YABookgate

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

Ruocchio went from Daw to Baen and has now gone back to Daw. I guess those Chinky VC shekels are irresistible.

FWIW, ol' JDA is insinuating Baen is a sinking ship, and cites the Ruocchio boomerang as one example of their decline..

I think its the other way around. Some asshat at daw got upset some straight southern white catholic man was outselling their cherished gender-queer bipoc author, and in a fit of rage, gave ol'Christopher the ax. Then after he left, someone else higher up the chain started asking questions as to why their profit margins changed. Not sure if the ax-wielding retard got fired, or not, but it is clear daw wanted Ruocchio back. Hell, they may have simply done it to prevent Baen from gaining a wider share of the market by taking away such a big author.

I don't think Baen is on its way out. If it was in financial trouble, as supposed, it wouldn't have let Ruocchio go back to daw. Maybe Mr. Ruocchio personally wanted to go back. Whatever the case, the "if you like this, you'll also like all these other books you've never heard of" would have sold more books, and made more money for Baen than whatever daw was willing to pay. I mean, how many Space Operas, or Dune/Starwars-esque books does Baen have in their back catalog? Even if a quarter of them are only written half as good as Sun Eater, people will still prefer that to latest DEI slop. I know I do personally.

Or it could be, that as an outsider to the industry, I haven't the faintest clue about any of it.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

I think its the other way around. Some asshat at daw got upset some straight southern white catholic man was outselling their cherished gender-queer bipoc author, and in a fit of rage, gave ol'Christopher the ax. Then after he left, someone else higher up the chain started asking questions as to why their profit margins changed. Not sure if the ax-wielding retard got fired, or not, but it is clear daw wanted Ruocchio back. Hell, they may have simply done it to prevent Baen from gaining a wider share of the market by taking away such a big author.

I don't think Baen is on its way out. If it was in financial trouble, as supposed, it wouldn't have let Ruocchio go back to daw. Maybe Mr. Ruocchio personally wanted to go back. Whatever the case, the "if you like this, you'll also like all these other books you've never heard of" would have sold more books, and made more money for Baen than whatever daw was willing to pay. I mean, how many Space Operas, or Dune/Starwars-esque books does Baen have in their back catalog? Even if a quarter of them are only written half as good as Sun Eater, people will still prefer that to latest DEI slop. I know I do personally.

Or it could be, that as an outsider to the industry, I haven't the faintest clue about any of it.

Getting mad because they're butthurt and then shooting themselves in the foot does sound like the kinda "Go woke, get broke" policy they follow.

There's clearly a market for entertainment focused SF. I do hear that plenty of people ignore 90% of modern SF because it doesn't draw them in.

 

[Raconteur Press]

Ruocchio went from Daw to Baen and has now gone back to Daw. I guess those Chinky VC shekels are irresistible.

FWIW, ol' JDA is insinuating Baen is a sinking ship, and cites the Ruocchio boomerang as one example of their decline..

This is true. Where do you think ARC Press secured its funding from? Peter Thiel's network is bleeding Baen dry. Much of the energy and talent has already left them behind the scenes. Expect to see a lot of press releases about a "promising new sci-fi imprint" in the coming year.

 

[AngryAboutInternets]

There's clearly a market for entertainment focused SF

Yeah just not one that any publisher wants to claim (or any agent wants to peddle towards) apparently. Not that I blame them entirely when pseudo-erotica "chick lit" in every genre basically prints money these days.

Source: Me, trying to find agent/publisher interested in exactly that to publish 1 or more novels.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Yeah just not one that any publisher wants to claim (or any agent wants to peddle towards) apparently. Not that I blame them entirely when pseudo-erotica "chick lit" in every genre basically prints money these days.

Source: Me, trying to find agent/publisher interested in exactly that to publish 1 or more novels.

I mostly read older stuff, so I don't feel anything about this. Open Road Media puts out the majority of old stuff, repacked on the Amazon Kindle store. This means I can just acquire all 15 or so volumes of their "Complete Short Fiction of Clifford Simak" series, as well as almost all of Simak/Poul Anderson/Fritz Leiber/etc. works still under copyright because they've just wound up putting everything they got the rights to reprint into ebook form. Baen has a bunch of freebie ebooks too but I'm not interested in David Drake and co. that much.

E-readers are great but even when you count all of the old stuff, male oriented genre fiction feels like it's outnumbered by the shitloads of women's romance/romantasy slop on the kindle store.

I get it. It sells. Men are more likely to pirate too.


