Baen’s WebScriptions and eARCs

It takes an understanding of Baen’s product line to appreciate how the Baen Free Library and giveaways like it on Baen’s website have enhanced the company’s overall sales. First of all, what percentage of sales comes from e-books at Baen? “As a general rule of thumb, ten percent is still a good figure” writes Weisskopf. Baen Books prides itself on being indiscriminate toward formats when it comes to providing readers with what they desire. Weisskopf, who served as Baen Books’ executive editor before Jim Baen passed away, describes the company’s nimble strategy as being more about “making our books available to as many people as possible in as many formats as possible. Some people, a small but growing percentage, read only e-books. We can sell to them. Some like a few books as e-books, for the portability, but will still buy ‘must have’ authors or series in paper—hardcover or mass market. We can sell to them. Others will only by paper books. Again, no problem. We live to serve. It’s the story we’re selling—the format is just the means to the end.”

The Last Centurion (eARC)In 1999, Baen Books instituted the policy of buying all electronic rights in contracts with its new authors. Unlike its major competitors, the house pays its authors a handsome 20% in royalties for its eARCS (electronic Advance Reader Copies) and individual e-book sales. (Writes Weisskopf on the company’s community messageboard Baen’s Bar: “There is a complicated formula for calculating the e-book royalty Baen pays, known only to the Mysterious Marla […] Authors and agents do get the formula, but only if they can tell me or Marla the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow!”) Since then, Baen Books has acquired the work of many classic science fiction authors, including Fritz Leiber, Orson Scott Card, Peter Straub, Dan Simmons, L. Sprague de Camp, and Larry Niven.

Jim Baen’s insistence that his e-books be free of format restrictions, an insistence that echoes Stewart Brand’s observation, “Information wants to be free,” underscores the company’s belief that electronic publishing technologies should empower the end user. For example, Baen Books does not offer any of its titles in PDF format: “What [PDF] does is generate files […] that are extremely opaque to standard word processing software, so that if, for example, you downloaded Time’s table of contents, you would be stuck with that appearance: no changes allowed, or possible. Can’t change the margins, can’t change font sizes, can’t grab text for pasting, can’t anything.”
WebScription.net Instead, Baen sells printable, multi-format, DRM-free e-books through its fifteen-dollar WebScription service, which puts out electronic galleys of novels undergoing editorial development at Wake Forest for readers to purchase before the novels appear in print. The WebScription package includes at least four new novels that are released in portions as editorial development approaches the print publication date. These e-books are available in HTML format before the novel is published; once the print version is released, Baen releases the WebScription bundle in MS Reader, Palm, Psion, Rocket eBook, and Rich Text format. In addition, Baen sells individual eARCs—complete, unedited manuscripts of novels in development—for fifteen dollars well in advance of even the WebScription release dates (more than five months pre-publication). The price of eARCs decrease as the novel comes closer to its publication date, recognizing that readers’ demand for the unedited manuscript wanes as the fully-edited version nears completion.