Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
I'd have to go googling, but the reports I've read over the years have said that Baen went from an also-ran SF publisher to a major SF hardcover and ebook publisher primarily due to the Baen Free Library and their ebook sales policies (they've always done well in MM paperbacks).
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Maybe - but aside from them being lionized by e-book readers, I haven't been able to track down anything suggesting that they are unusually successful. Based on what little I could find on the web, they publish something like 70 titles (out of 2500 sci-fi titles in print), and are something like the 7th largest pure sci-fi imprint. However, they do pretty much completely dominate in the military sci-fi area.
Big publishers produce many tens of thousands of copies - I think HarperCollins publishes something like 90,000 books. So even if Baen is unusually successful, I don't think that whatever they are doing is really translatable to a big publishing company.