| Founded | 1983 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jim Baen |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Riverdale, New York |
| Key people | Toni Weisskopf |
| Publication types | Books |
| Fiction genres | science fiction and fantasy |
| Official website | www.baen.com |
Baen Books is an American publishing company established in 1983 by long time science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen. It is a science fiction and fantasy publishing house that emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, military science fiction, and fantasy. Soon after Baen died on 28 June 2006, he was succeeded as publisher by long-time executive editor Toni Weisskopf.
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Baen Books was founded in 1983 out of a negotiated agreement between Jim Baen and Simon & Schuster. Simon & Schuster was undergoing massive reorganization and wanted to hire Jim Baen to head up and revitalize its science fiction line of its Pocket Books division. Jim Baen, with financial backing from some friends, counter-offered with a proposal to start up a new company named Baen Books and provide Simon & Schuster with a SF line to distribute instead.[1]
From his days in magazine publishing, Jim Baen had a reputation for being able to recognize a gem in the rough and the ability to take a new author and nurture and train him up able to write salable material, and establish himself, which were some of the qualities desired by Simon and Shuster on their team.
In the later nineties, the publisher embraced the newly emerging internet as a means of "spreading the word" about a book or author and created one of the first, if not the first, writer-to-fan discussion forums "Baen's Bar" capable of using a mix of technologies to support the overall promotion and interest in reading books for education and entertainment. The web board became very dedicated to expanding the shrinking reader base for printed works by using the electronic internet to recapture interest.
One project which came about from this focus was the compendium of great science fiction "The World Turned upside down", and the practice begun circa 2002, of republishing older good science fiction in collections and omnibus editions, such as the works of the sixties authors Christopher Anvil and others.
Initially, the company invested resources in "Baen's Bar", its online community service that provides a forum for customers, authors and editors to interact, beginning as a BBS. In the early 2000s, a blogger wrote: "Like every other publisher, Baen set up a website. But several of his authors and fan friends convinced him to put a chat client on his site. Since he was interested, and since several of those authors (like Jerry Pournelle, former columnist for Byte Magazine, for instance) were very Internet savvy, he did. The chat client grew into an incredibly vibrant community called Baen's Bar."[2]
In recent years, beginning in mid 1999, Baen has emphasized electronic publishing and Internet-focused promotions for its publications. The discussions on Baen's bar convinced him to do so.[3] Baen's electronic strategy is explained exhaustively in a series of "letters" or "essays" called The Prime Palaver by Baen Free Library. "First Librarian" Eric Flint, but in a nutshell, emphasizes distribution of unencrypted digital versions of its works free of Digital Rights Management copy protection schemes through webscriptions, misunderstood by many to be a part of Baen Books, but which only provides the services and is de facto an independent e-publisher. Webscriptions does not apply DRM for Baen, and Baen's Webscriptions, but Baen is the customer and so defines the relationship by contract. It is fair to say that Baen and Flint scoff at Digital encryption strategies and feel they do more harm than good to a publisher. Consequently, Baen also makes its entire catalog available in multiple formats for downloading and typically prices electronic versions of its books at or below that of paperback editions—and makes a profit doing it.[3] According to essays on Baen's science fiction e-magazine Jim Baen's Universe, also edited by Flint, the strategy is if anything, getting stronger and more fruitful with the passage of time, especially with the advent of e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle, and the Barnes & Noble Nook.
Baen has distributed serialized e-book versions of at reduced prices. These have been scheduled three months in advance of print publication. Baen called this Webscriptions, but contracted implementation to his web services consultant, who established Webwrights and its internet lifeline, Webscription.net[4] which also features other publishers such as SF genre rival Tor Books. Webwrights is credited as the e-published version copyright holder while Baen does the accounting and pays the original copyright holders, the authors, their cut on the e-books.
Baen's standard setup is based on monthly bundles. Each month, whatever books Baen has coming out in paper (paperback or hardcover, new or reissued) are put together in a fixed price (currently $18) bundle regardless of a number of books (historically 4-9 books, average 5-6). The Baen's Webscriptions installments are as follows: first includes roughly a half of every book in the bundle, second includes roughly three quarters, and the third, coinciding with the print release, includes the full text. The first two installments are generally available only as HTML, while the last includes all formats supported.
Another avenue for distribution that Baen uses for some of its new titles is the offering of Electronic Advance Reader Copies (ARCs), or E-ARCs 3–5 months prior to actual publication. Marketed as a premium product for the fans who absolutely positively have to read it now, they are priced at full $15 per single title and can in fact differ from the final text (as they are in fact electronic proofs). What it means is that some authors (and Baen) can get paid as many as three times for the same book if the reader is a webscriptions regular—EARC, part of the webscription bundle, and actual printed book.
The electronic versions by Baen are produced in five common formats from webwrights (HTML, Palm Pilot/Mobipocket/Kindle format, Rocketbook, EPUB/Stanza, Sony LRF, RTF and MS Reader versions), all unencrypted in drastic contrast to the rest of the e-publishing industries strategy. Jim Baen disliked Adobe pdf format for reading purposes, but webwrights offers some titles in that format as well at the clients request.
After print publication, the "cleaned up and finalized" electronic copy is available both on line through webscriptions in bundles or as single titles (priced variably $3–6) and through the parallel practice Baen instituted of using promotional CD-ROMs with permissive copyright licenses with many of its stable of authors works. Whether downloaded or by CD-ROM, the source material is available in all the formats Baen supports, which includes some for e-book readers.
