Talkin' with James

 

About a decade or so ago you would have found me rushing up and down the streets of Toronto going from one interview to the next. Not interviews for a job, but interviews with authors for my radio show "Covered & Bound" on CHRY 105.5FM, and later for my (now defunct) hand-coded-in-html blog "Engaging the Word".


I saved all those old interviews, an archive that numbers in the several hundreds, and I decided to start putting them back up online. I got to looking at Tumblr one day, and found that this was the perfect format for these interviews.

They are long form (20 minutes to 1 hour long)  interviews with authors from all across the publishing spectrum.

If you like HBO's A Game of Thrones, for example, you might want to check out the two interviews I did with George RR Martin.

I've linked to it at the top of this blog, or you can click this link here - Talkin' with James

Using Piracy to Turn Your Book into a $$$ Machine

There's some new thought turning up on the interwebs about the intersection of pirating and the book business, and while the mainstream line is that piracy is always bad, recent events may be adding a caveat on to that.

Sure, if you sell and e-book and someone pirates it, it's bad, because who wants to pay money for another e-copy? But if you are getting the digital copy of a book that can only be truly experienced in a more tactile form.... then pirating becomes marketing.

At least this was the case with the breakout best-selling kids title "Go the F--- to Sleep."

Gratis-nomics

I'm kind of liking that word right now, seeing as how Chris Anderson already took the other cool variation.

Some interesting news.

Ever heard of The Guild? It is an independently written, and produced webshow about a bunch of geeks who love World of Warcraft.

Season one was givjavascript:void(0)en away free, as will season 2 be. But quality work speaks for itself, and loudly enough that The Guild is now being sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint.

In the new creative economy, I'm thinking that talent, effort, and quality work are going to be the main factor determining success.

The Future of Publishing

You know, for an awful long time, the business of publishing has boiled down to taking a book, throwing it on a shelf in a bookstore, and hoping readers will find it, and buy it.

Oh sure, there are also marketing campaigns, book tours, interviews and reviews that help out, but for the most part publishers relied on third parties to get people to buy their books. And the system worked, until it didn't, and instead of changing, most publishers seem to just keep on like nothing has happened.

Well one publisher decided to buck that trend. What's more, when faced with the bleak harshness of the open market after their Arts Council funding was withdrawn, instead of laying down and dying an elegaic death, they performed an epic act of innovation, and have begun to thrive.

As The Bookseller.com reports, "Independent poetry publisher Salt has raised enough money to get through the rest of 2009."

Instead of just chucking books on a store shelf, they made direct contact with their past customers. They reached out, got names, emails, and began their "Just One Book" campaign, where they urged people to buy one, just one, book. Not the same book, but just one book by them.

And it worked, by golly. Instead of relying on handouts and bemoaning the disinterest of the modern reader, and waiting for some media panjandrum to raise an approving eyebrow, they put boots up arses, stirred up some interest themselves, and to top it off are now diversifying into other genres.

Amazing, isn't it? What publishers can do when they use their heads?

A First Glimpse of the Kindled Future

You ever hear of Boyd Morrison? Probably not, but his story is more than a little pertinent for anyone looking to make a living as a writer.

It seems that old Boyd went and wrote a novel, but instead of going the usual route of sending it off to sit on a slush pile, or futilely begging an agent to look at it, he self-published it on Amazon as a Kindle book.

And it sold.

Not Harry Potter levels, but more than enough that Simon and Schuster kicked down his door and stuck a two book deal in his face.

This Kindle thing may not only be a way for to get noticed by readers, but for the publishers to notice writers. Instead of looking into a crystal ball to predict what might sell, they only have to see what does sell, then lock that writer in tight.

Reports of the publishing industry's death may soon be proven to be exaggerated.

Google Gets Some Love

These days any news about Google seems to be bad news, and always along the line of no good intention ever going unpunished.

The good deed they've been getting the most flack for these days has been their bold, unprecedented attempt to digitize the world's books.

When I first heard about this initiative, I loved it unreservedly, because I had wanted to do something similar myself.

Indeed, a lifelong ambition of mine has been to build a house somewhere with a lot of space, and add on a big circular library. You know, one of those tower like structures that's three storeys high, the shelves rise up to dizzying heights, with a massive stained glass window on the top. It would be like my own little wizard's enclave, a place where Raistlin would feel at home.

