Tor.com, a website started six years ago by speculative fiction publishing house Tor Books, is launching its own imprint. The Tor.com imprint will publish, as the tagline says, “stories at their right length,” from novellas and short novels to serial works.

“It’s a natural progression of what we’ve been doing all along,” says Irene Gallo, the imprint’s associate publisher. (Gallo is also art director for Tor Books.) Over the past six years, Tor.com has become well known in the speculative fiction community for its celebration of longer stories and novellas, which have won four Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and a Shirley Jackson Award. Three of those wins came just this year, when Tor.com stories swept the Hugo short fiction categories. Tor.com consulting editor Ellen Datlow also received a Hugo, for best short fiction editor.

The imprint, which will have its own team of editors, will take advantage of the largely untapped market for new science fiction and fantasy novellas. “The novella is a foundational format for the speculative fiction genre,” Gallo says. “Novellas provide the perfect blend between the stylistic concision of the short story and the engagement of the novel.” Such longer stories were common during science fiction’s so-called Golden Age, 1938–1946. But the contraction of print magazines in recent years has reduced the market for these longer works, without necessarily reducing demand for them. While novellas have found a new home online in webzines, few of those outlets actively seek them out. The new imprint will provide a marketplace for longer works and serials without competing with the interests of its parent company.

“We [at Tor Books] love big, fat fantasy doorstoppers as much as anyone, but we think our readers will also appreciate the faster reads,” Gallo says. “You can buy, read, and fully digest a novella over the course of an evening, or a few days’ commute, on your mobile device. We think people are going to like that.”

The Tor.com imprint will focus on stories that might otherwise be orphaned, or else expanded into novel-length works. Its senior editor, Lee Harris, formerly senior editor at Angry Robot, says of the venture, “It’s opening up a whole new paying market for authors who write at this length, and a whole new library for readers—like me—who love to consume their books in ‘regular,’ rather than ‘super size.’ ” The plan is for the imprint to put out three titles a month, depending on submissions and timing. Gallo says the fact that Tor.com is not bound by the seasonal scheduling of traditional publishing “gives us the room to be responsive to the work we receive, rather than rushing to fulfill a specific catalogue goal.”

Although the Tor.com website has been home to many works by award-winning authors, the imprint will not be a reprint market, breaking tradition with the usual small-press method of operation. “I’m aiming to have a relatively even mix of science fiction, urban fantasy, and epic fantasy—as epic as you can get in 40,000 words, anyway,” Harris says. “I’m also very interested in stories that cross genres, and in novella series.”

The imprint will release works in both e-book and print editions. The latter will include traditional print and print-on-demand, with the possibility of limited and lettered editions as well, depending on the work and on feedback from readers at the Tor.com site. “It’s easier than ever for fans to speak directly to authors and publishers,” Gallo says, “and as a result we are learning more about what readers want and expect.” The initial list is expected in late spring or early summer of 2015.

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