Notably, when you purchase a title from Baen, you can read it online, download in any format you want as often as you want (as long as you remember your account information).
Baen's first run at magazine-style book publishing took place in the late 1970s, in the form of Destinies, a quarterly 'bookazine' that featured fiction and non-fiction by well-known and new authors that Baen was promoting. It was published by Ace, where Baen was employed at the time. Under the aegis of Baen Books in the 1980s he published two more bookazine series. The first was Far Frontiers. The second was New Destinies, edited by Baen, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Michael A. Banks.
Baen's began the experimental publication of The Grantville Gazette, an e-magazine anthology series specifically related to the popular Ring of Fire alternate history plenum.
That semi-failure led in turn to a separate establishment of two self-sustaining e-zine enterprises with a separate staff for each, both spearhead by Eric Flint: Jim Baen's Universe and the reconfigured (after Grantville Gazette V ended the initial spin-off production mode using the E-ARCs mode as an e-zine.) Gazettes magazine.
In contrast, the general audience speculative fiction anthology Baen's Universe is available only on-line. At approximately 120,000 words, this latter publication is unusually large when compared to most traditional print editions of science fiction magazines, and the average size of the newly reconfigured Gazettes is similarly generous.
In 1999, Baen launched its "Webscriptions" service, which provides customers with the opportunity to purchase access to a "bundled" discount package of electronic releases from Baen's catalog, varying in composition from month to month.
For a fee, a customer subscribes to a set of approximately five novels and/or anthologies. Each package is commonly a mix of new releases and older titles.
Upcoming titles (in both Webscriptions and as individual purchases) are released to the customer in increments in advance of the scheduled publication month. The usual method is to make the work available for reading as increments in HTML-only encoding. Two months prior, the subscriber may read 30-50% of the work; one month before publication, 50-75% becomes accessible. The complete text becomes available in multiple digital formats in the day and month of the released print publication.
All titles in a particular month's Webscription remain available in that "bundle" henceforth (as do all of the packages offered since the onset of the Webscription service in December 1999), and may be purchased retroactively.
The subscription aspect of the term "Webscription" refers not only to the serial manner of treating with new releases, but also to the way in which the purchaser is obliged to accept all of the selections in a particular monthly package, in much the same way as he/she would accept all of an editor's choices when buying a copy of a monthly science fiction magazine. This actively encourages purchasers to read outside their usual preferences by making available to them works by authors (and materials in subgenres of speculative fiction) that might not have come into their hands otherwise.
Because Baen subsequently maintains the great majority of their electronically released publications on its Web site for purchase, the publishing house has been able to make midlist titles available to readers long after they would typically have gone out of print under traditional publishing practices.
Baen has made liberal use of free content in its marketing efforts. For example, free sample chapters of its books are typically available on the Baen Web site. The "Baen Free Library" allows free access to dozens of titles from the company's backlist, often the first book published in a series by a Baen author. Baen also provides free electronic copies of its books to readers who are blind, paralyzed, dyslexic, or are amputees.
Baen's emphasis on electronic publishing has generated press coverage for the company. Wired magazine has described Baen's Webscriptions service as "innovative".[5] Charles N. Brown, publisher of Locus Magazine, has praised Baen's approach in an interview in The New York Times, saying "Baen has shown that putting up electronic versions of books doesn't cost you sales. It gains you a larger audience for all of your books. As a result, they've done quite well."[6]
Baen Books has since 1999 been releasing electronic versions of forthcoming books by subscription as e-ARCs ("electronic Advanced Reader Copies"), released in roughly, one-third of whole installments, the last coinciding with the print release, and incorporating the installments, as a full e-book. Later marketing innovations have seen Baen include copies of the e-books as free material on CD-ROM discs, bundled with a hardcover book release.
These electronic versions, whether full or partial releases, are produced by Webscriptions under contract for Baen Books in various (at least five) common digital formats which complicates the issue of identifying electronic versions, so that Baen and Webscriptions do not use the DOI registration system, though until circa 2005, webscriptions still listed DOI identifiers, and Baen's website continues to use the abbreviation into and as of 2008. Under the registered DOI system, each installment release, and the final e-work, in all the formats produced should have a unique and specific Digital Object Identifier, which in terms of economic costs, is simply too high to bear.
The electronic e-ARC practices also complicates things in "publications dates", since the first released text starts two to three months before the release of the print copy, though the released text is not guaranteed to be fully copy edited—and so occasionally differs from the final released fully copy edited versions.
Thus, like the Grantville Gazettes the e-publication date antedates the print copy by about two months—the interval before the release of the last third and the hardcover print edition is simultaneously released.
Baen authors include:
In 2004, more than 2,500 titles in the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror were published in the U.S. by 248 publishers. According to the 2004 Book Summary,[7] Baen Books was the ninth most active publisher in terms of most books published in the genres indicated, and the fifth most active publisher of the dedicated SF imprints, publishing a total of 67 titles (of which 40 were original titles). It is difficult to judge the issue of quality but, based on the number of times a title published by Baen Books appeared in the bestseller lists produced by the major bookselling chains, it is ranked the seventh most popular SF publisher. In 2005 Baen moved up to the eighth position in the total books published with 72 books published (of which 40 were original titles).[8] It was the sixth most active publisher of the dedicated SF imprints, and the fifth most popular SF publisher based on the number of bestseller list appearances.