Over the years, I’ve edited a number of stories that have won or been nominated for Hugo Awards, but the editorial feat of which I am proudest is that in the decade of the 1990s I bought more first stories than any of the major magazines, indeed than all of them put together, and that 8 of “my” discoveries made the Campbell ballot (science fiction’s Rookie of the Year award), and one of them—my daughter, in fact; good genes there—won it.
I am committed to editing the best science fiction around, but I am equally committed to encouraging the next generation to produce it. When Burroughs and A. Merritt and Olaf Stapleton had shot their bolts, along came Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon. A decade later we had Sheckley and William Tenn and Jack Vance. Then came Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, A few more years and we had Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey. Then along came George R. R. Martin and Connie Willis and Orson Scott Card. A new batch of superstars makes the scene every few years. Along with presenting the best of the current ones, we owe it to the readers, and indeed to the field itself, to find and present the next generation as well.
Newcomers have a lot of stories to tell. They don’t fall into the trap of telling the same story over and over again. That they leave to television, and that we’ll leave to lesser magazines, which is one of the reasons I am so committed to finding the best of them.
I’m glad to be aboard. Eric is still the head honcho, and production schedules being what they are very little of my editing will show up here before the last two or three of issues of 2007. But I’m at work on those future issues right now, and I promise to do my best to please you.
Welcome to the Future
Okay, I hear you ask, how the hell can Jim Baen’s Universe pay such phenomenal word rates? Are we just a loss leader for Baen Books?
The answer is that we’re not a loss leader for anybody. We intend to make a profit, and I’ll show you exactly how. But first let me tell you a little story about the sex industry. (Yeah, I could explain it just as easily without sex, but Topic Number One does tend to capture the attention.)
Move the clock back to 1965 (and how I wish we could—at least when I look in the mirror). I’m a 23-year-old kid, and I’ve landed my first job in Chicago’s publishing industry. None of the legitimate papers or magazines had any openings, so suddenly I find myself editing The National Insider, which is just like The National Enquirer only worse. The first thing I learn is that the only number that matters in my little universe is 41. That’s the break-even point. For the Insider to stay out of the red, we have to sell 41% of our print run…which is to say that the cost of printing, shipping, distributing, editorial, overhead, everything added together, gets covered only if we sell 41% of our print run, which was about 400,000 back then. (Don’t drool; we only sold for 15 cents an issue.)
We were selling about 38% when I took over. I figured that if one naked lady was good, 6 were better; if one silly story about saucers flying off with Jackie Kennedy was good, four were better; if one Hollywood gossip column filled with innuendo was good, lots were better. And I was right. Suddenly the paper was regularly selling between 70% and 75% every week.
Okay, move the calendar ahead to 1969. I’ve quit my job and gone freelance. Doing what? Same damned thing. I’m packaging four monthly (and later bi-weekly) tabloids out of my house in Libertyville, Illinois. But there is a huge difference. Now my magic number is 9.
You see, now I am working for Reuben Sturman, the true kingpin of the American porn industry (though my tabloids are his one non-porn publication. We’re just sexy, thank you very much.) Now, Reuben wasn’t born the kingpin of porn; he was a self-made smut king. He’d been a comic-book jobber in Cleveland in the 1950s. Then one day the major distributors decided they wouldn’t handle a bunch of “muscle books”—we’d call them bottom-level body-building magazines today—and Reuben volunteered to distribute them, You know how the New York Times prints “all the news that’s fit to print” and the National Enquirer prints the rest? Well, the major distributors handled all the material that was fit to display on your local newsstand or in your local supermarket, and Reuben handled all the rest, especially those with (*sigh*) naked ladies.
And got rich. And started a whole chain of what were known as secondary distribution agencies. When the dust cleared in the early 1960s, there were 65 secondary agencies nationwide, and Reuben, under various corporate veils, owned 59 of them. He figured if it would work for distribution, it would work for retail outlets, and soon, of the 800 adult book stores in the country—I haven’t been to one in thirty years, but they were the kind where men in raincoats paid a dollar to browse and got it back if they bought something—Reuben owned over 600. He also invested in a printing plant.
Back to the new magic number: 9. My break-even point for Reuben’s tabloids was 9%. That’s right; we could pulp 90% of our print run and still show a profit.
How? Simple. He got rid of the costs that others had to pay. (Remember that: we’ll come back to it later). He didn’t pay a printer anything but the cost of paper, because he was the printer. He didn’t pay a national distributor because he was the national distributor. He didn’t pay the local distributor (the equivalent of Charles Levy in Chicago, or Long Island News Agency in New York) because he was the local distributor. He didn’t have to give the bookstore its usual percentage, because he was the bookstore.
9%. Simple. And then he made sure of his profit by forbidding any of the 600 bookstores, or any of the 59 secondary agencies, to sell a single copy of a rival tabloid—all of which had to use his services—before we’d sold half of our own print run.
(Sound familiar? If you’re a Resnick reader it should. The protagonist of my 1984 science fiction novel, The Branch—which is being reprinted by Pyr in 2008, hint, hint—was based on Reuben, and his business was lifted lock stock and naked ladies from Reuben’s.)
We’re going to talk about science fiction magazines now. I’m inclined to say something flip, like “Back to the real world,” except the point of all this is that what I just related to you was the real world. My first publisher went belly-up a few years after I left because the expenses whelmed him over; Reuben stayed profitably in business until the Feds finally nailed him for tax evasion. (He died in jail.)
The way I see it, the great printzines—Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF—are my old Chicago publisher, and Jim Baen’s Universe is Reuben Sturman.
Let’s see if I can explain—and please understand, I love those three magazines. I’ve been reading two of them all my life, and the third since its inaugural issue thirty years ago. I’ve sold to all of them. I have won five Hugos, and each winner was from one of them. I will never refuse a request from one of their editors, and will write for them right up to the end. I will weep bitter tears when they die.—but die they will, and for much the same reason my Chicago tabloid publisher died.
And Jim Baen’s Universe, or some as-yet-unborn JBU clones, will live and prosper, for the same reason Reuben Sturman’s publishing empire lived and prospered.
Consider: what does it take