A Three-Ring Circus of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Fact.
Eric Flint's Explication
The following is cut and pasted with permission and
minor edits for
continuity from a number of posts Eric Flint made to announce the
magazine last month at Baen's Bar (return to my blog
entry here)
I’m sure almost everyone here already knows that short form
fiction has been declining steadily for decades, in the science fiction
and fantasy genre. All four of the major paper magazines –
Asimov’s, Analog, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and
Realms of Fantasy – have been staggering under declining
circulation figures for a long time, with no end in sight. And the one
major online F&SF magazine that had been paying the best rates in
the industry, the Sci-Fi channel’s SciFiction, just closed down.
The reasons are complex, and I’m not going to get into them here.
What I want to talk about instead is the impact that the decline of
short form fiction has on the field as a whole. That’s true,
regardless of what causes it.
In a nutshell, it’s extremely damaging, and for two reasons
– one which affects authors directly, the other which affects the
readership base of the genre and therefore its future.
The absence of a large and vigorous market for short form fiction
hammers authors directly. That’s because it makes all SF authors
almost completely dependent on the novel market. And, while the novel
market is and always will be intrinsically more lucrative than the
short form market, it is also an extremely harsh environment for
authors.
Why? Well, simplifying a lot, it’s because of the fundamental
economics involved. Novels, unlike washing machines and toasters and
automobiles, are unique, each and every one of them. Not
“unique” in the sense that they don’t have generic
similarities, but “unique” simply in the obvious fact that
each and every story has to be different or nobody is going to want to
read it.
When you walk onto the parking lot of an auto dealer, the last thing
you want to hear the car dealer tell you is that “this here car
is unlike any other.” Translation: it’s a lemon. But when
you walk into a bookstore, that’s exactly
what you want. A
story that, at least in one way or another, is completely different
from any other.
What that means, however, is that the book market is incredibly opaque.
Even in the largest car dealership, there won’t be more than a
relative handful of models available to choose from. A dozen,
let’s say. Whereas any Barnes and Noble or Borders in the country
is likely to have 100,000 different
“models” in stock.
How are you supposed to choose between them? Well, you can’t,
that’s all. What happens in the real world is that almost all
book-buyers, except a small percentage of unusually adventurous ones,
will stick almost all of the time to buying only those authors they are
familiar with.
What this creates, willy-nilly, is a hierarchy among authors in the
marketplace that is...
“Extreme,” is the only word I can think of.
Everybody familiar with the publishing industry knows the basic facts
of life:
All of a publisher’s profits and about half of the operating
expenses are covered by the sales of a relatively small number of
so-called “lead” writers. And it’s a very small
number of authors. In the case of Baen, not usually more than half a
dozen. And even a big publisher like TOR won’t have more than a
dozen or so lead writers.
Midlist writers generally do well to make a small profit for the
publisher, or at least break even. Sales of their books – all
told – cover the other half of operating expenses.
New writers, and first novels, generally lose money for a publisher.
Those are the cold, hard facts, folks. What it means for authors is
that developing a career is a very chancy business nowadays – and
it was always chancy to begin with. Because what happens is that even after you get a first novel
published, you still have to overcome
what Mike Resnick calls the “fourth book hurdle.”
The hurdle is this: A publisher will generally give a new author an
average of three books to demonstrate if they can become lead writers.
If they can’t, they’re out the door and the publisher will
try a new writer to see if they might be able to do it.
Yes, it’s heartless – but there’s an underlying
economic reality for that practice, it’s not because publishers
are being nasty for the hell of it. It’s simply a fact that, as a
purely mathematical exercise in calculating profits, it makes real
sense to toss writers overboard – even good ones, selling fairly
decently – if doing so might improve your chances of grabbing the
“lead writer” lottery ticket that generates Ye Big Bucks in
novel publishing.
Granted, not all publisher are the same, and they don’t all
follow exactly the same practices. A midlist writer will usually find a
smaller independent publisher like Baen a less unforgiving environment
than most of the big corporate houses. Furthermore, in Baen’s
case, Jim consciously looks for ways to ease midlist writers over the
hump, if it’s possible. The most common method he uses,
well-known to all Barflies, is to hook up a new writer with a
well-established one and let them do some collaborative work for a
while until they get better known to the public. (And their skills
improve, in the process.)
