a lot too!

His book AND THE DEVIL WILL DRAG YOU UNDER *was* available in an electronic version, and he said he would agree to licensing based on the sales of that one title. Hardly anyone bought it.

A shame, too, because if it had sold well, he might have been prodded into writing the sequel, which I would have enjoyed, even if no one else.

However, whatever my complaints about the entry requirements for SFWA, their Emergency Medical Fund kept a roof over my head, and food in our kitchen while Jack was dying. I’m dubious about a system where people voluntarily pony up whatever they think an e-book is worth. I happily downloaded Dr. Pournelle’s FALLEN ANGELS when I saw it on the Baen site, but I doubt I’d pay anything for it. If I thought the entire amount would go directly to Jerry, I’d pay an amount equal to the author’s royalty (Jack got 6% of whatever the full retail price was, but surely Eleanor–both Jack’s and Jerry’s literary agent–was able to negotiate more than that for Jerry).

I’ve never met Dr. Hendrix, but if I were depending on Jack’s royalty payments to pay my bills, I’d be cranky, too.

The above page by Jerry makes interesting reading. Pity he stopped updating it in 2003.

As for a “fair way to react”, it’s standard practice to avoid purchasing from people that they don’t like.

For things that have objective criteria (such as how fast a computer is) the effect of disliking the vendor is small. For thing that have highly subjective criteria (such as how much you enjoy reading a book) then you have to expect the effect of disliking the author to be high.

Russell: Fair enough, I just wanted to nip any ideas people might have had reading your and my blogs that this was a fair way to react to the stupidity of a few SFWA officers and old farts/curmudgeon authors, most of whom have stopped writing fiction I would enjoy reading long ago….

I’m merely changing my priorities. The fact that I haven’t got nearly enough time to read the books I would like to read is part of the problem (I have a pile of unread books, some of which I have owned for over a year).

Eric flint is not “a senior editor for Baen Books”. He is the senior editor (actually, Editor In Chief) of Jim Baen’s Universe. He is not, to my knowledge, employed by Baen in any other context.

He is, of course, also a free-lance author and editor who publishes mainly through Baen Books, but that does not make him “a senior editor for Baen Books”