, David Weber, John Ringo and others. Some other authors, who don't publish through Baen, have done much the same. Two examples are Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross; there are others.

About two-thirds of all my titles are available for free to the public in the Baen Free Library, which we opened in December 2000, not much more than a year after the start of Webscriptions. True enough, I can use that fact to demonstrate that a consistent anti-DRM policy followed by an individual author does not cause the sky to fall. To give perhaps the clearest example, my most popular title is 1632. It has been available for free in electronic format to the public for five years now—and the book has never suffered any decline in sales during that time period. Year after year, despite being available for free as an e-book, the paper edition sells about fifteen thousand copies. That figure fluctuates a bit from one year to the next, of course, but there is no overall downward trend at all. The standard rule of thumb in the industry is that 80% of a book's sales happen in the first three months after publication. But in the case of 1632, sixty percent of the book's sales have come since the first year it came out—during which period the book was always available to the public for free in electronic format.

Impressive, yes. But, in the end, it's really just a stunt. That's about all an individual author can do. Putting my most popular title up for free to the public was my literary equivalent of Evel Knevel jumping over twenty cars on a motorcycle. I did it to demonstrate, as graphically and daringly as possible, that people who worry about the so-called "threat of online piracy" are being spooked by shadows.

Stunts have the great value of drawing a lot of public attention, but the problem is that most people figure they're just that—stunts.

Who knows? The fact that it worked for one author doesn't mean it would work for others, much less all authors. Just as the fact that people will marvel at Evel Knevel's ability to jump over twenty cars on a motorcycle doesn't make them in the least bit inclined to follow his lead. Many of them also know, after all, that in the course of his dare-devil career Evel Knevel broke just about every bone in his body.

But what Jim did wasn't a stunt. All the arguments that people can and do marshal against me, such as:

— you're just lucky;

—you would have been popular anyway, regardless of the free e-books; in fact, they may have cut into your sales and you prospered despite them;

—yadda yadda yadda. ..

Simply can't be made against Jim Baen, because what Jim did wasn't a series of stunts, it was a major publishing house's policy.

In the end, the Free Library is an excellent demonstration of some truths, but it doesn't prove anything. What does prove something is the much more mundane, even—by now—humdrum, regular sales of all its e-books through Webscriptions done by Baen Books.

Year after year, month after month, Baen Books keeps proving that DRM is, in addition to everything else, a liability for a commercial publisher. All the arguments that can be advanced against me—or David Drake, or Cory Doctorow, or Charlie Stross—simply can't be advanced again Baen. That's because it all evens out in the wash, when you're dealing with a major publisher's policy.

If someone insists that I probably would have done well anyway, I can point out that all of Baen's authors do better in electronic sales through Baen's Webscriptions than anyone else.

What? Are we all "lucky"?

If someone insists that Cory Doctorow's policies with regard to DRM prove nothing because Cory doesn't make most of his income as an author, I can simply point out that all of Baen's authors do better in the electronic market than other authors do. And not one of them has an equivalent to Cory's very popular Boing Boing web site, and many of them—including me—do in fact depend on writing for their entire income.

For years, I've danced about and done my best to draw public attention to the issue, like a virtual Gene Kelly. Nor was that work unimportant, because it did in fact get a lot of publicity. Business Week's online magazine ran an article on me, and I was once invited to attend—all expenses paid—an international conference in London on the subject of electronic publishing.

But I could only do it—and it only made a big difference—because I had Jim Baen at my side. I could dance, but he could hammer. And hammer, and hammer, and hammer, and hammer, like a blacksmith at his trade.

Which, in the end, is what he was. And when the day finally comes, as I believe it will, that the American public decisively repudiates DRM and demands that giant corporations cease and desist from their efforts to lock up society's intellectual heritage for their own private gain, the world will look back and recognize Jim Baen as the man who, more than any other, forged that outcome. Not by words, but by deeds.



One last thing. In a jocular manner, in the course of an email exchange we were having on the subject of DRM, Jim once called me "Baen's bulldog." The reference, to those familiar with the history of evolution, is to Darwin's most forceful and popular advocate, Thomas Henry Huxley.

Jim was joking. . . mostly. And I responded in kind, at the time. But there was an underlying seriousness to the statement, and we both knew it. Leave aside the humor, and it was true.

And still is. Jim Baen is gone. The bulldog remains—and I intend to continue using this magazine the way Jim wanted me to. Among other things, as a bully pulpit for explaining to the public that DRM is a serious and deep threat to the liberties of the American population and that of the world as a whole. And that a clear and practical alternative exists, created and maintained by Jim Baen, that guts all the claims made by DRM advocates that their anti-democratic policies are essential for the preservation of copyright and the livelihood of authors, artists, and other intellectual creators.

The reason I will be able to do that illustrates another part of Jim's legacy. The difference between what an author like myself can advocate and demonstrate, and what a publisher can do, is that the latter leaves behind an institutional framework where the former does not.

There will be no change in Baen Books' policy, now that Jim is dead.

First, because there is no reason to change the policy. It works, and it works well.

Secondly, because—like all successful policies—Jim's has left behind a coherent and organized vested interest, in the form of a staff that is accustomed and comfortable with his policies, and, just as important, a large fan base that is also comfortable and accustomed to it.

People usually use the term "vested interest" as a pejorative, but that's just silly. It all depend on whether the interest being vested is a good one or not. Democracy, after all, is also a "vested interest"—and it becomes more difficult to undermine or destroy, the more thoroughly rooted it becomes.

So it is with Jim's anti-DRM policies. By now, even if the incoming management wanted to change those policies—which it has no intention of doing, I can assure you—they would find it so damaging to Baen's financial interests that they would shy away from even thinking about it. The uproar from the very large fan base that Baen Books has created for Jim's policies with regard to electronic publication—which, I will point out, is so far the one and only clearly defined "vested interest" that can be matched against the vested interests of music recording and movie industry executives and their powerful lobbies—would be enormous.

That, too, is Jim's legacy. Thousands of regular readers—and buyers—of electronic books whom he created as a vested interest in the right way to handle the challenges of the electronic era for the publishing industry.



I asked Jim to read and approve all of the editorials I wrote in my Salvoes Against Big Brother column. I did that because, although I am listed as the author of those essays, I considered Jim to be the co-author of them in all but name.

He was able to read and approve the first three of those essays. With regard to the first, he sent me the following email:

''Hi. I've read both. The DRM one has my enthusiastic approval, and you certainly did not say anything I don't agree with.''

He gave me his verbal agreement to the second and third essays, one of which appears in this issue and the other will appear in the next. That was in the course of a telephone conversation that may have been the last one I ever had with him. If not, certainly one of the last.

He won't be able to read the ones that will come after. I don't believe in an afterlife, and neither did Jim. But if we're both proven wrong, whatever other problems I may face in that life-after-death, I'm not at all worried that Jim's shade won't be pleased by the rest of what I have to say.