That method works... sometimes. It certainly worked with me. And, on
very rare occasions, a new writer hits it big coming right out of the
gate, as John Ringo did. But the fact is that, even at Baen, the
underlying economics of novel publishing remain stark and unforgiving.
“Make it big or die on the vine” is still the rule, even if
an author can linger on the vine longer than they might be able to at
another house.
Leaving aside issues of unfairness – and, yes, it ain’t
fair, not even close – this reality has a negative impact on the
field as a whole.
First, because it’s incredibly wasteful. Not all writers develop
their talents at a rapid pace, just for starters, even leaving aside
the fact that there’s always a certain amount of pure luck
involved. For every Heinlein, there’s a Frank Herbert, who needed
years to make it big. In today’s environment, I’m not at
all sure Herbert would have had that time – and we’d be
short DUNE as a result, which remains (I believe) the bestselling
science fiction novel of all time.
But it’s also detrimental the other way around, because it places
such pressure on lead writers that they very often react by becoming
extremely conservative in what they write. Not all do, to be sure. I
don’t, and neither does Dave Drake or Dave Weber or John Ringo.
But even we stick most of the time to the tried and true approaches
– and there are a lot of lead writers out there who are scared to
death to vary at all from the type of story that enabled them to become
lead writers in the first place.
In short, the situation sucks – and the steady collapse of the
paperback market is making it even worse. I don’t have time here
to go into that, although I’ve explained the reasons for it in
long posts I’ve put up in the past. Just take my word for it.
Paperback sales today are probably half what they were a few years ago,
and there’s no sign I can see that that’s going to turn
around any time in the foreseeable future.
Midlist writers working at novel length usually live and die on their
ability to show they can do well in paperback, so a publisher will give
them a shot at a hardcover. That was never easy at any time, and today
it’s gotten a lot worse.
So.
Enter – the short story magazine!
In decades past, it was the size and health of the magazines that
cushioned all of these problems. They allowed midlist writers a place
they could keep getting published, gain perhaps slow but steady public
recognition, and improve their skills – without being under the
“fourth book” guillotine. And, while it was always very
hard even in the salad days of the magazines for an author to make a
full-time living as a short fiction writer (at least, unless you could
sell to the Saturday Evening Post), they could bring in enough of an
income to take a day job that allowed them as much freedom to write as
possible.
And, on the flip side, the magazines provided lead writers with a place
they could stretch their skills if they wanted to, without running the
risk of falling off that precious lead writer sales plateau.
Okay, so much for the writers. Now I want to explain how the decline of
short form fiction has been hammering the field as a whole.
It’s not complicated. It’s what’s often called in the
field the “graying of science fiction.” Put crudely and
bluntly, the average age of science fiction and fantasy fans keeps
rising. Once the quintessential genre of choice of teenagers,
it’s now a genre that’s developed a great big middle-aged
potbelly.
What do you expect? When the entry
level purchase, nowadays, is
likely to be a $25 hardcover? And you have to drive an average of seven
miles to get to a superstore that’ll even carry a science fiction
title at all? (And that’s the national average. In some areas of
the country, you have to drive a hundred miles or more.)
That’s not how I got introduced to science fiction, as a
twelve-year-old, I can tell you that. I got introduced through
magazines and cheap Ace Double books on the wire racks of my local
drugstore, in a small town in rural California. Which...
Don’t exist any more. The books and magazines, I mean. The small
town is still there – but it no longer carries any SF titles.
The problem isn’t even the price of a paperback, as such. That
hasn’t actually risen any, over the past half a century, measured
by the only price criterion that matters. To wit, today a paperback
novel costs just about the same as a movie ticket. And, fifty years
ago... it cost just about the same as a movie ticket did then.
No, the problem is availability.
When I was a kid, SF magazines and
paperbacks could be found all over the place. Today, with a few
exceptions – and those, almost invariably, only a small number of
topselling authors – you can only find F&SF titles in
bookstores, especially the chain superstores.
There’s no magic in the real world, however much there may be in
fantasy novels. The vanishing of SF paperbacks and magazines is due to
profound changes in the economic and social structure of the Unites
States. (And the rest of the world’s industrial countries, to one
degree or another.) Put simply, it’s just the literary equivalent
of the same dynamic that has seen McDonald’s and Burger King
supplanting thousands of independent little diners and restaurants, and
has seen Home Depot and Lowe’s replacing thousands of little
hardware stores.
