to the real world,” except the point of all this is that what I just related to you was the real world. My first publisher went belly-up a few years after I left because the expenses whelmed him over; Reuben stayed profitably in business until the Feds finally nailed him for tax evasion. (He died in jail.)
The way I see it, the great printzines—Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF—are my old Chicago publisher, and Jim Baen’s Universe is Reuben Sturman.
Let’s see if I can explain—and please understand, I love those three magazines. I’ve been reading two of them all my life, and the third since its inaugural issue thirty years ago. I’ve sold to all of them. I have won five Hugos, and each winner was from one of them. I will never refuse a request from one of their editors, and will write for them right up to the end. I will weep bitter tears when they die.—but die they will, and for much the same reason my Chicago tabloid publisher died.
And Jim Baen’s Universe, or some as-yet-unborn JBU clones, will live and prosper, for the same reason Reuben Sturman’s publishing empire lived and prospered.
Consider: what does it take to get a copy of Asimov’s or one of the others into your hands?
Well, there’s an office, which means an overhead.
There’s an editor, a top-notcher, who has to get a salary commensurate with his or her talent.
There’s paper for the magazines to be printed on.
There are color separations for the covers.
There is the cost of printing tens of thousands (formerly a couple of hundred thousand) of copies of the magazine.
There are shipping costs. The subscribers don’t drive to the printing plant to pick their copies up. Neither do the distributors. Neither do the stores.
There are the distribution costs, both for the national and local distributors. They’re good guys, but they don’t place the magazines in the stores for free.
There are the stores themselves. If they sell a $5.00 magazine, most of them are going to want $1.50 or thereabouts for their troubles.
There are warehouse costs for those magazines that are neither sold nor pulped.
And a month later, every copy has vanished from the newsstands and bookstores, to be replaced by the next month’s issue.
Now let’s take a look at how these expenses effect Jim Baen’s Universe:
There is no office expense and no overhead, because Eric, Paula, me, all of us, work out of our houses.
There are no editorial salaries for Eric, Paula or me. We’re so confident that the magazine’s going to make money that we each opted to get a piece of the profits.
There are no paper expenses, because the magazine doesn’t appear on paper.
There are no color separations, because we simply post the artwork right on the screen.
There are no printing expenses, because the magazine is not printed.
There are no shipping costs, because the magazine is not shipped.
There are no national or local distribution costs, because JBU is not distributed. It’s right here, and we don’t have to pay anyone to put it in your physical proximity.
There is no cut for the bookstores, because we are not sold in bookstores. Or newsstands. Or supermarkets. We’re right here on line. You pay us, and we give you the magazine, and there are no middle men. (You might think about that. You pay $4.95 for a digest magazine, they might wind up with about $1.85 of it; you pay us $5.00, we keep $5.00.)
There are no warehouse costs, because the magazine exists in electronic phosphors, not paper pages. We’ll post another issue in a couple of months, but this one won’t be through earning us money, because it will always be available for anyone who wants it. It just won’t be the new issue on the website.
Do you begin to see where the print magazines are at a bit of a disadvantage?
Now, there is one expense that they and we both have, and that’s content, which is to say, the stories that are our reason for existence.
The three digest magazines pay seven to eight cents a word. It seems reasonable. Hell, when you look at their expenses and their diminishing print runs and sales, it seems positively generous, almost philanthropic. How can JBU possibly compete with that?
Easy. By paying our major writers three times as much, and by paying every writer, even our rank beginners, at least as much as the digests.
Remember: they’re paying overhead, color separations, editorial salaries, paper, printing, shipping, national distributors, local distributors, bookstores, warehouses, and authors.
And us? We’re paying…authors and artists. Period. And we won’t be happy until our best authors are getting 50 cents a word, and all of our authors are getting at least twenty cents. Give us three years; we’re working on it.
Next question: is there enough of a cyber audience to keep an e-zine in business?
I didn’t know until a couple of months ago. Now I do.
Let me tell you about that. There’s a young man named Steve Eley who runs a podcast site called Escape Pod. Last year he asked me for a story. At the time I didn’t pay much attention to it. I mean, who the hell listens to podcasts? Then a French producer/director who had never been able to get the magazine my story appeared in heard the podcast and optioned the story for maybe 75 times what Steve had paid for it. So of course I instantly became a huge supporter of podcasting, sent a bunch of top writers to Steve, sold him a bunch more stories, gave out podcast interviews all the hell over…and couldn’t help wondering if anyone except the occasional French movie producer actually listened to these things.
So I asked Steve if he had any figures. He said yes, that “Travels With My Cats,” my second Escape Pod story, had 22,000 hits in its first month.
22,000 hits? I couldn’t believe it. It had appeared in Asimov’s. If every single person who bought that issue read the story—and my guess is that probably a quarter of them didn’t—that was still only 18,556 readers according to this month’s Locus.
More people heard the story online in one month—and of course it’s still being heard months later—than read it!
Okay, I said to myself, the story was a Hugo winner and Steve advertised it as such. For whatever reasons—its content, its awards—it touched all the right buttons. But surely not every story on this one little web page could do that.
So this month he posted another of my stories. It’s a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale. It won no awards. It was written for teenagers. It has nothing in common with the other story.
I couldn’t even wait for an entire month. I e-mailed Steve after two weeks to ask how many people had downloaded it. (Hold onto your hats.)
14,000!
14,000? This is me. Not Anne McCaffrey. Not Kevin Anderson. Not Mercedes Lackey. Not Robert Jordan.
Are the readers out there in the ether?
You