Also, I do notice that I mostly hear that it's men listening to audiobooks. Hmn.


I don't know how we'd get a wave of new genre fic authors for the usual male oriented stuff. Especially given the literacy rates taking a hit with the youth during covid.

 

[Boston Brand]

Ruocchio went from Daw to Baen and has now gone back to Daw. I guess those Chinky VC shekels are irresistible.

FWIW, ol' JDA is insinuating Baen is a sinking ship, and cites the Ruocchio boomerang as one example of their decline..

He isn't wrong.

Ruocchio is the total package as an author. Writes damn good books, critical darling, die hard fans, sales improve with every release, no personal issues, turns in new books on time... and he's barely over 30!

Getting him was a MASSIVE coup for Baen, which definitely needed young talent... and Disquiet Gods was a massive sales success too!

And they sell him back to DAW less than a year later?

I'm sure there are some details of the sale not made public, but unless Baen got paid low seven figures, they lost more money in future than they ever got selling him back to DAW. Which might mean they needed cash flow.

Even if Baen's fine, a rival start up with deep pockets just poached two of thier remaining editors, and the next series from thier most commercially successful author.

That's a humiliation no matter how they spin it at best, and at worst, a knife in the back when they can least afford it.

I'm mostly shocked JDA scooped this. This is the kind of story I would usually expect broken by one of the outlets carrying water for SFWA.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

edit: This was supposed to go in the SFWA thread. Oh, well. Pretty substantial reader overlap anyway.

JDA continues to kick the hornets' nest...

Baen Books Author Larry Correia Announces Going Fully Independent In Reaction To Ark Press News While Others Circle The Corporate Wagons

https://archive.is/wip/QJu22

Also, LOL. LMAO, even...

Fandom Pulse attempted to contact Correia through his blog comments, but Correia deleted our post as a response, and he has us blocked, giving us no ability to request he clarify or provide more information as to these additional ventures.

 

[Dick Johnson]

Something unusual happening in BookTok right now. You probably have heard a little about Sam Kuffel. Pictured below, Sam Kuffel was a local weather reporter for CBS58.

View attachment 6914698

You probably also know Sam was recently fired for criticizing Elon Musk's hand gesture at Trump's inauguration. She didn't mention it on air. She posted memes critical of Elon on her private Instagram account. Within a day or so, she was fired.

View attachment 6914660

So, how does this relate to BookTok? It so happens that the person who fired her is a woman named Jesse Garcia. Besides being the head of the station where Sam worked, she also is a big author popular on BookTok, writing such thrillers as The Business Trip and more.

View attachment 6914689

So basically, the woman who fired Sam Kuffel for her Instagram posts criticizing Elon is an author who capitalized on being popular on TikTok to sell thrillers. Naturally, people on BookTok are not happy, and are flooding her socials with insults and boycott threats:

View attachment 6914773

St Martin's Press, Garcia's publisher, is also the publisher of lolcow Lindsey Ellis.

I haven't read it because I knew of the controversy surrounding the author before the book.

The thread on Manhunt is pretty great. I loved it, and its stalling is what led to me signing up to KF in order to finish it.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

He isn't wrong.

So Baen has one foot in the grave? What's your opinion on Cordova's response to FP?

Spoiler: Jason Cordova

Well, I typically don't respond to Jon del Arroz attacks because, well, I have things to do. But since he's now lobbing my name out there because I groused last week about dealing with his drama is affecting my cancer treatments (he emailed me the next day about it), I guess it's time to risk my job at Baen to clear the air and get a lot of facts straight.

Guys, if you're going to grab screenshots of my posts here to pass them along to others, at least be open and say it? I don't care if you're open about it.

For starters, I don't speak for Baen Books or Toni at all. This is me and only me. I'm probably going to get chewed out for this, but not fired. Hopefully. Been chewed out before.

Probably will be chewed out again.

In his articles, del Arroz implied that there is a culture war between Peter Thiel and Baen Books. I have no idea where this came from. I didn't even know who Peter Thiel is before the article was published. The accusation that Ark was formed as a response of a failed purchase of Baen, and they immediately started poaching authors, is interesting, but could only come from the mind of a person who thinks publishing is nothing but destroying everyone else who might be a competitor. I was told back when I was first hired that people make offers to buy Baen all the time. **shrug** If the Ark thing is true and they were created solely because we refused their purchase off, then Baen must have spawned off a hell of a lot of publishing companies purely out of spite.

Go us?