But could I hold the world's books? And for what purpose? In the event of Armageddon, or some sort of nuclear holocaust, it would be a place that could help the world rebuild. It would be the center of a brand new civilization, and oasis of knowledge and learning in the midst of ignorance and savagery.

But when was the last time the whole world ended?

Maybe one day I will build a library like that, but it would only be an ornament, really. Not something that could enrich the lives of others, unless I wanted to turn my home into a public space, and I'm sure the wife would have reservations about such a plan.

Besides, what I imagined doing was and still lay firmly in the realm of my own imagination. In practice, I seem to have gone in reverse, as I have become one of those people who now sheds books after using them. But Google isn't talking about a cool idea, or a grand notion, they're in the business of making it happen.

And that's where I get mystified by the response Google has gotten. A huge number of the books they have been dealing with are out of print, the author has died but no copyright owner can be found, or their is no indication of the clear holder of the copyright. In other words, these are books existing in a form of purgatory, of no real use to society at large, yet representing a massive amount of intellectual capital.

What Google found was a gold mine that nobody wanted, and nobody had ever bothered to even look at. So when Google staked their claim on all that empty territory, put a ton of resources into making something out of what had been abandoned as nothing, why only then did the howls begin. Accusations of monopoly where flung with abandon. Google was said to have vile, nefarious plans for locking up all the world's information, and leaving mankind in the dark.

All because they began digging up books that had been left to rot.

The whole thing struck me as the rawest of hypocrisy. Let's say I found a book they had dug up, and I had to pay a fee to access it. Well, the very fact that I found out about the existence of that book was due to Google, and the fact that I could actually obtain access to a copy was due to Google. So why they heck shouldn't they be allowed to charge me? They did all the work, and I am reaping the benefit of that work.

As usual, what strikes me as common sense, often seems to be less than common, and I find myself on the thin edge of an argument wedge. Which is why is was gratifying to see Slate.com come to the rescue with an argument that puts paid to all that nonsense sprayed about by all those howling nincompoops out there.

Now if only a way can be found to make digital storage and retrieval permanent, then worries about the loss of information can be put to rest.

Crystalline storage, anyone?

Worldwide Bestselling Authors

Abebooks put together a list of the Top 20 bestselling authors worldwide. The list draws from the bestseller lists of English titles from 9 countries that keep national data.

Pretty eye opening.

Number 13 is a kid who, only a few years ago, was traveling around the US, hawking his self-published book at science fiction and fantasy conventions.

Number one is a dude who has only written two novels, the first of which was virtually ignored for a year or more after its initial release, and then became an international sensation - Khaled Hosseini.

I interviewed Khaled Hosseini when The Kite Runner first came out. He was a nice guy, but I was pretty sure he was headed for mid-list status.

Boy was I wrong.

What I didn't see was that outside Canada, and even the US, his novel, and his second novel, sold incredibly well. Out in the middle east, he is prominently displayed at the front of pretty much every store.

As for Harry Potter... I am sure the list would be different for 2007, which is when book 7 came out. This list is just for 2008, and Stephanie Meyer got a real boost with Twilight being released in theaters..

1 Khaled Hosseini
2 Stieg Larsson
3 Ken Follett
4 Stephenie Meyer
5 Muriel Barbery
6 Carlos Ruiz Zafón
7 Anna Gavalda
8 John Grisham
9 J K Rowling
10 Henning Mankell
11 Alan Bennett
12 Jodi Picoult
13 Christopher Paolini
14 David Baldacci
15 Nicholas Sparks
16 Elizabeth George
17 Lauren Weisberger
18 Michael Connelly
19 Patricia D. Cornwell
20 Paulo Coelho

How Short Stories Could Be Revived

I've gone into this in the past, but basically, I think short stories could be revived using an iTunes approach. The writer sells directly to the reader, or through a short story site, for a low, low price. Say $0.25. If a thousand people buy your story, that's $250. Not a fortune, but it is something.

But that sort of approach is not ready for prime time yet, because online micro-payments has not really hit the mainstream yet. People have to have Paypal, or use their credit card currently, and while most people would be okay with linking these up with Apple, most people may not feel comfortable or be willing to do so for a tiny short story site.

