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Jim Baen | |
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Born | James Patrick Baen (1943-10-22)October 22, 1943 Pennsylvania |
Died | June 28, 2006(2006-06-28) (aged 62) |
Occupation(s) | Science fictionpublisher andeditor |
James Patrick Baen (| beɪn |; October 22, 1943 – June 28, 2006) was aU.S.science fictionpublisher andeditor. In 1983, he founded his ownpublishing house,Baen Books, specializing in the adventure,fantasy,military science fiction, andspace operagenres. Baen also founded the video game publisher, Baen Software.[1] In late 1999, he started anelectronic publishing business called Webscriptions (since renamed toBaen Ebooks), which is considered to be the first profitablee-book vendor.[citation needed]
Jim Baen was born inPennsylvania. He left his stepfather's home at the age of 17 and lived on the streets for several months before joining theUnited States Army; he served inBavaria.
After stints atCity College of New York and as the manager of afolk musiccoffee shop (a "basket house") inGreenwich Village in the 1960s, he started his publishing career in the complaints department ofAce Books. In 1972, he got the job of an assistantGothics editor.[2]
Baen wasJudy-Lynn del Rey's replacement as managing editor atGalaxy Science Fiction in 1973. He succeededEjler Jakobsson as editor ofGalaxy andIf in 1974. While atGalaxy (which absorbedIf from 1975) he largely revitalised it, publishing such authors asJerry Pournelle,Charles Sheffield,Joanna Russ,Spider Robinson,Algis Budrys, andJohn Varley, and was nominated for severalHugo Awards.
Pournelle, in 1983, described Baen as "arguably one of the best science-fiction editors in the world. CertainlyLarry Niven and I regard him among the top two or three we've ever worked with".[3]Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novelThe Cat Who Walks Through Walls toBaen and eight of the other members of theCitizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.[4][5]
In 1977, he returned to Ace to head their science fiction line, working with publisherTom Doherty. When Doherty left to startTor Books in 1980, Baen shortly followed and started the SF line there.
In 1983, he had the opportunity to start his own independent company,Baen Books, distributed then and now byPocket Books/Simon & Schuster; this was possible in part thanks to release from a long-term contract by his good friend Doherty.
Baen Books has grown steadily since and established a large readership among fans of accessible adventure SF, publishing books by authors such asDavid Weber,John Ringo,Eric Flint,David Drake,Lois McMaster Bujold,Elizabeth Moon,Mercedes Lackey,Larry Niven, and many more. According to Eric Flint's "Editor's Page" column just after Baen's death, once-tiny Baen Books had been voted the second most looked for "label" among science fiction fans – up from fourth in 2004 and seventh in 2003. The rapid growth was credited as being due to Jim Baen's electronic marketing strategy – by seeming to court piracy, ignoring encryption, and giving away free titles onCD-ROM (See"Electronic marketing strategy" underBaen Books), by offering bundled "bargain samplers" ande-ARCs – Baen's e-marketing pulled in sales. People could sample the wares, decide they liked it, and pick up a tangible book to read – which given the series orientation of the SF genre, translated into more than one book. In short, even as the average small town library is trimming titles carried and stocking up on audio-visual media, Baen took advantage of technology to counteract the former "boost" gotten from libraries buying titles and keeping them around.
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 quality that Jim brought to his company was a personal vision. Baen Books didn't try to be for everybody, but it was always true to itself. In that as in so many other ways, the company mirrored Jim himself.[6]
Baen edited severalanthology series inpaperback format, trying to combine the feeling of an anthology and a magazine. To achieve this, they were numbered and dated like a magazine and contained many magazine features:Destinies (Ace, 11 issues 1978-81),Far Frontiers (Baen, 7 issues 1985-6), andNew Destinies (Baen, 8 issues numbered I to IV and VI to IX 1987-90). He also edited several volumes of reprints fromGalaxy andIf in the 1970s.
After hearing Pournelle praise writing with a computer, Baen purchased anIBM PC in the early 1980s. Disliking the layout of theIBM PC keyboard, he commissioned and published Magic Keyboard, a utility to remap its keys.[3] Baen started an experimentalweb publishing business called Webscriptions in late 1999. (It was relaunched asBaen Ebooks at the start of 2012.) Unlike other eBook publishers, Baen flatly refused to use encryption or even Adobe'sPortable Document Format (PDF), regardingdigital rights management (DRM) as harmful not just to readers but also to authors and publishers. This stance was quite controversial at the time, but Baen Book's hardcover sales numbers have soared in direct relation to the number of titles available as inexpensive e-books, while the competition's remained flat or declined in the same period. As another measure, in comparison, e-royalties paid by Baen run circa 5% of a hardcover royalty over the same period, other publishers have paid out less than 1% comparatively on average — typical period numbers are a difference of four figures to two figures in e-royalties.[7]Critics at the time also dismissed the e-book market as too small. Instead, it is one of the few such enterprises that regularly turn a profit, breaking even in its first year.
