Jeremiah Tolbert

Tor Will Make a Big Splash

A few years ago, we were all upset when SCIFICTION was dropped by the SciFi Channel. The genre lost its best pay­ing mar­ket, and arguably the high­est qual­ity pub­li­ca­tion, online or in print. Its depar­ture from the scene left a hole that many have tried to fill, to vary­ing degrees of suc­cess. But the world has changed sig­nif­i­cantly since then.

Today, nearly every pub­lisher, large or small, has some sort of online com­po­nent. No longer is dig­i­tal con­tent being largely ignored, as it was when I first came onto the scene in 2001. Baen, Prime Books, Small Beer Press, Tor, just to name a few that have recently or reg­u­larly released con­tent online for free. Tor’s com­ing social networking/​publishing site might be the final piece of the puz­zle that ties the SF/​F com­mu­nity together under one roof (depend­ing on the extent of their social net­work­ing tools). I eagerly await the chance to beta test their site.

SCIFICTION and Strange Horizons stood mostly unop­posed for a very long time. Smaller, respectable mar­kets flour­ished, but none of us had the audi­ences of these two pub­li­ca­tions. Baen came onto the scene, and shook things up, but I don’t know much about them because their model of the sub­scriber wall keeps me out. Tor is going to bring in the exist­ing online audi­ence, and I think they have the clout and sta­ble of authors to bring even more read­ers to online short fiction.

Tor’s entrance onto this stage is going to ele­vate everyone’s game. With a new giant player on the scene, the smaller pub­lish­ers are going to be work­ing harder to inno­vate, harder to stand out. We’ll see even more exper­i­men­ta­tion. We started out with the online fic­tion itself as the exper­i­ment. Tor’s entrance proves that experiment’s cen­tral the­sis. People will and do read fic­tion online, and in great num­bers. What’re more, I believe it val­i­dates the model of the short fic­tion as adver­tise­ment for long form pub­lish­ers. Prime Books, Clarkesworld, and Subterranean have pio­neered this.

I can’t help but think that we have Cory Doctorow to thank for much of this. I’m sure many peo­ple released books online for free before him, but did many who had tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing con­tracts release their books online in con­junc­tion with the print release? It’s almost cer­tainly his influ­ence that has led Tor to devel­op­ing their com­ing site–I’m sure oth­ers, such as Patrick Nielsen Hayden and semi-​​anonymous Tor employ­ees at who I do not know are ulti­mately respon­si­ble for the project, and I don’t want to min­i­mize what they are doing. But Cory blazed the path. That path is turn­ing into a paved road. Soon, it may be a highway.

Who Falls Behind?

I like the fic­tion in Asimov’s and F&SF very much, but they are begin­ning to look a bit like large warm-​​blooded bird ances­tors prone to mas­sive extinc­tion by meteor impact. F&SF has made some strides in the online world, with it’s free fic­tion and blog, but the fic­tion is mostly pretty old, prac­ti­cally ancient in online terms, and their pre­sen­ta­tion leaves much to be desired.

Asimov’s web pres­ence has not changed sig­nif­i­cantly since I first vis­ited their web­site. It’s a mess, frankly. It’s great that you can buy it for the near-​​mythic Kindle, and they’ve been avail­able in var­i­ous e-​​formats for a long time via Fictionwise. But they have utterly failed to take advan­tage of the web as a medium. And no, I do not count their sep­tic forums. I haven’t paid much atten­tion to Analog, but I sus­pect they’re in a sim­i­lar place, being owned by the same publisher.

What Next?

Who will make the next inno­va­tions in pub­lish­ing? I think it will still be the small, fleet-​​footed pub­li­ca­tions like Futurismic, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and so on. Podcasting, once the sole domain of EscapePod, now has sev­eral other major play­ers on the field, even exclud­ing the var­i­ous EscapePod spin­offs. And remem­ber, their num­ber of lis­ten­ers out­weighs the read­er­ship of any print mag­a­zine out there. I also think that their lis­ten­ers are not the same peo­ple as the sub­scribers of mag­a­zines. It’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent audi­ence, and ignor­ing the pod­cast audi­ence would be like throw­ing money away at this point. I pre­dict more will offer pod­cast­ing sup­ple­ments to their web pres­ences. Small pub­lish­ers will begin to inves­ti­gate devel­op­ing for the mobile web, and this may call for a dif­fer­ent type of fic­tion, some­thing shorter and leaner. The use of mul­ti­me­dia and art­work is going to grow. A sim­ple site like the Fortean Bureau looks like an Amish buggy com­pared to the hot rods we’ll be see­ing in the next cou­ple of years. I don’t know about you, but I’m very opti­mistic and excited about the things that are to come. We may not get paid much in the short fic­tion world, but there are more and more oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­nect with audi­ences. And for read­ers, there’s never been so many options for your read­ing expe­ri­ence (which presents its own set of prob­lems).