Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Frankly, the day Baen determines they can run a profitable e-book only line, is the end of the big six as far as entertainment reading goes.
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Well, you could argue that the Grantville Gazette is that. Okay, I know it's not precisely Baen (although Baen can and does cherry pick for print runs), and that it's an ezine rather than novels...but it's an web ezine with the vast vast majority of stories
from fans,
paying professional rates.
This is something new.
I'm also interested to see what Baen will do to replace Baen's Universe - as they've said, the
specific arrangements they made for the Universe were not working out in the longer term*, but if they could start over (and they've indicated they are) with a clean slate, well...
(*The Gazette, using much the same business model, IS working out - so it's a specific case rather than their picking a bad business model per-se)
Look at the people here who said they've bought every single month's webscription. Sure, there probably isn't a great number of them overall...but how many many mop's purchase everything - or even a set proportion - of the major publishers output? Baen and their authors are
engaging their market in a way the majors simply are not*, which is why I'm confident they will be around for the long run.
(*And Tor.com is not quite doing from my perspective, but let's not get into that here, it's long and has a bearing on some commercial work I might be doing)