This year marks the 30th anniversary of Tor Books, generally regarded as the world’s most successful science fiction publisher. The company has won Locus’s best SF publisher award for 21 years running, and its stable includes more award-winning and -nominated authors than any other company’s. “It’s the sum of the talent of the people who work here,” says Tom Doherty, Tor’s founder, president, and publisher. “Publishing doesn’t need plants and equipment the way you do in some other industries. You need the right people.”
Passion is another part of the equation, says senior editor Beth Meacham. “The company founders were book salesmen who loved books,” she says. “We focused on books we could sell easily and happily, and which, at the same time, were books that we wanted to read. That laid a foundation of success that continues to the present.”
“We try not to get too far afield of stuff somebody around here sincerely likes and understands,” adds Patrick Nielsen Hayden, senior editor and manager of science fiction. “[But] we’re a broad church. One of Tom’s strengths has been his willingness to work with an array of editors who represent very diverse tastes, even within particular genres.”
Senior editor Claire Eddy praises Tor’s flexibility about work arrangements. “We have a network of senior level editors working from home in several states,” she says, “as well as many contributing editors, some of whom live outside the U.S.” This unusual setup has made it possible for the company to hire and keep top-notch employees even if they can’t adhere to a typical nine-to-five schedule.
The Tor editorial team is confident in the face of economic downturn and challenges to the publishing industry. “Not to sound too complacent, but I got into book publishing in 1984, and supposedly the industry has been at death’s door that entire time,” Nielsen Hayden says. “On the one hand, the omnipresent global Internet is a huge competitor for people’s time and recreational budgets. On the other hand, the condition of being immersed in a long narrative is something people have proved that they continue to want; it’s not the same thing as reading blogs or playing a game. I think people and companies who can provide reliably good narratives are going to continue to prosper, whether the delivery vehicle is screens or dead trees.”
Doherty is less sanguine about changes in book retailing, particularly the loss of mall stores and non-bookstore sales. “I worry about the loss of so many impulse sales,” he says. “The committed reader will go to the bookstore, or online, but that impulse reader who’d walk through the mall to get a sweater and wind up in a Walden store isn’t doing that when Walden isn’t there.” He cites refining demographic distribution models as the key to reaching those readers. “We’re using the EIN more effectively now, to recapture some of that accumulated knowledge that was lost when we went from having 400 non-bookstore distributors to three.”
Embracing e-publishing and online marketing is another part of Tor’s plan for success. “Tor is doing a lot of exploration around the edges of new publishing methods and models,” Meacham said. “We are moving aggressively into digital books, and we have a very strong Internet presence. So do our authors.” Nielsen Hayden adds, “Tor editors have been out there leveraging social media since long before marketers started using such phrases. If indeed the future of book publishing involves more direct contact between publishers and readers, we’re cool with that.”
And of course, the children are the future. “We have always had our eye on young readers, and have been publishing SF and fantasy geared to them from our very beginning,” says Meacham. “We believe that demographic is what will let us keep selling books into the future. And we continue to look for new writers.” She adds, “We had a very successful 2009, and 2010 looks just as good. We’ll keep doing what we’ve always done: publish books we want to read.”