Right now, I think the only viable model is to a) build a readership by giving it away, and aggressively marketing what you offer, and b) using an established reader base (as newspapers and magazines use circulation figures) to sell sponsorship. Not ads, but sponsorships, and this is an important point.

Looking at the state of short fiction these days, the declining readership may appear to signal a waning of interest in the form of short fiction, but the truth is that the interest is there so long as the delivery medium is convenient. Which is where podcasts come in.

A lot of magazines and newspapers have been including podcasts with other content online. The New Yorker even produces a fiction podcast. But a magazine like the New Yorker has deep pockets, and this sort of production would be peanuts to them.

One short story magazine that started from nothing and grew is "Escape Pod," with 209 episodes (issues) thus far. It's a Science Fiction Audio Magazine. If you want to check out an episode, a good example is Episode 158, both because the story is fun, and the episode is sponsored by the musician Jonathan Coulton. His song "The Future Soon" (an excellent track) is at the end of the podcast.

An interesting side note...lyrics from that song inspired the Cory Doctorow short story "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away."

Escape Pod pays contributors about $100 a story, and $20 for flash fiction. Not a grand sum, but it makes them a legitimate publisher, and allows them to legally secure rights (nonexclusive rights) to the stories they buy. Since their launch a few years ago, they have become one of the largest markets for short science fiction on the web.

Even Garrison Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" podcast is sponsored. Usually by Cheerios. You can find that podcast on iTunes

The reason I feel sponsorship is the way to go is because you can sell exclusivity. The problem with selling "ads" is that you end up having to sell as many as possible, crowding them in the smallest space possible to maximize revenue. It worked great for magazines until it didn't anymore. For audio magazines, nobody is going to listen to ten minutes of commercials, free podcast or not. But a sponsorship is perfect for the form, because podcasts are a recreation of the theatre of the mind of the old days of radio. It is a very intimate and engaging experience, and in that format, sponsorships are much more effective because the announcer incorporates the sponsors message smoothly into the episode.

I know the whole money issue seems a mere piffle, a distraction from the real business of literature and good writing, but it is what allows the literature and good writing the opportunity to find an audience.

The idea is to use the revenue stream generated through the podcast sponsorships to pay for everything else. On the site you can post the story text, put a link to the audio version, and you can even carry over the sponsorship if you want, or not if you prefer the make the site look as un-commercial as possible.

Starting from scratch, however, unless you want to end up broke after 11 issues and unable to continue, like Farrago's Wainscot, which was a pretty cool online experimental fiction magazine, there has to be some way of generating a revenue stream.

Of course you could just do a free thing, and offer no payment to authors (which means you probably couldn't secure rights to their story), and hope word of the site spreads like wildfire. Unfortunately you would then face the problem of how to attract quality writing, and how to get taken seriously.

Resurrecting the Short Story

I know, the titles is a tad hyperbolic, but I've been thinking a lot about this issue lately, and I'll probably be posting on it more and more as time goes on.

As you know, markets for short stories have been shrinking drastically in recent years. Science Fiction and Fantasy have been hard hit, and a number of great magazines have disappeared in the past two decades. While a few online 'zines have popped up, nothing seemed to really halt this overall decline. Literary fiction has had and even rougher time, with few literary fiction magazines able to survive without government funding, or private donations, and even then having a rough time making a go of it.

If you wanted to start up your own magazine, off the bat, you're jumping into a market that is seen as not only dying, but perhaps long dead. It's a grim scenario, for sure, but in recent years a teeny, tiny bright light has appeared.

This bright light comes in the form of "audio magazines?" You see, I don't often have time to "read" short stories, but I do "listen" to them. Every day I listen to podcasts like EscapePod, which is a science fiction audio magazine that has already produced over 200 episodes. In fact, the creators of this podcast were so successful that they have branched out into other genres, with PodCastle (Fantasy) and PseudoPod (Horror). They actually pay their writers ($100 a story) and have built up a listener base in the tens of thousands. In fact, because of the size of their listener base, other writers, publishers, and even musicians often pay them to "sponsor" an episode, which allows these programs to run at a slight profit.

There are other audio magazines like EscapePod, but as far as I know, thus far there is no CanLit version. Being Canadian, this could represent a market opportunity, even if it is a tiny one.

