So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

So here we are, in the final issue of Jim Baen’s Universe. It’s completing its fourth year, I’m completing my third year with it, and we both wish it could have gone on.

But weep not for it. It served its primary purpose, which is to say, it created a market for professional-quality electronic stories that paid professional rates at a time when the short story seemed to be an endangered species.

Back when the internet was just starting to take off, there were dozens of start-up science fiction magazines. Any writer who was around twelve to fifteen years ago can vouch for the fact that we all used to get almost weekly offers from hopeful new e-zines, the gist of which was always: Give us top-qualify stories for free today and we’ll make you rich next week (or next month, or next year). Never happened.

Then every wannabee writer started posting their unsaleable stories on the web. There were literally tens of thousands of them, all free, almost all unreadable.

There were a few exceptions. GalaxyOnline.com paid top rates, mostly for non-fiction, but it began running fiction toward the end—and it was gone in less than a year. Omni Online paid top rates as well…but the fiction was never a major part of Omni in print or in phosphors, and it was gone pretty quickly. Scifi.com stuck around awhile, but it was basically a loss leader for the SciFi Channel, and it went the way of all (electronic) flesh.

The first web publisher to actually pay good money and show a profit was the still-extant Fictionwise.com, which went on the assumption that there was so much free dreck on the internet that people would pay actual coin of the realm to read authors of known quality, even reprints—and reprints are what Fictionwise.com provided. They started with just a few science fiction writers—myself, Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, a couple of others—and lo and behold, we were all making surprisingly handsome royalties within half a year. So they began expanding. Before long they’d added Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Dan Brown, Robert Ludlum, and that whole crowd—and these days, I’d guess that half their inventory consists of romance novels.

About halfway through the millennium’s first decade it was Jim Baen who decided that it was time to start a legitimate professional science fiction e-magazine, and he got Eric Flint to edit it. It would pay 25 cents a word at the top (compared to 8 cents for the digests), and 8 cents as its absolute bottom rate. It would run about 200,000 words an issue, as opposed to the 90,000 to 100,000 the digests were running. It would do animated covers that were beyond the scope of the digests to match. It would buy at least one first story an issue. It would run full-color illos. It would open Baen’s Bar to an ongoing discussion of the magazine, and JBU’s editors and writers were encouraged to participate. It would charge the same as the digests, but it would also allow more expensive levels of subscription with more perks and benefits to those subscribers who wanted them. It would give readers a viable, legitimate alternative to the digests.

And we did that. We published Greg Benford, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Eric Flint, Nancy Kress, David Gerrold, me, David Drake, Esther Friesner, Elizabeth Bear, Ben Bova, Barry Malzberg, David Brin, Jay Lake, L. E. Modesitt Jr., Julie Czernida, James P. Hogan, Jack McDevitt, Kevin J. Anderson, Gene Wolfe, and many other stellar writers. We ran the best regular columns we could find. We put two stories on the Hugo ballot.

So what happened?

What happened was that we convinced a bunch of other entrepreneurs to do the same thing. JBU was conceived as an alternative to the digests—more names, more art, more pages, all for the same price—and for a year that’s exactly what it was.

But then came Clarkesworld. And Subterranean’s outstanding magazine went from paper to phosphors. And Orson Scott Card started a professional e-zine. And suddenly, about the time I joined JBU as Eric’s co-editor, our primary competition was not Asimov’s and Analog and F&SF, which were selling for $4.95 an issue, but half a dozen pro-paying e-zines that charged nothing at all. Take a look at Subterranean: the typical issue features Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Joe Lansdale, me, and 3 or 4 other well-known writers…and it’s free. Try Clarkesworld; their recent authors include Robert Reed, Jay Lake, Mary Robinette Kowal, me, Jeffrey Ford, and cetera. And it’s free.

The business model for Jim Baen’s Universe was valid when it began, but outmoded within a year of its initial issue. To this day we can compete with the digests…but we can’t sell an e-zine when so many quality e-zines are available for free.

We’d like to think that we’re at least partially responsible for those e-zines. We’d like to think they looked at JBU and said, “Hey, we can do that!”

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a simple fact. When JBU started up, we were the only e-zine paying what the Science Fiction Writers of America considers a professional rate.

And how many are there today? It’s a field in flux, but this list is valid on the day I’m writing this (March 24, 2010):

At the same time, there are still just three digests among the print magazines. Realms of Fantasy, a full-sized “slick” magazine, died and was just purchased and resurrected by Warren Lapine.

And that’s the ballgame as far as magazines that pay what SFWA considers pro rates. Amazing came back from the grave for a 4th time and died yet again. The resurrected Argosy looked great and expired after 3 issues. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine fell by the wayside. So did Aboriginal SF. So did Science Fiction Age.

That’s right. There are 22 professional science fiction (and related) magazines. 4 of them are print; 18 of them are electronic.

It looks like the science fiction short story has been saved. I like to think we had a little something to do with it.