Jim Baen's Universe

Important Announcement

Columns

Universe Closing

Written by Eric Flint

Jim Baen’s Universe will be closing after the April 2010 issue

I’m sorry to have to announce that we’ll be closing Jim Baen’s Universe at the end of our fourth year of publication. That year began with the June 2009 issue, and will end with the April 2010 issue.

The magazine will remain open through April 2010. No subscriber needs to worry that you won’t get every issue you paid for. For new subscribers, beginning with this issue, what we will be selling for a $30 subscription is access to any issue of the magazine, from its inception in June 2006 through the last issue in April 2010.

People can continue to buy Club memberships, if they choose, all the way through to the end of this year, December 31, 2009. The benefits of Club membership—access to Webscriptions, free e-book packages, cups, tote bags, Tuckerization rights, etc.—will be continued through whatever year of access the member purchased. Those benefits are not directly tied to whether or not a current issue of the magazine is being produced, and Club membership at any level includes access to all issues of the magazine.

The one exception is the $50 Titan memberships, which we will discontinue beginning in October. The main benefit that comes with Titan memberships is access to the e-ARC of the magazine. We feel that after this issue, as we get nearer and nearer to the last issue of the magazine, that benefit will simply no longer be enough for us to continue selling that level of membership. The Saturn, Polaris and Andromeda memberships, however, will continue to be available until the end of the year.

The one small class of people whose needs we’ll need to handle separately are those people who began subscribing with the very first issue of the magazine in June 2006 and have maintained their subscriptions ever since. Simply providing those people with access to all issues of the magazine for $30 won’t be sufficient, since they’ve already gotten all of them prior to this August 2009 issue. We will either reimburse those people for however many issues they don’t receive (at $5 per issue) or we will figure out alternative arrangements that suit them.

No author who has already sold a story to the magazine and for which they have a contract needs to be concerned, either that the story will be published or that (in those cases where payments were staggered) they’ll get the rest of the money owed to them. To use the parlance of the industry, no one is going to get orphaned.

I believe we’ve already sent notices to all authors who had stories submitted, either accepting them or rejecting them. If we’ve overlooked anyone, please let us know. For self-evident reasons, the magazine will be closed for any further submissions. We already have or will soon be acquiring all the stories we need to take us through the April 2010 issue.

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I’ll write a long analysis of the reasons we found it necessary to close the magazine for the October issue. I’m not in position to do it right now, however, because I simply don’t have the time. As many of you know already, I had to have open heart surgery three months ago (triple bypass operation) and once I was able to work again I was under tremendous deadline pressure to work with David Weber to get Torch of Freedom finished. (That’s the next volume in Weber’s Honor Harrington series, coming out in November.) So I’m still trying to catch up with everything.

For the moment, I’ll just provide a short summary. In a nutshell, we were simply never able to get and retain enough subscribers to put us on a sales plateau that would allow us to continue publishing. From the beginning, we were too dependent on the income from the Universe club. The Club’s purpose was to provide the magazine with a much-needed initial surge of income—which it did indeed provide—and then, after the first year, to continue as an important but subsidiary source of income. Instead, the Club wound up being the source of about half of our annual income, from beginning to end.

That was just too much; or, to put it another way, a reliance on too few critically important subscribers. Once some of them began to fall by the wayside—which was inevitable and, indeed, something we expected—the magazine’s income began to be badly squeezed.

It was our hope from the beginning that, as time went by, we’d expand our regular subscription base to the point where that base alone provided all the income we needed to keep publishing. Obviously, a situation where many customers are paying a small amount is a much more stable and dependable financial basis on which to operate a magazine.

But... we never got there. As I said, we came close. But it was never enough, and as time went by the situation simply became untenable. By the end of our third year of publication (which was officially July 31, 2009), we saw no reason to think that the situation would change—not, at least, in the near enough future—and so we made the final decision to close the magazine. We wanted to make that decision early enough that we could avoid the sort of mess that so often accompanies the folding of magazines. (Short-changed subscribers, orphaned stories, unpaid authors... oh, it can get very ugly indeed.)

For whatever it’s worth, I can assure you that no one is sorrier that we had to come to this decision than the magazine’s editors, Mike Resnick and myself, and the rest of the magazine's staff: Paula Goodlett, our managing editor, Dave Freer (art director), Rick Boatright (tech geek), Walt Boyes (marketing) and Stoney Compton (for lack of a better term, our utility infielder.).

Eric Flint

August 1, 2009