Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
They're a genre-specific publisher that has spent years cultivating an audience and a stable of authors. In a lot of ways they are a lot closer to Campbell's Astounding than a modern publishing house. They're really an outlier.
Contrast them to Tor, who are totally cribbing from them but not getting the same kind of brand loyalty. Of course, having Sargent shoot his mouth off and undo a lot of their outreach is a pretty big handicap.
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Yeah, these Baen comparisons are really apples to oranges. First of all, no one really knows how well Baen is doing - there is no evidence that they are in any way more profitable than big publishers.
Second, Baen is tiny: they publish something like 80 new titles a year. Simon and Shuster publish 80,000 new titles a year. Things that work for a niche publisher in a specific genre just may not translate to larger publishers...or to other niche publishers who are not e-book pioneers.
All we really know about Baen is that what they're doing has not destroyed their profitability in the past. (Although now, of course, they are changing their model).