On 5/4/2025 9:21 PM, Chris Thompson wrote:
Ahasuerus wrote:
On 5/3/2025 9:58 PM, Chris Thompson wrote:
a425couple wrote:
[snip-snip]
Turns out, it was the Boundry 'co-author' Eric Flint that died.
from wiki
"Since both the Grantville Gazette and the Ring of Fire Press had
ceased operations shortly after Eric Flint's death in 2022,[3][4][5]
the series was originally expected to be concluded after manuscripts
that had already been submitted to Baen prior to Flint's death were
published in the upcoming year or so.[6] In June 2023, it was
announced that a new company, Flint's Shards Inc., had signed a
contract with Lucille Robbins, Eric Flint's widow and heir, to
produce a new electronic magazine called Eric Flint's 1632 & Beyond
that was scheduled to be released bimonthly on the first day of odd-
numbered months ,with Bjorn Hasseler as editor-in-chief, starting
inSeptember 2023.[7]"
If you enjoyed the Flint/Spoor collaboration, their book _Fenrir_
will be coming out in June. Ryk is posting teasers, links to which
can be found on his Facebook feed. _Fenrir_ may well be Eric Flint's
last book to see print. Dammit. The eARC is available at Baen.com.
(Ah, _Fenrir_ is not a continuation of the _Boundary_ series, nor any
other. It might be the first book of one, though. Ryk seems to have
about 30 irons in the fire atm.)
Hopefully the financial complications that followed Eric Flint's death
have been resolved. Back in October 2022 David Drake wrote (https://
david-drake.com/2022/newsletter-128/):
I got to thinking about success. I always figured that a writer
could expect three material things from his work: money, readership
and awards, I wanted enough money for a comfortable life and enough
readers to sustain that income. I never cared about awards.
My friend Eric Flint wanted a fourth thing: fame. How different
that is from the other three was driven home when his widow had to
declare bankruptcy. Eric was a good writer and apparently (to me)
successful. It turns out that it’s expensive to keep up the appearance
of being successful–being famous, in other words. Eric spent more
money on this than he earned, so he died famous but owing a lot of money.
That's really sad. I knew there were financial difficulties but I didn't realize they were bankruptcy-level bad. I wonder if bringing new writers along through the Ring of Fire stories had much to do with it. It
certainly seemed like Eric Flint should have had a comfortable living.
Whether an author has a comfortable living is determined both by how
much he earns and by how much he spends and, according to the Drake
quote above, "Eric spent more money on this [keeping up the appearance
of being successful] than he earned".
As Wilkins Micawber said in _David Copperfield_:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and
six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure
twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." (
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/766/pg766.txt)
Then again, I don't really know how much money an author actually nets
from their works.
For authors who use Patreon, there is this list of "Top Patreon Earners
- Writing" - see
https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-earners/writing.
Note that most authors use the "per month" model, but some, notably
Seanan McGuire, use the "per story/creation" model.
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