Along side the the print material, the can be stories recorded as podcasts. You can put them up on iTunes, offer them for free, and post them on the website alongside the source material. You can even do the same thing with the reviews of short story collections. If you can build up an audience, even a modest one, after a year or so your initiative might be eligible (in Canada, at least) for Canada Council funding. Based on the size of the listenership, you might even be able to hit up the publishing companies for a few bucks.

I know it is not about the money, but this way you could actually pay your writers for their work, which would be something to boast about, considering the state of the CanLit short story market. And even if that didn't come to pass, you'd still be doing something needful, and filling a currently unfilled niche.

In Their Defense

These days any news about Google seems to be bad news, and always along the line of no good intention ever going unpunished.

The good deed they've been getting the most flack for these days has been their bold, unprecedented attempt to digitize the world's books.

When I first heard about this initiative, I loved it unreservedly, because I had wanted to do something similar myself.

Indeed, a lifelong ambition of mine has been to build a house somewhere with a lot of space, and add on a big circular library. You know, one of those tower like structures that's three storeys high, the shelves rise up to dizzying heights, with a massive stained glass window on the top. It would be like my own little wizard's enclave, a place where Raistlin would feel at home.

But could I hold the world's books? And for what purpose? In the event of Armageddon, or some sort of nuclear holocaust, a place that could help the world rebuild. It would be the center of a brand new civilization, and oasis of knowledge and learning in the midst of ignorance and savagery.

But when was the last time the whole world ended?

Maybe one day I will build a library like that, but it would only be an ornament, really. Not something that could enrich the lives of others, unless I wanted to turn my home into a public space, and I'm sure the wife would have reservations about such a plan.

Besides, what I imagined doing was and still lay firmly in the realm of my own imagination. In practice, I seem to have gone in reverse, as I have become one of those people who now sheds books after using them. But Google isn't talking about a cool idea, or a grand notion, they're in the business of making it happen.

And that's where I get mystified by the response Google has gotten. A huge number of the books they have been dealing with are out of print, the author has died but no copyright owner can be found, or their is no indication of the clear holder of the copyright. In other words, these are books existing in a form of purgatory, of no real use to society at large, yet representing a massive amount of intellectual capital.

What Google found was a gold mine that nobody wanted, and nobody had ever bothered to even look at. So when Google staked their claim on all that empty territory, put a ton of resources into making something out of what had been abandoned as nothing, why only then did the howls begin. Accusations of monopoly where flung with abandon. Google was said to have vile, nefarious plans for locking up all the world's information, and leaving mankind in the dark.

All because they began digging up books that had been left to rot.

The whole thing struck me as the rawest of hypocrisy. Let's say I found a book they had dug up, and I had to pay a fee to access it. Well, the very fact that I found out about the existence of that book was due to Google, and the fact that I could actually obtain access to a copy was due to Google. So why they heck shouldn't they be allowed to charge me? They did all the work, and I am reaping the benefit of that work.

As usual, what strikes me as common sense, often seems to be less than common, and I find myself on the thin edge of an argument wedge. Which is why is was gratifying to see Slate.com come to the rescue with an argument that puts paid to all that nonsense sprayed about by all those howling nincompoops.

Now if only a way can be found to make digital storage and retrieval permanent, then worries about the loss of information can be put to rest.

Crystalline storage, anyone?

At Last, an Iota of Sense

Roy Blount Jr. has gone and done the entirely unexpected - he has shown some common sense. Since the advent of Google Books, the Author's Guild has fluctuated from ambivalence to hysterics, managing to come off looking like a woodcut print of horse's rear in the process. When Amazon announced the Kindle 2, and the new text to speech capability, the Author's Guild sealed that image by swinging around their metaphorical billy clubs, smacking down the blind and visually impaired in an orgy of self-indulgent, grasping bleating.

Thankfully Blount ate his Cheerios today, and grew a little bit smarter. It seems that, after careful consideration, Blount has decided that scanning millions of books that are not published any more (out of print), cannot be found in any bookstore, and have disappeared entirely from the public view, and offering those up for sale, may actually be a good thing for writers. These "orphan" books, which provide no income for any party, yet are trapped by the inescapable realities of economics and copyright law (not worth printing in quantity - unavailable in the public domain) are finally getting a chance to find a new life in the minds of readers everywhere.

