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 betcha. In vast quantities.
Are we positioned to find them?
We think so. We hope so. And if we’re wrong, then the next e-zine to come along will find them (or be found by them), or the one after that.
The one thing you can be sure of is that JBU and its electronic imitators will bring you the very best writers and artists money can buy.
After all, we’ve got nothing else to spend it on.
Straitjackets
I’ve received some interesting comments over on Escape Pod, an audio site where they read one of my stories every now and then. To date they have read two Hugo winners and a Hugo nominee—and each time someone, or a few someones, write in to say that the stories are all well-written and moving and all that crap, but they clearly aren’t real true-blue science fiction.
Which gave me my topic for this issue’s editorial, because people have been trying to put science fiction in a straitjacket for close to a century now, and it just doesn’t work.
The first guy to define it was Hugo Gernsback, the man who created the first all-science-fiction magazine (Amazing Stories, back in April, 1926). He’s the guy our most prestigious award is named after, even though he had some difficulty speaking English, clearly couldn’t edit it, and usually refused to pay for it except on threat of lawsuit.
Hugo declared that “scientifiction” (his first term for it) existed solely to interest young boys in science. (Young girls, presumably, were too busy playing with their dolls.) The science had to be reasonably accurate, and central to the story.
Now, at about the same time Hugo was creating science fiction, H. P. Lovecraft was perfecting a fantasy fiction that rarely involved science (although he did sell a few pieces to Astounding in the 1930s), and clearly wasn’t meant for the impressionable young boys Hugo saw as his audience.
Okay, move the clock (the calendar?) ahead 80 years. Lovecraft is just about a household name. Eleven