Posts Tagged ‘Tor’

Print or Electronic Short Fiction Magazines?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s some great con­ver­sa­tion going on over at the Tor site about mag­a­zine mod­els again.  John Klima is tack­ling the whole print vs. elec­tronic delimma.

Personally, I think if you can do print, do it.  But elec­tronic edi­tions should be a given. It costs maybe an hour of your time to take your files and con­vert them into the pop­u­lar for­mats.  There are web­sites that do it for you. If any­one wants to know about those, I’ll dig up the links.

Cory Doctorow has talked about this in the past, and I agree with him.  Sell a nor­mal sub­scrip­tion for print, but those peo­ple get a free elec­tronic ver­sion as well.  The elec­tronic ver­sion sup­ports the print ver­sion.  It’s eas­ier to search, and, hon­estly, eas­ier to share, which at the size we’re talk­ing about?  People pirat­ing your sto­ries around is a good thing.  Anything that makes it eas­ier for peo­ple to spread the word about your pub­li­ca­tion is a plus.

Also, sell a cheaper straight elec­tronic ver­sion.  If some­one really wants to just get a PRC file every month, then let them.  But I think you’ll find that the elec­tronic ver­sion is a sell­ing point of the print ver­sion.  I can’t guar­an­tee it will increase sales, but I think it’s the best of both worlds.  It’s your choco­late in my peanut but­ter, my peanut but­ter in your choco­late.  Mmmm!

I’d be ecsta­tic if every book I bought came with an elec­tronic ver­sion so that I can search it after­wards, or even bet­ter, while I’m wait­ing for the book to arrive via Amazon.  In fact, yes­ter­day, I ordered some web appli­ca­tion design texts and after I placed my order, Amazon tried to sell me a $15 e-​​book copy of one of the books so I could start read­ing right away.  That’s great–only I sure as hell ain’t going to pay another $15 for a $50 book for that promise (and prob­a­bly find that it is full of DRM that pre­vents me from really using it).

There are things I can do so much bet­ter on a com­puter or e-​​reader than I can do with a book.  But paper is still eas­ier to read until we see e-​​ink really take off (the Kindle is appar­ently cool, but I’ve never seen one in the wild).    The two for­mats are com­pli­men­tary, and I’d really like to see some­one try out the model I’ve out­lined above.  I’d sub­scribe, any­way, and I cur­rently sub­scribe to no mag­a­zines (although that’s a fac­tor more of my recent unem­ploy­ment than it is any prob­lem with the magazines).

Are you pub­lish­ing a print zine and giv­ing away e-​​copies to your sub­scribers for archiv­ing and easy index­ing?  Let me know in the comments.

Awesome Little Brother Alternative Cover Design

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The New Sleekness » Little Brother, in progress

Tor designer Pablo Defendini has, in his spare time, done up an alter­na­tive cover to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (which I hope to get­ting around to read­ing some­time this decade). I really love the approach of this cover design, and from what I’ve read about the book any­way, it seems really appro­pri­ate. The addi­tion of easter eggs means after read­ing the book, you have a new­found appre­ci­a­tion to it.  I like the illus­tra­tor style–it’s not some­thing you see in SF book cov­ers very often, so I think this book would stand out if I saw it on the shelf.  The typog­ra­phy is tight, well done, and going with the Neil Gaiman quote promi­nently like that is a damned good deci­sion that will help sell the book.

I’m adding this site to my feeds. I’m more inter­ested in cover design lately, and I think his work is par­tic­u­larly inspiring.

Here’s a pro­gres­sion of that Little Brother sketch I put up a few days ago. This is what hap­pens when I have a week­end to myself. I’ve had lots of fun putting this together, par­tic­u­larly includ­ing lit­tle easter eggs (hints: run the binary through a trans­la­tor; check out the ‘maker’s brand’ on the arphid on the spine, etc.)

The Coming Online SF/​F Renaissance

Posted on: by 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).