[NatCh]

Originally Posted by mrkai

Ok...I'll rephrase that since the "no offense" part seems to CLEARLY have been ignored.

Ah, okay, yeah I didn't notice it up in the post title -- I often miss the title completely, because they aren't widely used here, and the quote being between it and the rest of the message pretty much guarantees that I, for one, will miss it entirely as part of the actual post.

In any case, I took no offense, but rather wanted to explain why I felt the Baen point isn't as irrelevant as you seem to believe.

Originally Posted by mrkai

I go to amazon's top sellers and the NYT fiction list I see several authors I recognize.

As I don't read sci-fi I guess you know this could have been a limiting factor there.

I was suspecting that might be the case, and only meant to subtly point out that it might be a factor.

Originally Posted by mrkai

The other point, and agian, getting twisted up on who or who is not a Baen fan my be getting tangental here, but are any of these Baen NYT Bestsellers themselves available from Baen?

I'm assuming you mean "available from Baen as e-books" because obviously all of Baen's books are available from them as p-books.

To actually answer your question then: yes, this is one of Baen's "things" -- all of their new publications are available as e-books. In fact, many of them are available as e-book Advanced Reader Copies, well before the official publication date. They also work through their back-list gradually, with the presumed intent of making all of it available eventually.

Originally Posted by mrkai

Like the Grammys (for example) there is a grammy for Best Audio Engineering on a Latin Fusion Recording-type Grammy...but not many people can tell you who won it.

I go to Mobileread, I see stuff I know or people I've heard of...and I mean heard of *casually*..not as a fan of a particular genre.

If you're talking about the books that are in our e-book uploads section, well, that's not really a fair basis of comparison. What I mean is that those books are all 1) public domain (so they've been around a long time), 2) selected by the folks who processed and uploaded them so they're likely to be things those folks enjoy, and 3) (the most telling in my opinion) often written by authors who were taught in High School English classes.

Pretty much everyone who's made it through 9th Grade (corresponds to ~14 years of age for the non-U.S. reader) English Class has at least heard of Charles Dickens or Charlotte Brontë, for instance. Whether or not they've actually read anything those folks have written is another matter, of course.

Originally Posted by mrkai

How anyone could have not picked this up...I dunno.

I might suggest the same thing about my last point.

Originally Posted by mrkai

Seems like fanboys looking for a fight.

To the hypersensitive, your choice of words might seem like someone picking a fight, but that's a matter of perception, and generally around here there's very little tendency to do either, as it's simply not much tolerated.

Originally Posted by mrkai

Wrong thread...unless you serious think that

1. Big Publishers would go for the Baen model and
2. Big Publisher's product (with in the above stated "I go to Mobileread, I see stuff I know or people I've heard of...and I mean heard of *casually*...") have the same market weight/value

If so...rock on

Actually, I think the original point was that Baen's model might be a better choice of example of what works than the example of Apple's model, because Baen deals, successfully, with e-books rather than music -- the gist being, why compare oranges to apples when you have a perfectly good orange to compare them to?

That being said, the facts that Baen does have an actual e-book store, from which they show a profit, and have a number of bestseller list titles available from, which seem mysteriously resistant to piracy despite their glaring lack of any DRM would seem to be extraordinarily relevant to the current topic of discussion.

I understood that you wished to discuss how e-books might be successfully and profitably marketed in the mainstream, but perhaps I misunderstood your intent?

If I don't misunderstand, then I'd figure that a specific, real-world example of a company that's doing a darned good job of doing precisely that in a particular genre would be of interest, along with the details of how they're going about it.