These innovations earned him respect in the technological community, and increasing disbelief in the publishing trade with perhaps the best comment of all – others began to mimic him, or place e-titles with Webscriptions themselves. One such title was even offered by Webscriptions using the despised (by J. Baen) Adobe PDF format, at its publishers insistence. Webscriptions is generally considered to be both the firste-books-for-money service whose product completely lacksencryption (in fact, Webscriptions makes each book available in a wide range of openly readable formats) and one of the first e-book publishing services to become profitable. (Indeed, it broke even in its first year and is likely the most profitable such service). In the words ofDavid Drake, a writer with more than fifty books published:
The two books Jim most remembered as formative influences wereFire-Hunter byJim Kjelgaard andAgainst the Fall of Night byArthur C Clarke. The theme of both short novels is 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 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.[6]
Along with Webscriptions, Baen created theBaen Free Library, where authors can make books available free of charge in the hope of attracting new readers. Though some scoffed at the idea of the free library, giving away ebooks turned out to increase sales.
Baen's e-books did not useencryption or DRM. Baen was an outspoken opponent of DRM, regarding it as harmful to publishers and authors as well as readers.[citation needed]
With his death, many other publishers have come to agree with his methods and principles. His stance on DRM is considered to still have been the most extreme among mainstream publishers, but has grown in credibility over time.[citation needed]Eric Flint, who has been called "Baen's Bulldog" on the DRM/Copy protection controversy[citation needed] believes that Jim Baen's legacy will be the impact on the DRM issue, and that Baen will have saved society from the rapaciousness of big corporations because Jim Baen had the courage of convictions to spit in the face of encryption, and moreover, prove that non-encrypted, non-DRM-protected intellectual materials actually give a sales boost—exactly the opposite of the conventional wisdom.[7]
Jim Baen was very active on theweb forum of the Baen website, calledBaen's Bar, which he started in May 1997; his interests includedevolutionary biology,space technology,politics,military history, andpuns.
Baen's activity on the forums led toJohn Ringo becoming a published novelist. Ringo was a longtime participant in Baen's Bar and had gotten to know Baen by discussing topics like theaquatic ape hypothesis. Although his novelA Hymn Before Battle had been rejected, he mentioned he had submitted it and it had been rejected when Baen told him the manuscript had been lost. Baen took a look at the manuscript, fired the reader who had rejected it, and told Ringo that if he made certain edits, Baen would buy it.[8]
Another result of such interaction is that the barflies, the customers frequenting the site, actually talked Jim Baen into charging more for the e-book variation on the publishing trades'advance reading copy — (sampler packages of five books) the house was offering callede-ARCs ("Advanced Reader Copies", emphasis on benefit to the "Reader"). Jim Baen would have been glad to break even on the e-biz, for he was firmly convinced the increased exposure would lead to increased sales, and it took only three years to prove it beyond much doubt, and about as long before even the competition could no longer deny the successes.
In 2000, Baen was the editor guest of honor atChicon 2000, that year'sWorldcon. With the interest shown in Flint's1632 series, he set up a second talk forum for the new writer, one specialized to the buzz of1632-verse called1632 Tech Manual. The fans wanted a sequel "yesterday", the research was daunting, so he advised fledgling writers to open up the universe, to make it ashared universe long before the "normal point" in a fictional universe life-cycle; Flint was willing to gamble, and the result wasRing of Fire. Meanwhile, Baen had paired best-selling authorDavid Weber with the emerging mid-list author Flint in a five-book contract, and the resulting1633 created a new cycle of buzz and interest.
Flint suggested creating an e-zine to carry some of thefan fiction submitted forRing of Fire or created subsequently. Baen took the risk, adapting hise-ARC system and Webscriptions for a magazine format. The result wasThe Grantville Gazettes. Baen Books subsequently published some of the stories ashardcopy anthologies; the fourth of those volumes was the last book Baen bought from Flint.
In late 2005 Baen announced plans for a bimonthly onlinescience fiction magazine, which was originally namedBaen's Astounding Stories. After concerns overtrademark infringement withDell Magazines (publisher ofAnalog Science Fiction and Fact, which was originally titledAstounding Stories), it was renamedJim Baen's Universe. The magazine, edited byEric Flint, published its first issue in June 2006, authors contracted includingDavid Drake andTimothy Zahn.
In August 2009,Baen's Universe announced that they would be closing down the magazine due to financial issues, stating "we were simply never able to get and retain enough subscribers to put us on a sales plateau that would allow us to continue publishing".[9]
Jim Baen had two daughters, Jessica (1977) with his wife of sixteen years,Madeline Gleich, and Katherine (1992) withToni Weisskopf.[10] He apparently had a premonition of his own death[11] and suffered a massive bilateralthalamusstroke on June 12, 2006. He died on June 28 atRaleigh, North Carolina, without again regaining consciousness.[12][13] According to Flint, he did get to see the first issue of his magazine before dying.