Whatever can be said of that phenomenon, when it comes to hamburgers
and building supplies, it’s destructive to literature in general
and science fiction in particular. That’s because, duh, stories
are not hamburgers and screwdrivers. To go back to the point I made at
the beginning of this little essay, it’s the essence of stories
that each and every one of them is different.
Whereas, no more than
on a car dealer’s lot, do you want to hear a salesperson at
McDonald’s tell you that “this individual hamburger is
different from any other hamburger we have.” Translation: food
poisoning.
You can think whatever you want about this fundamental transformation
of modern society – ursus, as is well-known, shakes his furry
fist at the cap’talist bastids – but facts are facts, and
they are stubborn things. If you want to try to turn that situation
around, with respect to our genre, you have to figure out a new
approach.
Which, we think we have. Enter:
(roll of drums)
Jim
Baen’s UNIVERSE A Three-Ring Circus of Science
Fiction, Fantasy and Fact.
We’re not sure this is going to work, mind you. A lot of what
we’ll be doing is taking us into uncharted territory, and we have
and will be doing a lot of experimenting. But we think we’ve got
a good crack at it, and the stakes are worth making the effort.
In essence, as a business model, our strategy is to use the free entry
and accessibility of the internet to substitute for the ready
availability of paper editions of SF magazines in times past. This will
be a big challenge, of course, because the electronic fiction market is
still small. But, by combining a very aggressive promotional campaign
with Baen’s longstanding policies with regard to electronic
publishing – which you can summarize as WE SELL CHEAP AND
UNENCRYPTED STUFF, AND THAZZIT – we think we’ve got a good
shot at pulling it off.
As an editorial model, we’re doing two things, neither of which
are “new” so much as returning to the tried and true
practices of the magazines in their salad days.
First, we’re paying top rates for stories. The best in the
industry, even coming out of the gate. These rates are still not really
“pro” rates, to be sure. To start crossing that threshold,
and bring pay rates for short fiction back to where they were half a
century ago, we’d need to be paying (my estimate, anyway) about
twice what we’re paying now – which would be a top rate of
50 cents a word instead of the top rate of 25 cents that we’re
starting with.
That is our goal, however, and if the magazine is successful we intend
to roll as much income as we can into raising the rates. In the
meantime, by starting with these rates we’re signaling to all
F&SF authors that we’re dead serious about trying to turn the
situation around—and many of them have already responded very
enthusiastically.
Secondly, we’re orienting the magazine from the beginning toward
a popular audience. That means doing things like soliciting stories
from top-selling authors including writers who usually produce novels,
welcoming stories that are set in existing popular universes of their
creation – like the Dune story by Brian Herbert and Kevin
Anderson that will appear in the first issue of the magazine –
and emphasizing stories that center on adventure and generally have a
positive outlook on the future. Which is to say, pretty much exactly
the same emphasis that characterized magazines like Astounding/Analog
and Galaxy many years ago.
(I should add that we’re going to be publishing more new authors
in each issue than any magazine has done in a long time, if ever.
That’s also a way to generate
interest and excitement.)
There’ll be some differences, of course, which simply reflect
changes in popular taste over the years. ASF, for instance, very rarely
if ever carried any fantasy stories, while we will be carrying a lot.
In that sense, Baen’s UNIVERSE is a very big tent –plenty
big enough for three main rings and lots of sideshows – and
we’re not fussy at all about the content of the stories we buy.
All we ask is that they be stories, of whatever of F&SF’s
many sub-genres, that at least most readers find fun to read.
And that’s the nexus: “fun.” That’s why
we’re calling it a circus in the first place. Circuses are not
dignified, they are not entirely respectable, they are not
fussy—in fact, they’re a little on the uncouth side.
Low-brow, if you will.
So be it. I have nothing against so-called “literary”
magazines, and my own tastes in reading include a lifelong devotion to
authors like James Joyce, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and
Herman Melville. But the fact remains that the existence of a sizeable
enough market for more challenging types of fiction depends – and
always has, for millennia – on the existence of a huge audience
for popular fiction. That’s just the way it is, and always will
be. Most readers read simply to relax and have fun. And even that
(fairly sizeable) percentage of readers who like more challenging
fiction rarely make it a steady and exclusive diet.
