Baen Books has much to celebrate here at BookExpo. This year marks the 25th anniversary of David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, which boasts 14 novels, 12 spinoffs, and three YA titles totaling more than five million copies sold. Fans will be happy to know that there’s no end in sight. A new Harrington novel, Shadow of Victory, is due in November.
Meanwhile, a former collaborator with Weber, Eric Flint, has much to celebrate as well, and is in Chicago to do so. His time travel series, Ring of Fire, has sold more than three million copies of its novels and story collections. The 16th book in the series, 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught, will be published in January 2017.
Baen’s own history and path to success is a bit unusual. In 1983 Jim Baen participated in a reorganization of Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Book division, which led to the creation of an independent eponymous publishing company, still distributed by S&S. “We believe in collaboration at Baen,” says publisher Toni Weisskopf, who joined the company right out of college, later beoming the editorial director. She was trained by the company’s founder to take over before he died in 2006. Weisskopf says that collaboration is a tradition in the genre, begun when Hugo Gernsback, as founding editor of Amazing Stories, printed not only readers’ letters but also their addresses so that fans could write to each other. “That’s where the seeds for modern geek culture came from,” she adds.
Beginning with his first Ring of Fire book, Flint reached out to readers for feedback and ideas for future books through the online fan forum called Baen’s Bar, which the company started in the 1990s and remains active. “That collaborative interactive process, with lots of people sharing ideas, is the essence of science fiction,” adds Weisskopf,
Her experience with Honor Harrington goes back to when Weber originally pitched the idea for a series featuring a formidable female royal space naval officer set in 4003–4025 A.D. Twenty-five years later—in the 20th and 21st centuries—the series is still going strong, although Weisskopf hints that she knows how Weber intends to end the series when it’s time. Not wanting to be a spoiler, Weisskopf says only there will be “no black holes in the Honorverse,” the name fans have dubbed Honor’s world. In many ways, Weisskopf says she feels like she grew up with Honor Harrington. It’s a sentiment booksellers tell her avid readers of the series share with them all the time.
Eric Flint will be signing copies of Ring of Fire IV, the latest collection of stories in the series, 10–10:30 a.m., at Table 10 in the Autographing Area.
This article appeared in the May 11, 2016 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
