“…the more e-texts Baen Books makes available cheaply or free, the more it has been able to sell the most expensive kind of printed book. ‘We are drifting from being a paperback house to a hardcover one because of the Net,’ [Jim] Baen said.” – Publisher’s Web books spur hardcover sales, in LaRaza.
The TeleRead take: As e-book technology improves, this probably won’t be the most sustainable model. But is it a good one now for willing writers and publishers? Absolutely! More details–on Baen’s related activities:
Webscriptions is an effort to recreate the feel and excitement of old-fashioned science fiction serials, in which stories unfolded month by month in pulp magazines like Galaxy, where Baen was formerly an editor. For $10 a month, members can download four or five books that are soon to be published on a three-month installment plan that concludes several weeks before print publication. In other words, electronic versions of Baen’s new hardcovers are available for less than a tenth the cover price even before the books are published. As a code of honor, subscribers are asked not to circulate the free copies they download.
This service runs counter to common wisdom in the industry -including paying royalties of 20 percent, double the amount for traditional books, and allowing readers to customize how the e-texts look in their word processors.
Based on the high turnover of subscribers and the response, Baen is convinced that customers use the service to sample works, not read them in their entirety. That may explain why the company has no plans to publish original e-books solely in electronic form.
By the same reasoning, the company hopes the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library) can increase the audience for Baen titles by offering the full text of select books at no charge, said Eric Flint, a Baen author who led the project. Flint said that of the more than 400 readers who had e-mailed him about the free library, some 90 percent indicated they planned to buy a printed Baen book as a result of visiting the free site. The free library contains 15 books by various Baen authors, and there are plans to add up to four new works each month.
“I got into an online brawl with some other authors over the issue of online piracy,” Flint said, explaining the free library. “Their cure -all sorts of new laws- was worse than the disease. Whatever the moral difference, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers obtain books for free or at reduced cost, such as borrowing from friends.”
It is worth noting, though, that only eight of Baen’s dozens of authors have offered texts to date. “My agent is concerned about the effect posting complete works for free might have on future rights sales,” said Lois McMaster Bujold, one of Baen’s most popular authors, whose work is not available on the Free Library.
But Bujold’s work has been promoted in Webscriptions and on Baen’s Bar, the Web site’s popular bulletin board, where authors and readers routinely interact about works in progress. Baen often posts snippets from a coming book on the bulletin board -sometimes no more than five to 10 paragraphs. He began the practice with Bujold’s “Civil Campaign” in the summer of 1999, and she credits it with pushing pre-publication orders for the book into Amazon’s Top 10 that August.
Flint said he even used Baen’s Bar a few years back to ask readers to help with the extensive research required for one of his books, “1632.” He said the result was thousands of helpful postings -and a ready-made audience for the book…