I’ve read James Joyce’s ULYSSES three times, over the past
forty years, and Melville’s MOBY DICK as many times. But, on any
given day, I’m far more likely to read an author like L. Sprague
de Camp than William Faulkner. For the good and simple reason that most
of the time I just want to relax and enjoy a good story.
That’s the audience – more accurately, that’s the taste, since the audience varies a
lot – that UNIVERSE is
oriented toward.
To conclude.
The fate of fantasy and science fiction is now IN YOUR HANDS.
I won’t go so far as to say that it is every Barfly’s
Sacred Duty to buy a subscription to UNIVERSE. Or – better still!
– buy a membership in the soon-to-be-hallowed Universe Club.
No, I won’t (choke, choke) come right out and say it. Not even the
ursus is that shameless.
Quite.
But I will say that, if there is an afterlife, you will surely burn if
you don’t. The Almighty dotes on F&SF, obviously, or why
would He have made all those weird astronomical phenomena if He
didn’t? Or, if there is no afterlife, scholars of the future will
gravely conclude that fantasy and science fiction began its death
spiral when the Barflies flopped. And urchins of their time, who read
nothing but mysteries, will cheerfully scribble graffiti on your
headstones. Really sarcastic stuff, too.
And now, having milked Shame and Guilt and Anxiety for all
they’re worth, the unscrupulous furball will move on to show the
Upcoming Goodies under the big top.
I said earlier that we were already getting a
very favorable
response from authors. If you thought I was huckstering, here are the
authors who will be appearing in the first three issues of the magazine.
These are the well-established authors, mind you. In addition, there
will be lots of brand new writers and ones who haven’t (so far) becomes
known to many fans.
VOLUME 1 (June, 2006)
Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson
Dave Drake
Gregory Benford
Charlie Stross
Gene Wolfe
David Brin
Julie Czerneda
John Barnes
Sarah Zettel
Elizabeth Bear
Dave Freer
S. Andrew Swann
Christopher Anvil
VOLUME 2 (August, 2006)
Dave Weber
John Ringo
David Brin
Cory Doctorow
Catherine Asaro
Barry Malzberg
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
Esther Friesner
Joe R. Lansdale
The first two volumes are pretty well filled up, and we’re well into
filling up the third volume. So far, volume three has:
VOLUME 3 (October, 2006)
John Ringo
David Brin
Gregory Benford
Kristine Smith
K.D. Wentworth
Dave Freer
Louise Marley
I’m hoping we’ll get another story from Gene Wolfe for this volume, as
well as another one from John Barnes. If not, I’m sure they’ll be
appearing in later issues.
Starting (just a few days ago - ed)
we’ll be starting to offer subscriptions to Baen’s
UNIVERSE
magazine.
I’m using the term “subscription” a bit loosely, since technically what
we’ll be selling are six-volume packages – i.e., the first year of the
magazine -- much the same way we sell the Grantville Gazette.
The difference is simple: With a package, you always get volumes 1-6,
regardless of when you make the purchase. Whereas, with a subscription,
you’d start getting your copies as of the date of the subscription
itself. That is, you might start with Volume 4 and continue on through
Volume 9.
We may eventually move to a modified traditional subscription system,
but we don’t want to do it for the moment because that sort of
subscription gets you involved with a number of complex legal/financial
issues. By keeping them as package sales, we can keep everything simple.
That said, I’ll use the term “subscription” henceforth to refer to the
six-volume packages.
We won’t be selling single issues right away, just subscriptions. The
cost of a one-year subscription (Volumes 1-6) is $30. That’s a savings
of $6 from what it would cost you to buy the issues one at a time.
In addition, as an incentive for people to buy their packages now –
because we need the money, dammit, to keep rolling -- instead of
waiting until the magazine first starts appearing in June, we are FOR A
LIMITED TIME ONLY offering these additional items which you will get
with a $30 subscription:
-- A free electronic copy of The World Turned Upside Down, a very large
anthology of classic F&SF stories edited by David Drake, Eric Flint
and Jim Baen.
-- One electronic book package of your choice among the many we offer
(see here).
In addition to selling packages, we are also unveiling at this time...
(roll of drums)
The UNIVERSE CLUB!
People who would like to support UNIVERSE magazine over and above
simply buying a subscription can do so by buying a membership in the
UNIVERSE CLUB. The memberships come in four classes, ascending in price
from $50 to $500. Additional electronic (and other) goodies are
provided for each class of members, getting more expansive the higher
the membership level. For more details see
here