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bought by Jim Baen and brought out in either hardcover or paperback or both formats, though the last purchased remains unpublished.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 "" 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 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 a co-founder and editor of the Baen Free Library which is an ongoing experiment in electronic publishing 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 electronic editions. As part of the initial phase, Flint has published a 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 . 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, which are not a part of the monthly bundle, but are available for purchase. These followed a successful experiment with an online eMagazine, called the Grantville Gazette. They are unproofed manuscripts and are full of typos and errors. They are unedited from the author's word processor; however, they are available even before the first part of the monthly bundles. These copies do not include the final proofed version, which is available only in the single or monthly bundle for that book. In March 2007, Flint began acting as publisher of a for-fee of the gazette. Flint also helmed Jim Baen's Universe, an e-zine published from 2006 until 2010.
