Locus, May 2013

by Locus Publications

  PNH: ‘‘You were also doing a bunch of reading, you did reading for Ginjer Buchanan, for instance. Teresa discovered Melinda Snodgrass.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Ginjer was clearing out a bunch of slush, and it was – well, it was slush. Then all of a sudden I’m reading this manuscript full of legal maneuverings in orbital colonies. It was solid, there was plot, there were real people talking, and it was interesting. That was Melinda Snodgrass’ first novel. Spotting it didn’t take genius on my part.’’

  PNH: ‘‘I was at the Literary Guild assistant job for about eight months, working for the two editors who acquired the books that were sold via ‘‘enclosures’’—the loose sheets of paper that arrived along with your monthly book-club promotional magazine. It was very data-driven, lots of ‘We’re going to send this advertisement to that chunk of our members.’ It was 1984 in New York, and publishing was a long way from being computerized. Our data was literally little old ladies in Garden City writing down sales figures in pencil on index cards.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Never lose sight of your audience. Back when we used to do our fanzine in Seattle, we had a list up on the wall of everybody we sent it to. For us, professional publishing is the continuation of fanac by other means.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Back to Seattle for a sec. We were in this weird state for a few years being major fanzine fans, while working low-level journeyman jobs and freelancing. Our first fanzine was called Telos. Then we changed the name and numbering and called it Izzard, pronounced as in Eddie Izzard’s name. It’s actually an old north-of-England word for the last letter of the alphabet.’’

  TNH: ‘‘But we pretended it was actually the term for these strange-looking creatures.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Teresa made up this long-nosed creature that she drew, like an anteater with stripes. We wrote for other people’s fanzines and some people wrote for us. We ran a bunch of excellent articles by Bertie MacAvoy, who’s better known as R. A. MacAvoy.’’

  TNH: ‘‘We ran the article by Greg Benford that was the precursor of Of Space/Time and the River. We were publishing Terry Carr.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Making Light is very much the descendant of our fanzine publishing.

  TNH: ‘‘Terry Carr was one of our role models: ‘‘a pro editor who never stopped being a fan. There’s always been that overlap. We live on the border. Or there is no border, and we live near its fictitious location.

  PNH: ‘‘From ’85 to ’87, Teresa and I both worked for the same scruffy reference-book publisher, Chelsea House, on a project called the Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. It was part of an empire of reference books about the history of literature, nominally edited by Harold Bloom, the Yale academic. In our three years there I met Bloom once, Teresa met him never. The actual straw boss of the operation was (Lovecraft scholar) S.T. Joshi. When we needed new staff, we reached out to people we already knew could handle the work. By the time the project wound down, there were volumes in the series that were, as Teresa said, ‘untouched by mundane hands.’ By then it was us, S.T. Joshi, the fan previously known as Tom Weber (now Soren de Selby), and Peter Cannon (another Lovecraftian), with proofreading by sometimes Seattle fan Robert Legault.

  ‘‘We picked up all the freelance work we could get. We made no secret of our ambitions to work in science fiction publishing. I don’t know if you remember The Little Magazine. It was started by David Hartwell and others in the mid-1960s, before David was working professionally in SF, and its had an eccentric but distinguished list of editors, including Marilyn Hacker and Tom Disch.’’

  TNH: ‘‘When we were working on it, the staff included us, Tom Weber, Kathryn Cramer, Susan Palwick, James Ellroy, and Samuel R. Delany. We met once a month at Chip’s apartment and read poetry submissions.’’

  PNH: ‘‘The magazine ran from the mid-to-late 1960s until 1988. Its demise, which was basically David deciding he couldn’t keep throwing money down a hole, was what led to the founding of The New York Review of Science Fiction.’’

