Jim Baen

Infobox Person
name = James Patrick "Jim" Baen


image_size = 140px
caption =
birth_date = birth date|1943|10|22
birth_place = Pennsylvania
death_date = death date and age|2006|06|28|1943|10|22
death_place = Raleigh, North Carolina
other_names =
known_for =
occupation = Science fiction Publisher and Editor

James Patrick "Jim" Baen (October 22, 1943 Pennsylvania – June 28, 2006 Raleigh, North Carolina) was a noted U.S. science fiction (SF) publisher and editor. In 1983 he founded his own publishing house, Baen Books, specializing in the adventure, fantasy, military science fiction and space opera genres. In late 1999 he started an electronic publishing business called Webscriptions, considered to be the first profitable e-book vendor despite not using encryption or Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Baen was an outspoken opponent of DRM, regarding it as harmful to publishers and authors as well as readers. He flatly refused to use encryption or even Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and was quite vocal in lambasting e-copy protection in any form as an act that was cutting the throat of any publisher that adopted it. This stance was quite controversial at the time, but after seven years, other publishers are adopting the same policy, and 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. [cite web
title=The Legacy of Jim Baen
date=Jim Baen's Universe, 2 Vol 1 Num 2: August 2006
url=http://baens-universe.com/articles/ed2
accessdate=2007-12-01
author=Eric Flint
quote=I will give you two examples:I5In 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.I5

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.I5

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.I5

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.I5

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.]

He was considered a controversial figure during his own lifetime, often due to his own personal style. However, with his passing, 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. Eric Flint, who has been called "Baen's Bulldog" on the DRM/Copy protection controversy 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. [cite web
title=The Legacy of Jim Baen
date=Jim Baen's Universe, 2 Vol 1 Num 2: August 2006
url=http://baens-universe.com/articles/ed2
accessdate=2007-12-01
note=synopses/summary of much of this essay --improve it if you can]

Biography

Jim Baen left his stepfather's home at the age of 17 and lived on the streets for several months before joining the United States Army where he served in Bavaria.

After stints at City College of New York and as the manager of a folk music coffee shop (a "basket house") in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, he started his publishing career in the complaints department of Ace Books. In 1972 he got the job of an assistant Gothics editor. [ The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction]

Magazine editor

Baen was Judy-Lynn del Rey's replacement as managing editor at "Galaxy Science Fiction" in 1973. He succeeded Ejler Jakobsson as editor of "Galaxy" and "If" in 1974. While at "Galaxy" (which absorbed "If" from 1975) he largely revitalised it, publishing such authors as Jerry Pournelle, Charles Sheffield, Joanna Russ, Spider Robinson, Algis Budrys, and John Varley, and was nominated for several Hugo Awards.

Robert Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Baen and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy. [cite book | author=Heinlein, Robert A | title=The Cat Who Walks Through Walls | publisher=New England Library | year=1986 | id=ISBN 0-450-39315-1] [ [http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/dedications.html Heinlein’s Dedications Page Jane Davitt & Tim Morgan Accessed August 20 2008] ]

Book publishing

In 1977 he returned to Ace to head their science fiction line, working with publisher Tom Doherty. When Doherty left to start Tor 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 by Pocket 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 as David 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 in recent years is credited being due to Jim Baen's visionary electronic marketing strategy — by seeming to court piracy, ignoring encryption and by giving away free titles on CDROM (See "Electronic marketing strategy" under Baen Books), by offering bundled "bargain samplers" and e-ARCs — Baen's e-marketing pulled in sales. People could sample the wares, decide they liked it, and picked 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.

cquote
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 was always true to itself. In that as in so many other ways, the company mirrored Jim himself. [ [http://david-drake.com/baen.html "JIM BAEN October 22, 1943 - June 28, 2006"] , Baen's obituary by David Drake, david-drake.com.]

Book experiments

Baen edited several anthology series, 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 Futures" (Baen, 7 issues 1985-6), and "New Destinies" (Baen, 8 issues numbered I to IV and VI to IX 1987-90). He also edited several volumes of reprints from "Galaxy" and "If" in the 1970s.

