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Originally Posted by sirbruce
It may be working for Baen and some of their authors at the moment. But all of those rely on physical sales too. If more people move to ebooks, more will discover the ability to pirate ebooks -- and then they'll just do that, and rarely buy at all, even if the ebook is cheaper than they were buying before. That is my fear, anyway.
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Their prices are such that they have no reason to feel bad if their sales move to electronic form -- rather the contrary, in fact. Authors and publisher would all make more money (in total) that way.
As for relying on physical sales, well sure!
Of course they "rely on physical sales" -- that's where the volume is right now. Revenue-wise, eSales appear to be somewhere between 10% and 20% of total volume. That's not bad -- in fact it's rather better than anyone else in fiction publishing -- but it's not enough to run the company, or for the authors to pay their bills on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
Let me also point out that Baen still rejects lots of good books from new authors every year. They could "easily" publish all of those in ebook form and see what sells and what doesn't, yet they still rely on physical sales for their authors. It's not just a quality issue.
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Actually, it wouldn't be so easy. The issue is one of maintaining the brand. Here's the conundrum:
Baen's paper distribution is (exclusively) through Simon and Schuster. S&S gives them a certain number of book slots per month (mixed between hardcover and paperback). This is important enough to repeat:
the number of slots is controlled by S&S, not by Baen. And the number of slots acts as an absolute limit on Baen's output in paper.
There are several different approaches to working around this limit. Each approach has significant problems to go along with its advantages.
- Publish additional "eBook only" titles. The problem here is that eBook sales run less than 20% of paper sales (measured by revenue to the publisher and authors, not by copies sold, by the way). This approach has some promise and charm, but would put serious downwards pressure on advances, and might not be able to cover the fixed costs (e.g. slush-pile diving, another editor(!), copy-editing, art, and on and on). Further, how many authors and agents would be satisfied with a 5x hit on their potential sales? I can see it now: "A contract for eBook only? Nah... I'll shop it to another publisher." One method for making this approach viable is to use it to extend their re-issues of the "good old stuff." And they've been doing exactly that. This won't be an attractive approach for new books until electronic sales start to look more like... half of total revenue, or thereabouts.
- Add another "line" of books; call it "Baen Presents" or something like that. The risk here is one of market perception. But the perception that matters isn't that of the readers, but is rather the perception of the buyers for the big bookstore chains, the big distributors, and Amazon. The concern is that whatever you put in that new line would be viewed as "It must not be any good, or they'd have put it in the main line of books." Any successful launch of another line must somehow avoid this problem. One possible avenue: make the new line clearly distinct from the old -- SF & Fantasy mysteries rather than general SF/Fantasy, for example. But whatever approach they take, problems of brand dilution are a very real concern. Especially since the reputation of their brand is probably their single most valuable asset.
- Arm-wrestle with S&S for more slots. They've done this. Baen is now routinely putting out two or three more books each month than they did six or seven years ago. I presume that Toni Weisskopf is continuing to try to get more book slots. This approach is more incremental. It's also slower, because Baen's only leverage is to educate S&S about why letting Baen have more slots is good business for S&S.
And remember -- any approach that increases Baen's publishing output involves an increase in fixed costs; those costs must be covered or the company gets into big trouble. One cost of particular concern is head-count of full-time employees -- especially editors. Baen doesn't have many full-time people, so adding even one more is a substantial percentage increase in payroll. Which means that there'd better be a substantial increase in revenue to go with it.
I am not an insider at Baen -- I hang out in the online community at Baen's Bar, and pay attention when actual insiders speak. The above is my best understanding of some of the issues and some of the possible approaches to expansion. There are probably other possible approaches, and other issues. These are the ones I've seen discussed at the Bar over the last few years.
The overall point I'm trying to make is this: it may seem simple at first blush, but there are a ton of issues that are
not simple to sort out.
Xenophon