  TNH: ‘‘For a long time we’d wanted to do something more serious about science fiction, because the old sercon fanzines, lumbering dinosaurs of things, had mostly gone away. What we had left was light reviewing in fanzines, and academic scholarship which could be pretty stodgy. We wanted a venue for the half-baked theories and informal critics – like, ‘I have this interesting idea, but there’s no way I’m doing the footnotes on it.’’’

  PNH: ‘‘There’s a place for informed commentary about science fiction from the better-informed end of fandom that overlaps with the publishing scene in New York. One of the things that occurred to us was that we were almost certainly going to be traduced as a bunch of New York literary elitists. That’s why I named it The New York Review of Science Fiction: ‘‘because that’s the most in-your-face, take-us-on, we-are-the-thing-you-fear name possible.’’

  TNH: ‘‘’We are snotty elitists, neener neener.’ We were partly inspired by The Pretentious Science Fiction Quarterly. So that was fun.

  ‘‘Around that time, Chelsea House turfed us out, the bastards. It was a really tough job, but we loved the work. It left us professionally at loose ends. I had a lot of editorial experience but I could also handle production work: ‘‘typesetting, proofreading, copyediting, et cetera. It was readily available, so I did that kind of freelancing full-time. My mentor was Martha Schwartz. I worked for her at four different houses, the last of which was Tor. At one point I think I was proofreading or copyediting most of Tor’s hardcover list, which was smaller then. Martha hired me as associate managing editor. She’s an immensely competent woman – it’s hard to overstate that – but she and Tor didn’t quite mesh. The house was hard on managing editors. Martha and the managing editor before her lasted nine months apiece. A lot of what I did was to put managing editorial together as a functioning, self-defined department. But I always had a sign on my office wall that said, ‘Being the managing editor of Tor is like being the drummer for Spinal Tap.’ I lasted 19 months.’’

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  PNH: ‘‘Meanwhile, Beth Meacham brought Debbie Notkin to New York on a limited gig to work as an editor at Tor. Because Deb was a friend of ours, and we had other acquaintances at Tor, our life got pulled into the Tor orbit. Things sort of progressed the way they do. I got a bunch more freelance work at Tor, until by late 1988 I was working in the house full-time as a freelance non-employee. When Deb decided to go back to the Bay Area, as was always planned, I got interviewed and got her job.’’

  TNH: ‘‘That was the old Tor offices where nobody had walls that went all the way to the ceiling. Patrick had the office between Beth Meacham and Ralph Arnote, head of mass market sales, so a lot of Patrick’s training consisted of being able to hear their phone conversations.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Listening to Beth Meacham dissect some hapless agent on one side of me, and Ralph Arnote yelling at some hapless distributor on the other.

  ‘‘My first position at Tor was as an administrative editor. They basically said, ‘We’re not going to let you acquire anything for a long time, except we’re going to give you the Doubles program.’ Remember Tor Doubles? They were started by Tom Doherty. His entire life, he’s been trying to figure out how to make money publishing novellas – he loves novellas. The doubles were one generation of that. Eight of them had been published and there were a bunch more in train, and I was told, keep running that program, keep buying two novellas, original or reprint, a month. One of the things I gradually learned in this job, is that almost everything in publishing works at first. The sort of silly demo that I cite is, I could come out with a line of triangular books, and everyone would go, ‘Whoa, cool, triangular books!’ The next month they’d go, ‘Wait a minute, that’s a dumb idea.’’’

  TNH: ‘‘Back then Tor had no art director. Editors did their own art direction, with mixed results.’’

  PNH: ‘‘It was like being the publisher of a pulp magazine.’’

  TNH: ‘‘So Patrick wou
nd up in editorial at Tor. Meanwhile, with the help of two bouts of Lyme Disease, I burned out as managing editor of Tor, so I went back to editorial work. Thing is, you’re not supposed to be able to switch from production to editorial.’’

  PNH: ‘‘It does happen.’’

