Jim Baen was editing Galaxy in those days, struggling heroically to keep it alive, and one of the writers whose SF he was publishing was David Drake. But no matter how nobly Baen strove to keep it alive—and he was widely admired throughout the SF community for his efforts—the magazine was failing and, just before it died, Baen moved to Ace Books, under publisher Tom Doherty. Baen was and is a smart editor, and was used to making bricks without straw, and silk purses out of a variety of materials on a low budget.

I was the SF editor for Berkley Books and bought the Drake novel. But my superiors at Berkley couldn't imagine doing a short story collection by a not-yet-published first novelist, so I was not allowed to offer to buy Drake's Hammer's Slammers. Jim Baen bought it immediately, and published it quickly and successfully. The rest, as they say, is history. The Hammer's Slammers stories became Drake's trademark, for better or worse. And when Jim Baen moved to Tor and then founded Baen Books, David Drake became one of his trademark writers, so much so that in 1984 when Bruce Sterling, in the course of founding the cyberpunk movement in his fanzine Cheap Truth, attacked Baen Books, he named David Drake, Jerry Pournelle, and Vernor Vinge as symbols of Baen, and of the military/militarist right wing. At that point Drake's fiction fell out of the serious discourse in the SF and fantasy field, with very little questioning of the accuracy or merits of Sterling's attacks, or the virtues of Drake's writing. It was military and that was enough.

A loyal friend,Drake has remained a mainstay of Baen Books to this day,and stayed with Kirby McCauley, his agent through thick and thin.