His attacks on Larry Correia and Sara Hoyt are both annoying and false. First off, him stating Sarah is not an American in his most recent article is false. She might not have been born here, but she legally immigrated and worked hard to earn her citizenship. That makes her an American. That sort of blood purity thing is strange coming from someone like Jon. I thought that we wanted people here legally, immigrants who work hard and follow the rules on their path to citizenship?

As for Larry, well, I've known Jon to be antagonistic towards Larry for years and I take everything he says about Larry with a grain of salt. In fact, the rift which occurred between Jon and myself happened because he attacked Larry, who has been one of my closest friends and supporters for 15 years now. Larry's reasons for agreeing to write for Ark are his own (as was his decision to write for Aethon). But as I've been telling Larry for 15 years (and Larry has always known this, so it wasn't like it's news to him or anything) you never want to have all your eggs in one basket. I've been published by 12 different publishers over the years with various projects, maybe more. I stopped counting awhile ago. If one of them were to fail (as one did two years ago), then it would be prudent to have other publishers you're already working with.

Now, the irritating thing about all this is that Jon brought me up in his article posted over the weekend, when I usually don't check my work email because I need a day off every one in a while. Jon tried to play coy by asking what Peter Thiel and his investment group had to do with my response to his article, but Jon (who spoke with Sean Korsgaard... the original article stated that Sean was reluctant to talk to Jon, but in this latest one he stated Sean refused to comment, so some wires might have been crossed here) knows that I am the one running Baen's social media accounts. I've been running it for about two years now. Any sort of thing that happens to Baen on social media is something I have to stay on top of. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job. The fact that this all dropped the day before my most recent infusion was only the icing on the cake that broke the table of patience.

I'll also address the whole "standing order" thing about authors not talking to Fandom Pulse. We have no standing order from Toni regarding any science fiction or fantasy magazine, ezine, or anything else prohibiting authors from speaking with anyone. If authors want to talk to any magazine or ezine, or vice versa, part of my job is to make the connection happen and provide the interviewer with whatever they need, be it professional headshot of the author, book covers, publishing schedules, permission to use quotes or snippets from the book, etc.

Jon was blocked from Baen's Twitter/X account by me, not Toni, after I'd unblocked it because the last person running the account had blocked him, and had only done that because the person before... you see where this is going. We've bounced back and forth between blocked and unblocked with Jon over the years because he does what is called "engagement farming" on Twitter/X. It's a simple trick used by applying the "@" towards someone, which gets it viewed by those who follow the targeted person. So Jon tagged Baen regularly to engagement farm, and while we had him muted so we couldn't see, it was still showing up to those who follow us. This used to not be the case, but the rules have changed. So instead of allowing him to continue using the Baen handle to farm himself more clicks, I chose to block him. I informed Toni of my decision, and she asked me why. I explained the methodology behind it, and she simply said it was my decision.

This next bit is what pissed me off today and prompted this response. Now, no authors in the history of EVER are stating that I am the one who is taking over from Toni Weisskopf when she retires from Baen. I would refuse the job if offered because I never wanted to be an editor in the first place. I only recently accepted the job title of "Associate Editor" because Toni got tired of me introducing myself as "Office War Monkey" to everyone at conventions. She asks for a little bit of decorum from me, so I obliged, even if it meant accepting a job title I am not entirely comfortable with.

People may think this is the case, though, because we learned that after 30 years of Toni having the same email address at Baen, it's gotten... crowded. Toni doesn't like deleting emails, and her spam filter works hard, so sometimes she misses emails. Authors are now CC'ing me on their emails to Toni because I've only been employed by Baen for 3 years now and my inbox is nowhere near as crowded. This allows me to message Toni and ask if she saw an email. If she missed it, then we've fixed the issue. If she saw it, then we're good either way.

I don't see how that means I'm taking over...

I will say this, though. Thank you, Jon, for wishing me good health. The road to recovery is slow but ongoing, and Baen's support in my needing days off from work to recover from infusions and doctor appointments has confirmed that this is still the best place I've ever worked, hands down.

 

[Boston Brand]

Can't reply directly @World Famous Quasi Payer so I'm doing that here.

Didn't know Jason had cancer. God that's grim, I've met him, he's good people.

That's the tragic thing here - I know all the guys getting brought up in these articles about Baen/Ark... like to think I'm friends with a few of them. They're mostly a good bunch, and it kills me to see them at each others throats sniping at each other.

But with respect to Jason... his line here is mostly cope and spin.

Again... two Baen editors, DJ Butler and David Afsharirad, got poached by Ark. Two others, Jim Minz and Sean Korsgaard, got laid off.

