by Eric Flint | May 12, 2020 | Blog | 1 comment As many of you already know, I have a publishing house of my own called Ring of Fire Press. I launched the house back in 2013 as a way to publish stories in the Ring of Fire series that were too long to include in one of the anthologies published by Baen Books. For the first few years, I operated the house on a pretty hit-or-miss basis. I had no regular publishing schedule and didn’t put a lot of money or effort into it. I was really doing it just as a service to some of our long-standing authors. A little over two years ago, however, I decided to take it more seriously. The first thing I did was engage a professional artist (Laura Givens) to do the covers. That instantly made a huge difference—by which I mean increasing our sales by almost an order of magnitude. Once I saw that we had a much bigger income, I took on Walt Boyes and Joy Ward as a combination of managers and editors of the house, so that it would no longer be something I was trying to do on the side. And we decided to establish a regular publication schedule. Initially that was one book a month, but we soon expanded that to two books a month. For a time, our focus remained on publishing Ring of Fire series books. But it didn’t take us long to realize that we’d built a real publishing house—so why not use it to publish any sort of fantasy and science fiction? We’ve been doing that now for some time, and reached the point where Ring of Fire series books are only about one-third of what we publish. In fact, we’ve expanded our output so much that beginning in July we’re going to shift to a three-book-a-month schedule. One of the things that has enabled us to do is…
Novels
by Eric Flint | Feb 19, 2020 | Blog | 23 comments “Tempus fugit” is a Latin phrase that officially translates as “time flies.” What it really is, though, is a hoity-toity way of saying “old farts forget stuff.” The old fart in this instance being me—and what I forgot was that my novel 1632 was published exactly twenty years ago. Well… Using the term “exactly” with some poetic license. The book was indeed published in February of 2000, but I’m pretty sure it was published earlier than the 18th day of the month. So I’m fudging a little. By any reasonable measure of the term “success,” 1632 was a successful novel. To begin with, it was successful on its own terms. It sold—this is taken directly from my royalty reports so there’s no fudging at all—7,458 copies in hardcover, which was very good at the time for hardcover sales. Better still, it also had a 69% sell-through. For those of you not familiar with publishing lingo, “sell-through” means the percentage of books printed and shipped that are actually sold. The industry average is around 50%, so 69% is very good, That was the initial hardcover print run. Since then, Baen Books has done a special edition leather-bound hardcover edition ($36.00 a copy BUT CHEAP AT THE PRICE) that has sold 765 copies at a 77% sell-through. Furthermore, the novel is still in print after twenty years, and has sold over 140,000 copies in paperback with a 88% sell-through, which is like incredibly, spectacularly good. A publishing house which has a book that maintains an 88% sell-through over two decades has essentially been able to legally print money for all that time. And—I love this fact because I sneer at so-called “electronic piracy”—keep in mind that 1632 has been available electronically FOR FREE for about the last eighteen years and… still just keeps selling and selling. Every year I get royalty payments for the book somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000. But the novel doesn’t stand on…