  TNH: ‘‘But it’s hard. Part of what I did was to go from editorial to production back to editorial again. I went off and I edited a bunch of other things, but the whole time I was also a consulting editor for Tor. One of the things that impressed me when I was first at Tor was that a cover painting would come in, and Tom might say, ‘There’s something wrong with this,’ and wind up talking about it to the guy that ran the mailroom, or me, or somebody else, and if you could accurately say, ‘This is where it’s going wrong,’ he’d take you seriously, no matter what your official job title was. Tom is really smart.’’

  PNH: ‘‘There are a lot of Tor quirks that I refer to as ‘Tom Doherty and his 700 elves syndrome,’ But it has its good side.’’’

  TNH: ‘‘Back before the month when every magazine on the stands suddenly had a lead article saying, ‘Hey, look, it’s the Internet,’ we put together the Tor website. We were one of the first publishing companies to have a presence on the World Wide Web.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Originally it was the Tor Gopher server. Gopher was invented at the University of Minnesota, which is the Fighting Gophers. It was basically a text interface but with scrolling arrows you operated with your cursor keys, browsing and retrieving documents. It was like a really primitive web.’’

  TNH: ‘‘St. Martin’s Press wasn’t big on computers, and nobody at Tor except us and a few other people understood that the Internet existed.’’

  PNH: ‘‘We didn’t call it the Internet then. We called it GEnie and CompuServe and Delphi.’’

  TNH: ‘‘What Patrick did was buy computer components for his colleagues on his editorial expense account. I think he bought 30 different modems at different times.’’

  PNH: ‘‘I spent the early to mid-1990s dragging Tor and eventually the rest of St. Martin’s, Holtzbrinck, etc., into the goddamn late 20th century. I bought like two dozen internal modems for people’s desktop computers out of my expense account. I got us a corporate CompuServe account with me as administrator so I could give out e-mail addresses. They were the old CompuServe addresses, like <72701,1344@compuserve.com> addresses, but they worked. I could create and delete accounts freely.’’

  TNH: ‘‘One of the reasons Tor editorial still runs on PCs instead of Macs is because you could buy individual components while staying under the radar.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Bunches of people at Tor, all the way back to the mid-1980s, were active on various bulletin boards, CompuServe, Delphi. There was the whole period from like 1989 to 1994, 1995, where most of the science fiction field piled onto GEnie, because GEnie would give you a free, unmetered account if you were in any way an SF professional.’’

  TNH: ‘‘It was a pretty glorious period, for a while.’’

  PNH: ‘‘It was the wild west, but it created a lot of connectivity.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Watching young Joe Straczynski and young Neil Gaiman get into an argument with Damon Knight, you know?’’

  PNH: ‘‘But it also meant that Tor institutionally got very comfortable with being online. People learned a lot of the skills for dealing with their enthusiastic readers and fans respectfully, and having useful conversations, and welcoming your core customers as your best critics and your best allies, and all those other fannish virtues that are absent from a lot of big corporations.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Years passed. I was now working two-and-a-half part-time in-house jobs at Tor. One of them was to answer e-mail, until there got to be too much of it. A frequent question I got was, ‘Is it true that Robert Jordan is dying?’ Because there were these awful rumors that would go around.’’

  PNH: ‘‘This was years before he was sick.’’

  TNH: ‘‘What I finally did was go over to the Usenet newsgroup for Robert Jordan fans and say, ‘Hello, I’m here from Tor.’ They said, ‘Prove it,’ because someone had been impersonating Patrick earlier. So I did, and then I made them a promise: ‘‘if there were any news about Robert Jordan, the first thing we would do is tell them. If they hadn’t heard it from us, it wasn’t true. After that, the amount of distressed fan mail about Robert Jordan just plummeted. The original Tor FAQ was actually my file of things I got asked about all the time – like, ‘When is George R.R. Martin’s next book coming out?’’’

