Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Back in 2008, when we were first preparing to launch Tor.com, I knew I wanted Jo Walton to be a regular writer for the site.
As a senior editor at Tor Books and the manager of our science fiction and fantasy line, I rarely blog to promote specific projects I'm involved with, for reasons that probably don't need a lot of explanation.
Tor.com has been a venue for original SF and fantasy since 2008, but we've never formalized our process for submissions. Indeed, for a long time, we were totally winging it.
Before the Internet, before BBSes and Fidonet and Usenet and LiveJournal and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, before the World Wide Web and hot-and-cold-online-everything, science fiction fandom had a long-lived, robust, well-debugged technology of social networking and virtual community.
I was ten years old in 1969, and while we lived in Arizona that year, I spent most of the summer staying with family friends in Portland, Oregon while my parents visited Spain. It was an adventure all around.
There's a latter-day notion that artsy hippie types in the 1960s disdained the space program. Not in my experience they didn't. We watched, transfixed with reverence, not even making rude remarks about President Nixon during his phone call to the astronauts.
Personally, I always find it especially piquant when cultural conservatives, usually quick to profess their devotion to the Free Market, rail against the success in said market of some product of which they disapprove.
In my own life, I've seen myself ramping up the amount of text I consume digitally. For me, it's the weight and inconvenience issue - I want anything that will spare me having to carry around reams of paper.
The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for with find and search functions, and the fungibility of digital text.
Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.
I have a severe Google Reader habit. I think people will use blog forms and Twitter to contrive fiction.
So many people's school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn't care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don't like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.Collection: Crazy
Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.Collection: Song
Book publishing was never a heaven "run by editors", and it is by no means today a hell "run by accountants." If our "sole interest" was "instant profit," not only would we never do any number of the things we actually do every day, we probably wouldn't be in book publishing at all.Collection: Running