There are many times I have come across a writer whose works I have enjoyed, only to learn that many of their other works are unavailable. They have not been printed in ages, and unless I haunt the used book stores for a time, or search across the internet to track down an errant copy somewhere, anywhere, I am out of luck. Many, many excellent books have been published with small print runs, and have faded into obscurity, with copies being lost over the years, destroyed, or packed into little cardboard boxes, to be stored in the attic indefinitely. A literal Library of Alexandria disappears from our world with frightening regularity, and has ever since the mass printing of books began five centuries ago, but for the first time this attrition can be stopped, those lost books can be found, and new books in future can be preserved for generations yet to come.

While this may seem trivial to some if this was only about fiction, but what Google Books will do is scan everything. Biographies, memoirs, poetry collections, books on history, geography and more. This includes books from the US Civil War, or from before Confederation in Canada. Voices lost to general view may yet have a chance to resurface. In many a small town there are tiny collections in tinier museums, holding a single copy of a journal or diary from long ago. A single copy that never leaves that shelf, forever destined to be a curio looked upon by families and small groups on summer holiday, before they donate $5 to the local historical society and head out to go to Dairy Queen.

Of all the atrocities of the past, the great massacres, pogroms, and wars of extermination, I've always felt that the greatest atrocities were not what mankind did to itself, for that behavior is endemic and eternal, but what mankind does to the record of itself, to it's own mind, and capacity to rise above it's nature. The destruction of information has long been the greatest tool in the arsenal of every tyrannical regime that has existed throughout the history of mankind. By repressing information, or limiting access to information, human bondage is assured.

If there is one thing the recent turmoil in Iran has shown, the ability to disseminate information is the one weapon every repressive regime fears. When the information disappears, and the messages are destroyed, those voices disappear, and the cycle of repression, violence and lies is free to continue again.

But if a way can be found, to keep those voices alive, to record them permanently, for posterity, then that can only be a good thing.

There's Still a Pot of Gold Out There for Some

It seems that Alistair Reynolds hit the jackpot recently, when British publisher Gollancz offered him a ten year, ten book deal worth £1 million. When I first heard of this deal, it immediately put me in mind of Steven Erikson, who in 1999, signed a nine book deal with Transworld, worth £675,000.

It used to be that large multi-book deals were a staple of the mainstream publishers, a trend that fell away to the point where new authors can only expect one book, and if that does well, provisional two or three book deal. In the book "The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada, 1946-2006," Roy MacSkimming made reference to a practice publishers had of shepherding talent, giving them time to mature, and time for audiences to find their books. The mainstream publishers felt that readership built slowly, and there was little point in investing in any author unless it was for the long term.

Today that attitude has disappeared...except for genre publishers. Unlike contemporary fiction, where multi-book stories are relatively rare, genre fiction depends on the extended series. The trilogies, the decalogies, the 22 books and counting runs where readers can once again spend some time with Detective X, or go on another campaign with a daring space ship Captain who had won their hearts fifteen books earlier. For every Stephen King, who has built a career mostly on stand-alone novels, or Harlan Coben who has mostly done the same, there are five to ten successful series authors, people like James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, or David Weber, who cater to a very large, and very voracious fanbase all waiting for the next novel in a certain series.

For the author who is lucky enough to land massive deals as Erikson and Reynolds have, it must seem like winning the lottery. But from the point of view of the publisher, such extravagance may actually be a smart and conservative move. Give your writer enough money that they can live comfortably enough that they won't have to rush about on side projects just trying to make ends meet, and that writer will supply you with a steady stream of books that can be marketed to their fanbase, then packaged, and resold abroad.

At a Price You Can Afford

On topic with last night's post is a little rant I posted the bulletin board run UBC's Creative Writing program, where I'm doing my MFA. From time to time I cross post between here and there, mostly because I have a tendency to go on when I write, and I'm often in mortal danger of running out, not of time, but of my wife's patience. A man must know his limits.

I had to laugh at an article from the New York Times a few days ago. It's about the digital piracy of books, and it starts off with Ursula K. LeGuin feeling shocked that people may actually like her work enough to go to the trouble of stealing it.

