io9: tor.com

New Tor.com Print-On-Demand Line Launches with "Year's Best Fantasy 9"

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:30:00 PDT

Tor.com is much more than the online wing of fabled scifi publisher Tor - it's an SF fiction magazine as well as a terrific lit blog. And now it's branching out into next-wave publishing with a line of print-on-demand books.

If you were wondering about how scifi book publishing might leave traditional publishing behind, this is a great example. POD books are perfect for "long tail" publishing, where a slow but steady stream of online consumers can buy at any time - this saves the publisher money, because it doesn't shell out for a giant print run that may not sell instantly, and keeps the book in print longer. Tor.com producer Pablo Defindini writes:

YBF 9 is available only as a print-on-demand book, in keeping with our mission of always exploring alternative forms of publishing. Similar to the launch of the Tor.com Store, this title is one of our various publishing projects that seek to experiment with the available alternatives to publishing's traditional sales, distribution, and delivery mechanisms.

Year's Best Fantasy 9 is available in the Tor.com Store, of course, as well as via online retailers such as Amazon, B&N, and more. As you'd expect with multiple Hugo Award-nominated (and recent winner) editors like David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, the Table of Contents for YBF 9 is impressive.

Here's what's in store:

"Shoggoths in Bloom" - Elizabeth Bear (a Hugo winner this year)
"The Rabbi's Hobby" - Peter S. Beagle
"Running the Snake" - Kage Baker
"The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" - Daryl Gregory
"Reader's Guide" - Lisa Goldstein
"The Salting and Canning of Benevolence D." - Al Michaud
"Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake" - Naomi Novik
"A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica" - Catherynne M. Valente
"From the Clay of His Heart" - John Brown
"If Angels Fight" - Richard Bowes
"26 Monkeys and the Abyss" - Kij Johnson
"Philologos; or, A Murder in Bistrita" - Debra Doyle & James Macdonald
"The Film-makers of Mars" - Geoff Ryman
"Childrun" - Marc Laidlaw
"Queen of the Sunlit Shore" - Liz Williams
"Lady Witherspoon's Solution" - James Morrow
"Dearest Cecily" - Kristine Dikeman
"Ringing the Changes in Okotoks, Alberta" - Randy McCharles
"Caverns of Mystery" - Kage Baker
"Skin Deep" - Richard Parks
"King Pelles the Sure" - Peter S. Beagle
"A Guided Tour in the Kingdom of the Dead" - Richard Harland
"Avast, Abaft!" - Howard Waldrop
"Gift from a Spring" - Delia Sherman
"The First Editions" - James Stoddard
"The Olverung" - Stephen Woodworth
"Daltharee" - Jeffrey Ford
"The Forest" - Kim Wilkins

Getting excited? You can read Geoff Ryman's "The Filmmakers of Mars" for free on Tor.com, and then buy the book!

New Online Bookstore Is "Agnostic," But It'll Be a Religious Experience For You

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:30:00 PDT

Tor.com may be the website of one of science fiction's biggest publishers, but their blog has tried to promote good books regardless of the publisher. And now they're extending this "agnostic" approach to their new online store, with fascinating results.

The Tor store includes a ton of science fiction classics, as well as newly published titles from several different publishers. But honestly, the main feature of the site that's really unique is that it provides a central repository for all the titles that the site's columnists have recommended (and a place to buy those titles, which doesn't hurt either.)

The most engaging content at Tor.com over the past year has frequently been Jo Walton's eclectic recommendations, and the essays she's written about each title — and now there's a handy list. Other lists of recommended titles include Ellen Datlow's "most influential books in SF" (which wouldn't be a bad primer for someone wanting to discover the genre for the first time) and Daniel H. Wilson's list of books about "robots, robots, robots!" It's a pretty great resource. Check it out!

[Tor.Com]

Why Dune Is The Perfect SF Novel For People Who Only Read Fantasy

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:40:53 PDT

Over at Tor.com, Douglas Cohen has a great explanation for why your friends who only read fantasy - the ones who don't like a book unless it's got dragons and swords - will like Frank Herbert's classic space epic Dune.

Mars Invades Earth With X-Rated Movies: Hear For Yourself!

Charlie Jane Anders — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:00:00 PST

Bizarre, pornographic silent movies turn up, allegedly made in 1911 — and then they start to feature uncannily real-looking Martians and other creatures straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories. The bitchy, demented story "The Film-makers Of Mars" could only be the work of Geoff Ryman (Air). It was published at Tor.com a while back, but now you can hear Ryman himself read it on the Starship Sofa podcast, and it gains a whole extra layer of snark in his own voice. You really need to hear Ryman discuss shaved pubes on Mars. Why? Because it's Saturday, and that's what one does on Saturdays. [Starship Sofa, via Books On Mars]

Tor Puts New Story Online To Read, Remix

Graeme McMillan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:30:00 PDT

Tor.com continued their amazing series of original stories yesterday with a new novella by Little Brother's Cory Doctorow, entitled The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away. Go and read it; if it's not your kind of thing, you can fix that by editing it yourself, as it's the first Tor.com story to be released under a Creative Commons license, meaning that everyone is "encouraged to remix it, translate it, whatever," according to Doctrow himself. [Tor.com]

Get Your Daily Dose of Scifi Authors at Tor.com

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:00:00 PDT

Tor Books, one of the biggest and most venerable publishers of excellent science fiction writing, has just launched a new blog that promises to bring the crunchy goodness of a Tor book to your RSS reader every day. With contributors like scifi authors Charles Stross and John Scalzi, as well as scifi art maven Irene Gallo and Tor editor Liz Gorinsky, you can expect cool essays on everything from trends in scifi writing to science experiments with testosterone. The best part, though, is that the site will feature regular doses of free fiction.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor-in-chief of Tor Books, writes in an introductory post that Tor.com is embracing the subculture of scifi and fantasy fans, inviting them to join the conversations that usually only scifi editors get to have:

Much of what has driven Tor.com is our desire to more fully contribute to the great conversation that is the subculture of SF—that river of talk, in person and in print, that has surrounded and informed science fiction and fantasy (and “the universe,” and “related subjects”) since SF fans began cranking out fanzines and organizing meetups in the early 1930s. That conversation has done nothing but expand. It is a major tributary to the modern Internet. Tor.com aspires to be part of that conversation.

Reading Tor.com is like jumping into a room where a lot of my favorite scifi writers and bloggers are chatting. Can't wait for more!

Tor.com [via Tor.com]