Baen started an experimental web publishing business called Webscriptions in late 1999 and also the Baen Free Library, where authors can make books available free of charge in the hope of attracting new readers. Some writers scoffed at the idea of the free library, and most observers dismissed the e-book market as too small or claimed that without copy protection it would fail. Instead, it is one of the few such enterprises which regularly turn a profit, breaking even its first year. Giving away books in the free library turned out to increase sales (to many authors' delight) — people liked taking the car out for a spin before dishing out hard earned money.

Jim Baen was very active on the web forum of the Baen website, called Baen's Bar, which he started in May 1997; his interests included evolutionary biology, space technology, politics, military history, and puns. One amusing 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 called e-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.

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 first e-books-for-money service whose product completely lacks encryption (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 likely the most profitable such service). In the words of David Drake, a writer with more than fifty books published:

cquote|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. [ [http://david-drake.com/baen.html "JIM BAEN October 22, 1943 - June 28, 2006"] , Baen's obituary by David Drake, david-drake.com.]

The last half-decade

In 2000, he was the editor guest of honor at Chicon 2000, that year's Worldcon. With the interest shown in Flint's 1632 series, he set up a second talk forum for the new writer, one specialized to the buzz of 1632-verse called 1632 Tech Manual. The fans wanted a sequel, "yesterday", the research was daunting, so he advised the fledgling writer to open up the universe, to make it a shared universe long before the "normal point" in a fictional universe life-cycle; Flint, a gambler was willing, and the result was ROF-1, but in the meantime he'd paired best selling author David Weber with the emerging mid-list author Flint in a five book contract and the resulting "1633" created a new cycle of buzz and interest.

Flint suggested taking some of the fan fiction submitted for "Ring of Fire" (or just appearing) and creating an e-zine, Baen was willing to take the risk, contort his e-ARC system and webscriptions and try out a magazine format. The last book Baen bought from Flint was for the fourth hardcopy edition of the magazine, which came about as well, because Jim Baen was willing to try an anthology of the Gazette, which became Grantville Gazette I, another experiment that worked.

Jim Baen's UNIVERSE

In late 2005 Baen announced plans for a bimonthly online science fiction magazine, which was originally named "Baen's Astounding Stories". After concerns over trademark infringement with Dell Magazines (publisher of "Analog Science Fiction and Fact", which was originally titled "Astounding Stories"), it was renamed "Jim Baen's Universe". The magazine, edited by Eric Flint, published its first issue in June 2006, with a number of prestigious authors (including David Drake and Timothy Zahn) contracted. The magazine, another successful Baen experiment, goes on.

Jim Baen had two daughters, Jessica (1977) with his wife of sixteen years, Madeline Gleich, and Katherine (1992) with Toni Weisskopf. [ [http://www.david-drake.com/baen.html Jim Baen ] ] He apparently had a premonition of his own death> [http://david-drake.com/baen.html Obituary] by David Drake> and suffered a massive bilateral thalamus stroke on June 12, 2006, and died on June 28 without again regaining consciousness. [ [http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007658.html Making Light: Jim Baen ] ] [ [http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004289.html Whatever: Jim Baen ] ] According to Flint, he did get to see the first issue of his magazine before passing.

References

External links

* http://www.baen.com Baen Books Homepage
** [http://bar.baen.com/ Baen's Bar - The Official Forum]
** [http://www.baen.com/FAQS.htm#About%20Jim%20Baen Brief biography] at Baen Books FAQ
* [http://www.chicon.org/gohs/baen.htm GoH Interview] at Chicon website
* [http://futurist.com/futuristnews/archive/Jim_Baen_Interview.htm Early 2000s interview] about electronic publishing at Futurist.com
* [http://david-drake.com/baen.html Obituary] by David Drake
* [http://www.dendarii.com/jbaen.html Personal remembrance] by Lois McMaster Bujold how Jim Baen started her career
* [http://www.johnringo.com/Special%20news/Dearjim.asp Dear Jim] - John Ringo's letter to Jim Baen
* [http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-baen4jul04,1,6374581.story Obituary] in "Los Angeles Times"
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