There is no universe where a publisher losing four editors in a little over a year is a good thing, especially if two of them were either poached or jumped ship to a direct competitor.

Ark also picked up a series from Larry Correia, on top of another picked up by Aethon.

Larry is Baen's best selling author. His books all sell very well, earn back advances, and make a profit for the publisher. Baen should be tripping over themselves to have more books from him... and instead they're letting the competition pick them up.

There is absolutely no good answer as to why they would do that. None.

Especially because the past couple years have been AWFUL for Baen. Two of the companies most profitable authors, Eric Flint and David Drake, both died. So did one of the most promising new Baen authors, Howard Andrew Jones. David Weber is in his late 70s and in very poor health. John Ringo is a burned out junkies.

It's the Christopher Ruocchio sale back to DAW that is the big tell for me. DISQUIET GODS sold well - very well. That, and backlist sales, are why DAW was willing to pay to get him and Sun Eater back.

And unless Baen got a princely sum for him - as in low seven figures to start with - they would easily make more money keeping him than selling him. It only really makes sense if they desperately needed cash flow ASAP... which isn't a sign of a healthy company.

You had a dozen Baen authors willing to talk to @Fandom Pulse admittedly off the record. I'm guessing that means a lot of authors getting paid late, or getting cut abruptly.

I'm an open Baen fanboy. Have been for decades... but all this out in the open, and the sniping and spin control? Not a great sign, and it's heartbreaking to see.

I hope the reporting and my gut is wrong.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Things are going so bad for baen that they stopped doing their world famous snippets as advertisement.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Things are going so bad for baen that they stopped doing their world famous snippets as advertisement.

Baen was always neat to have around. I'm not someone who regularly reads their output, but I do have editions of their collected work on older SF/F authors like Andre Norton, Poul Anderson, Keith Laumer, etc. It'd suck to see them go under.

Isn't there anything they could do?

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

This video popped up in my feed and after clicking on it to get a better look at her tits, watched the whole thing and was pleasantly surprised by her takes. inb4 she's called a pick me.

I do have a disagreement about the cover. My immediate thought was this was a chicks book from the bright colours and style. The title didn't help its argument either. I'm no artist and it's probably just my eternal 14 year old metal enjoyer taste that the cover and title just isn't 'brutal' enough. It feels very soft spoken, which is probably appropriate for its subject matter. I shouldn't expect it to have a Frank Frazetta or Doug Beekman cover, but it would help.

Anyway, thought you blokes would like to have a watch.

 

[FuckMeGentlyWithAChainsaw]

I do have a disagreement about the cover. My immediate thought was this was a chicks book from the bright colours and style.

I thought the same thing, probably speaks to how feminine the average offering is if this sticks out as masculine. Still, it could be so much worse.

I wonder if the book is even aimed at a male audience or is more for lit-chicks who want men explained to them in a digestible way.

 

[Wodanaz]

Just saw this:

I love seeing normal people slowly realize that the schizophrenics who rant about piracy and ownership and software as a service were absolutely and totally 100% correct about everything. TLDR Amazon is taking away Kindle users ability to backup their "purchased" books.

"There's a big move, and clearly has been for a while, towards subscription-type services like Spotify, which I think are fine. I completely get the deal with Spotify. With Spotify, I know that I am paying a monthly fee, and I don't own any of the music that I listen to. But when I buy a Kindle book from Amazon, I expect to own that book, and Amazon are gradually removing the ways in which I own that book. And I think taking away my ability to download the book onto a computer is one way that they are, kind of eroding my ownership of the book, if that makes sense."

This person is nigger cattle unaware that he actually owns nothing, and so is every single other Kindle user that doesn't use it as a means to secure local copies of books that are hard to find otherwise.

See Ross from Accursed Farms attempting to navigate the legality of challenging this notion, while trying to solve the problem of games as a service being shut down with no copy of the game distributed or made available in any way to customers who paid for the experience. He figured out that there is basically nothing consumers can do, because they literally never bought anything, and so have no legal recourse at all. Very similar to Kindle, Amazon has already taken down numerous books and not been required to make copies available for people who paid for them, because they were never selling products, they only sell the limited right to use them which can be revoked at any time.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

TLDR Amazon is taking away Kindle users ability to backup their "purchased" books.

