Universe Vol1Num2
Page 58
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 was 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.
Remembrances of Jim's life will be held at
Trinoc*Con in Raleigh, NC Saturday, July 22 and
Lacon IV, the Worldcon, in Los Angeles, CA in August.
Comments and remembrances may be left at:
Baen's Bar (http://bar.baen.com) in the "In Memorium" conference or
The Universe forums (http://www.baensuniverse.com/bbs) in the "In memorium" forum.
A Personal Remembrance of Jim Baen
Jim Baen was a genius. I am head of a science research team at London's Natural History Museum, have a Visiting Chair at Southampton University, and I am a Royal Society Programme Manager so I have met the odd genius in the course of my work.
Other people will tell you about Jim's influence on the publishing industry. I would like to draw attention to his profound grasp of evolutionary biology. Jim had some original ideas on why Metazoa age and die—this is still a contentious subject—and he used me as a sounding board. I couldn't find any holes in his logic so I passed his work to Professor Karl Ugland of Oslo University, who subjected Jim's hypothesis to rigorous mathematical analysis using standard genomic theory. "Baen is a clever fellow", Karl concluded. I concur; the chance of a lay-person coming up with a new testable hypothesis in evolutionary biology is close to zero but Jim did it. His 'Why Die' article and Karl's mathematical test of it are published in the first issue of Jim Baen's Universe.
Jim was always fascinated by the wide variety of early hominids. "Our family tree is too bushy at the base", he would say to me. He suggested that maybe our ancestors had interbred back into the ancestral chimp populations and that was the explanation for so many morphotypes. I was deeply sceptical. There are good reasons why fertile hybrids are unlikely between higher vertebrate species but Jim persisted despite the cold water I poured on him. Then came news that analysis of chimp and human DNA showed that our respective ancestors must have interbred for some considerable time; it is even possible that m
odern humans are descended from the hybrids rather than 'pure' hominid strains. Had Jim lived, he intended to work up a new article on this subject. He had deduced a hypothesis of human evolution before the DNA evidence. This is an exceptional achievement.
Jim Baen was not an easy man. He retained that childlike attitude to the world that one associates with genius. He could be petulant and unreasonable. He was also loyal, decent and a lifeline to anyone who needed help. I suspect he would have risen to the top of any creative profession that he tackled. Science fiction's gain was science's loss when Jim chose the former. I am very grateful that he was my friend.
Professor John Lambshead
London, England, July 2006
The Editor's Page—August 2006
Author: 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 pre
tty 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.