Eric Flint

Early life and education

He was born in 1947 in Burbank, California, Flint worked on a Ph.D. in history specializing in southern African history. He left his doctoral program in order to become a political activist in the labor movement and supported himself from that time until age 50 in a variety of jobs, including longshoreman, truck driver, and machinist, and as a labor union organizer. A long-time leftist political activist, Flint worked as a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

Career

After winning the 1993 Writers of the Future contest, he published his first novel in 1997 and moved to full-time writing in 1999.

Shortly afterwards, he became the first librarian of the Baen Free Library and a prominent anti-copy protection activist. He has edited the works of several classic SF authors, repackaging their short stories into collections and fix-up novels. This project has met commercial success, and has returned several out-of-print authors to print.

In 2004, faced with a persistent drain on his time by fan-fiction authors seeking comment on the four years old 1632 Tech Manual web forum focused on his 1632 series, he suggested to Jim Baen the experimental serialized fan-fiction e-zine The Grantville Gazette which also found commercial success. Four of the Gazette magazine editions were collated into anthology formats, bought by Jim Baen and brought out in either hardcover or paperback or both formats, though the last purchased remains unpublished. Subsequently, Flint became editor of the new Jim Baen's Universe science-fiction e-zine while concurrently remaining a creative writer bringing out three to five titles per year. After the death of Jim Baen due to a stroke and after completing the contract for the tenth Grantville Gazette, Flint founded a new website "grantvillegazette.com" which is not only continuing to bring out The Grantville Gazettes, but increasing the publishing rate from four per year to bimonthly while paying better than standard magazine pay rates and is modeled on the JBU e-zine.

As of October 2007 he lives with his wife Lucille (also an ex-labor organizer) in East Chicago, Indiana.

In 2008, he donated his archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

Flint was the author guest of honor for the 2010 NASFiC, ReConStruction.

He is also participating in The Stellar Guild series published by Phoenix Pick. The series pairs bestselling authors such as Flint with lesser known authors in science fiction and fantasy to help provide additional visibility to them.

Electronic publishing

Eric Flint is noted as the editor of the Baen Free Library which is an ongoing experiment in electronic publishing (e-books in multiple unencrypted formats) where Flint and the late Jim Baen convinced authors to post entirely unprotected free copies of various works for download over the internet. One early goal was to see if the release of free electronic content would increase the sales of their traditional print or (for-pay) electronic editions. As part of the initial phase, Flint has published a series of essays that in form have been part blog and part letters to the editor tracking the experiment and championing the practice.

Financially, it seems to be working out for publisher Baen Books, as they have embraced unencrypted e-book publication for all their works available in a variety of common formats. Usually eighty to a hundred titles are available in the Baen Free Library at any given time. In most cases, the works involved are the early volumes in continuing series, appetite whetters, where readers might be likely to purchase later works in the same series.

All new Baen Books can also be purchased as e-books in the same unencrypted formats as the free library through Baen WebScriptions. As an added wrinkle one can purchase a monthly collection of five bundled works in the release stage of publication at Baen's. Once the bundle reaches four months from its scheduled release date in print, about half of the work is serialized and available to readers purchasing the advanced peek. A month later, the next quarter, followed by the last quarter, available about a month on average ahead of any printed work. The last delivery contains the copyedited e-book version of the book.

One can also purchase electronic Advanced Reader Copies (or eARCs) which are not a part of the foregoing monthly bundle, but are individually available for purchase. These followed a successful experiment with an online eMagazine, called the Grantville Gazette (More below—see 1632 series). The eARCs is an unproofed manuscript and is guaranteed to be full of typos and errors. It is pretty much raw from the author's word processor; however, they are fully available even before the first part of the monthly bundles. eARCs do not include the final proofed version. For the final version, you would have to buy the single or monthly bundle for that book. In March 2007, Flint began acting as publisher of a for-fee web-access version of the Gazette.

Flint also helmed Jim Baen's Universe (JBU), an e-zine published from 2006 until 2010.

Reception of his published works

To date, six of his books have been included on the New York Times Best Seller list. These books are 1634: The Galileo Affair (2004), 1634: The Baltic War (2007), 1634: The Bavarian Crisis (2007), 1636: The Kremlin Games (2013), Torch of Freedom (2009), and Cauldron of Ghosts (2014).

1635: The Papal Stakes (2012), The Crucible of Empire (2010), and Threshold (2010) were listed on the Wall Street Journal Best-Selling Books list for Hardcover Science Fiction.

Cauldron of Ghosts (2014) was listed on the Washington Post Best-Selling Books list for Hardcover Fiction.

Almost all of Flint's books sold well enough to get listed on the various Locus Bestsellers Lists with some titles listed multiple times and a few even reached the top spot for the month.

Awards and honors

Flint was awarded the 2008 Dal Coger Memorial Hall of Fame Award for primarily for his River of War series.