I don't get why large corporations, like Amazon, are so determined to throw away their market shares. You spend all this time building yourself up into the largest bookstore just to throw it all away? How is this supposed to work anyway? Do I pay a monthly fee, and then have access to millions of books? Or will there be some tier system? Or does Amazon honestly believe there are enough nigger-cattle out there who are willing to pay full price for a book they will not own? This doesn't even make sense from a market perspective. All Amazon's competitors have to do is say "You can download your purchase at anytime" and now that makes them a far better service. This is all some overpaid executives idea on how to increase short term gains isn't it?

 

[AngryAboutInternets]

Or does Amazon honestly believe there are enough nigger-cattle out there who are willing to pay full price for a book they will not own?

It's this, and they're not even necessarily wrong. There are undeniably huge swaths of niggercattle who see no problem with "buying" something and not getting to own it. Oh sure, they'll piss and moan and complain that they can't do something they never did in the first place, but they won't actually change their purchasing patterns in large enough numbers to matter.

Sure, at the end of the day the change probably doesn't make them money, but gigacorps like Amazon don't need to have finances that make sense. Some dumbfuck C-level said "durr we can stop piracy if we just don't let them save the files" so that's what we're doing. By the time anyone has enough data to figure out if it was a bad decision or not everyone will have forgotten who initiated it anyway, with a 50-50 on them even still working for the company.

Piracy gets better and more morally justified every day, gotta love it.

 

[Wodanaz]

I don't get why large corporations, like Amazon, are so determined to throw away their market shares.

This is all some overpaid executives idea on how to increase short term gains isn't it?

Yes and no. In a sense it's short term planning because digital distribution is in its infancy compared to the traditional model of "buy a product, own a product", but it's also a long term strategy in the sense that they are hedging their bets that nobody will actually care enough to move to a different platform/pirate everything. Only insane schizophrenics like me do that. The convenience of the Kindle ecosystem is what they are selling, and if you think that's not a winning strategy, may I remind you that Apple became the world's first trillion dollar company by selling convenience and little else, because their ecosystem is a walled garden that forbids almost any end user freedom. To that end, it doesn't matter what Kindle or Apple does, how much private property ownership they take from their users, if they continue to offer enough convenience.

Example: Steam. Now Steam is actually one of the only good megacorps because Gabe Newell is not a soulless demon powered by money, he's just a gamer who hates Microsoft. The fact remains however, that everyone in the world uses Steam to "buy" games. They still don't own any of them, Valve is still legally allowed to delete people's accounts for any reason or no reason whatsoever, and alternatives like GoG do exist that offer DRM free local downloads of games. People still use Steam, because everyone else uses Steam, because Steam is the most convenient way to play PC games. Steam is the oldest, has the widest selection, and offers the most features.

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/live-service-hate-thread.176321/
Example of what could happen to Steam users if an insane leftist/corpo rat took over and implemented draconian community guidelines.

The same is true for Kindle in terms of books, and Twitter in terms of micro blogging. Think of all the leftists like Patrick Tomlinson who threw a fit when Elon bought Twitter, and how they swore to move to Threads of Bluesky or Tumblr or whatever. How many of them actually did? Not nearly enough to make Elon reconsider his policies. Every 6 months or so, I see a new story about some semi-famous author that has chosen to eschew Kindle because of its insane policies like revenue splits, but people still use it. It would take authors with massive fanbases like le terf woman, le fat shitting man, brando sando, Tolkien's estate, Stephen King, etc moving on from Kindle to effectuate any change. And since these authors have not actually given Kindle anything except the rights to distribute on their platform, it would actually be incredibly easy for them to do this, simply rescind the rights after the contracts expire, and move to another, less horribly anti consumer platform.

But that's probably not gonna happen, because you will own nothing, and be happy.

 

[Charlie Delicious]

Piracy gets better and more morally justified every day, gotta love it.

I feel like the only thing I won't torrent these days is video games. And I'm not sure if that's because I've taken a moral stance or because Steam just makes it easy to own games??

 

[Fandom Pulse]

I don't get why large corporations, like Amazon, are so determined to throw away their market shares. You spend all this time building yourself up into the largest bookstore just to throw it all away? How is this supposed to work anyway? Do I pay a monthly fee, and then have access to millions of books? Or will there be some tier system? Or does Amazon honestly believe there are enough nigger-cattle out there who are willing to pay full price for a book they will not own? This doesn't even make sense from a market perspective. All Amazon's competitors have to do is say "You can download your purchase at anytime" and now that makes them a far better service. This is all some overpaid executives idea on how to increase short term gains isn't it?

Because they're not. They have zero competitor for real. Normies won't even notice this. That's the sad part.

Physical media wins again.