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To a great extent, a large part of Baen's success was because of how close he was to the fans and how accessible he made his top authors to the fans. His web board was around before he started doing ebooks in 1998. It was run by Arnold Bailey, who had been very active on the old BIX forums and was thus quite experienced with online communities.
A large group of fans became very loyal to Jim Baen, Baen Books and the various authors because of this. Jim Baen also, in part because he was so close to the fans, became quite good at picking books that his audience liked. For a long period of time, if Baen published four new books in a month, I would like at least three of them. He had quite a stable of authors and as one author moved on, a new author moved in to take that author's place.
He was also very, very good at building interest and excitement in new books about to be published. He started the "snippet" campaign of putting up a series of brief extracts of an anticipated book in the months prior to it's publication. That doesn't really do justice to how he managed to whip up the anticipation for the new book. He truly was masterful and knew his audience quite well.
In the last year or two of his life, he seemed to hit a dry spell. He wasn't as involved on the web site and new authors weren't coming in as much. His forums were being run by a group of moderators rather than by Baen, Arnold Bailey and the authors. Cliques started to form.
Since his death, things seem to have gone downhill even more. It seems they are doing more and more reprints of older books (which is good since I finally get those older books as ebooks) and omnibus books and less new books. They do have a couple of new authors who seem to be interesting (Vanner and Correia) but over the last few years, the number of new books that I really liked has dropped quite a bit. I still buy the websubscription books each month, but that's more to get the older books as ebooks than anything else.
I've pretty much given up on most of the forums on baen's web board now. I monitor three forums to see what new books to coming out and what's going on at Baen books but that's about it.
The mobileread forum (i.e. this forum) kind of reminds me of the baen webboard at it's prime. No obvious cliques that I've noticed, the moderators keep things in line without appearing to take sides, and while there are certain repetitive topics, there is enough interesting conversation to make me keep coming back when I have the time. Of course, these are interesting times in the ebook community.
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