While I really felt the writer of the article was coming at the issue like a wide-eyed neophyte (whoa, man, they pirate books now?), and that the article was pretty crummy overall, there were a few salient points that, while only obliquely referred to, were in there.

The first point, though not explicitly mentioned, was clear. As a writer, you can be a Harlan Ellison, who doesn't think twice about sending forth his lawyers to lay wrath and destruction all about the landscape, all while hiding in a dark corner, forever bitching that a bunch hacks ruined your version of The City on the Edge of Forever. Or you can be Cory Doctorow, and encourage people to read your work, while bringing out bestseller after bestseller, and getting nominated for a host of major awards.

The next point, again unmentioned other than obliquely, was the affordability of first run fiction. As Stephen King says,

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys. And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

Right there is the crux of the whole issue, and it is something I almost never hear discussed. Oh sure, I read a ton about how people love books, love the feel of the pages on their skin as they hug novels to their chest and breathe in the earthy scent of bleached and processed paper. Or how the tactile pleasure of holding a book in one's hand is an ethereal state that approximates nirvana, or finding one's self in the presence of the almighty, basking in that eternal glory.

But I never read about how books are so bloody expensive.

Think about it. You pay $40 for a hardcover. Doesn't seem like much to the average reader, working a decent job, but with so little time to read they may only buy two or three books at most in a year. But for the avid reader, who often has far more time on their hands for any number of reasons, that's pretty steep. You know what $40 is to a lot of people? It's groceries for the week. It's a sizable chunk of the month's rent. It's almost half the cost of a monthly bus pass. Multiply that $40 by eight or ten, which is on the lower end of what an avid reader reads in a month, and instead of being a sizable chunk of the month's rent, the cost of books IS the month's rent.

So what to do? Go to the library? But wait...if you go to the library, it's a situation where one person (or institution) bought a book, and then countless people are reading it...for free!

What does that situation remind us of?

Perhaps that of an avid reader who passes on a book that is then passed on to another, and another, finds it's way into a second hand shop (no royalties there!) and into the hands of another reader, and on, &c. One copy purchased, which many read for free.

Or perhaps that of some lonely kid who reads this cool book he bought, and wanting to share it, he scans it and sends it to his friends. Again, one copy was purchased, while many read for free.

However you slice it, it all amounts to the same thing. People want to read, but they don't want to pay.

Or maybe they just don't want to pay that much?

Being the genre fan that I am, I got to reading Eric Flint's "1632" which is available for free on the publisher's site. The sequel "1633" is also available for free.

Well, I tell you, those crafty little crack dealers at Baen sure know what they are doing. When I finished the first two, I just had to read the next book, and I sure as heck wasn't going to pay $40 for it, or even $15 if I could track down a paperback. I didn't want to search through endless bookstores, or order one on Amazon and wait for weeks. I wanted it right there, right then.

I could have turned to the torrents and found it there, but there was no need. Baen wanted to sell it to me for $6. That's right. For only $6, I not only got an e-copy of the book in the format of my choice, but the perpetual right to re-download that book if I so chose, and the file itself was DRM free.

It was so easy, so painless, and entirely enjoyable. Just like the Kindle (Which, reasonably enough, is a key reason why Kindle lovers love the Kindle.

Imagine that, at a time when all these publishers are staring straight at a dirt nap, plucky, little, independent Baen, purveyors of pulp sci-fi and fantasy and awful book covers, is sitting pretty. Why?

Because of access. Not only can you buy books from them cheaply and quickly, but their entire back list is available online, including all the out of print books. And, you can get the first book or two of most series for free. Talking about getting you hooked!

Ever see a book that looked cool, but then you learn it is book 4, or something of a series? Ever tried to find book 1 on the shelf without success? Happens to me all the time, and not just with genre fiction. I have Richard Ford's "The Lay of the Land" and when I started reading it, I learned that it was actually the third of a series of three novels. For two years I looked for The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day," but to no avail. Only yesterday did my local Borders call me and tell me that the copies I had requested at the dawn of time were now in and ready for me to purchase - within 7 days, or they'd ship them off into the netherworld.

Good thing I'm not on vacation this week.

But really, when you think about it, when it comes to getting and reading books you want read, why is luck even in the picture?

Doesn't make good business sense to me, nor did it to Baen.

Maybe the major publishing houses will figure that out some day.