Due to the vagaries of rights, availability, and corporate policies, we’re not always able to make everything we want available, but we do try to not make that same mistake. Since then, we’ve always kept that in mind when doing ebook promotions.
Tor publishing store series#
In hindsight, it’s totally understandable that it would have been seen that way, but it was a classic case of being too close to the project everyone was pretty blindsided by that attitude.Īdditionally, the big, big lesson we learned from the promotion was to not offer a first book in a series for download if the subsequent books aren’t available as ebooks. This was a big, big thing for me, since it was the first time I was exposed as a public face associated with Tor.com, and, being an ebook consumer, I understood where many people were coming from.įirst and foremost, we never realized that the teaser campaign for Tor.com would be construed as a teaser for an ebook store specifically-the thought really never occurred to us. Have you learned anything from this experience? What would you change if you had the giveaway to do over again?
Tor publishing store full#
(Which, in the interest of full disclosure, I will admit to participating in. This led to a fairly vociferous backlash in several Tor.com comment threads. However, many e-book fans assumed they were promoting the launch of Tor’s e-book store and were upset when later books were not available electronically.
Tor publishing store free#
The free e-book giveaway at Tor.com’s launch was meant to serve as a promotion for the site, and for the dead-tree forms of various Tor series whose first books Tor gave away electronically. One of the things I’m trying to push for this year is to specifically address some of those things, but mostly they falls under the realm of nitty-gritty development stuff: which tools we should or should not be using, what systems are we not taking advantage of that we should, etc. Even the things that have not worked out have given us lots of insight into how we as publishers can approach the online space, and we’ve been able to build on the mistakes in order to try to set things right, or approach the same problem differently the next go-round. I can’t say that there is anything that we’d do differently, really. Is there anything that you would do differently given the experience you’ve had? Once again, I wasn’t around back then (I was then the low man on the totem pole in Tor Books’ art department at the time), but I think around 18 months, give or take.
How long was the site in the planning stages? They asked Tom Doherty for his blessing, and permission to use the Tor brand, but wisely kept the site separate from the daily workings of Tor Books.įritz is a very smart and forward-looking guy (and I’m not just saying that because he’s the guy who’s in charge of giving me a raise!), Irene, Patrick, and Teresa are all well-known bloggers and quite familiar with the way the social internet works, so they had a very clear idea of what they wanted-and didn’t want-the site to be. I wasn’t involved in Tor.com back then, but as I understand it, the seed of the idea came about from a conversation between (Tor Books Art Director) Irene Gallo, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor Books Senior Editor) and my current boss, Fritz Foy (VP of Strategic Technology for Macmillan), who is also a lifelong SF fan-‘one of us’ in every sense of the word. The complete interview text starts below the jump. However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about the site itself, and his own attitudes toward e-books. Our conversation ranged from the Tor.com blog itself, to the free e-book giveaway that kicked off the site, to the much-anticipated but still-absent Tor.com e-book store.ĭefendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions). I conducted an interview with Pablo Defendini, Producer and blogger for Tor.com, via Google Wave.
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