  PNH: ‘‘And we’d say, ‘Well, we’re not publishing him, but what we understand is…’’’

  TNH: ‘‘Readers would ask us anything. It came to me that Tor needed to have a real website. There’s a running conversation in science fiction that’s been going on since the 1930s, and it never ends, it just instantiates in different places. GEnie gave it a really good place to instantiate. People in science fiction go to have conversations wherever the other people are. We’re a gregarious species. So I said look, there’s this mindspace, this conversation, and we can catch it if we make a place for it. Eventually we got the attention of Fritz Foy, who’s a high-level person at Macmillan. Have you seen Pulp Fiction? You know the Wolf, the guy who comes in and fixes things? Fritz does that at a corporate level, only he tidies up infrastructure, not murder scenes.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Officially he’s the senior vice president of digital development. He’s also a giant geek. He’s a huge comics fan, huge science fiction fan, loves working with Tor. Tor.com was actually born five or six years ago at a Christmas party in the back room of a bar. This was the point at which, after years of the rudimentary 1995-style Tor website persisting into the era of modern websites, Tor had ponied up the money and paid professionals to put up a corporate calling-card website that looks like everybody else’s boring website. We’d been having a lot of desultory conversation about how basically nobody goes to corporate websites like that. At the party, Fritz Foy walked up to us and Irene Gallo and said, ‘I just realized how little the science fiction magazines pay for fiction! We could pay lots more than that and we’d still be throwing away less money than we routinely throw away on newspaper ads!’ We said ‘True fact.’’’

  TNH: ‘‘Fritz started talking about wanting to do a website, and I reached across the table and grabbed his hands and said, ‘Let me in on this, I was born to do this.’ Except that things didn’t quite work out at first, so I went off and became the moderator at Boing Boing.

  Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden (1983)

  ‘‘That was a weird thing that happened. Being a moderator is a skill I think of as going back to letter columns in fanzines, where I learned my chops, and to my GEnie days, watching Jim Macdonald be the moderator there. Then came Making Light. I adore good conversation, so I cared about moderating the comment threads at ML, and they got longer, and bigger, and more interesting, and then one day I woke up and had this big reputation as a moderator. This was right about the time of Web 2.0 when everyone suddenly realized that user-generated content doesn’t work without moderation. I was one of the only people out there who was specifically identified as a moderator. I went from being a happily obscure science fiction editor to getting large offers from large corporations. That was very strange for a while. Moderating Boing Boing was neat, but they couldn’t keep me forever, because moderators are expensive – you gotta pay for a whole person. But communities, once they jell, tend to be stable. I got Boing Boing’s to the point where it was stable. My successor is doing a really good job.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Tor.com is still figuring out what it is to some extent. Originally the fiction was all being bought by me. I brought Liz Gorinsky in because I couldn’t keep up. We watched the whole Weird Tales blowup, Marvin Kaye firing Ann VanderMeer, etc., and Fritz, who was following the whole thing on Facebook, said, ‘Why don’t we ask Ann VanderMeer to be our consulting editor?’ She said, ‘Terrific!’’’

  TNH: ‘‘There was no one pe
rson specifically in charge of acquiring fiction at Tor.com – it was kind of diffuse.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Tor.com is a giant cost center. No one expects it to make any money. It’s set up as a separate company under the Macmillan umbrella. It’s a big sandbox and testbed. This is my interpretation, it’s not official policy, but in a very real sense it’s a way of getting more Macmillan people used to the idea that the future of book publishing is going to have a lot more to do with us dealing directly with individual readers.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Frankly, it’s also a way of handing love back to science fiction readers and community, because Tor’s always been like that. Nobody ever knows what’s going to be happening in five years. For example, it’s a lot easier to do hardcovers and trade paperbacks than mass markets at this point.’’

  PNH: ‘‘There’ll be lots more e-only publishing. There’ll be e-only stuff at the top publishing level, or e-first stuff. We’re doing this experiment with Scalzi’s next Old Man’s War book, The Human Division, releasing it as a digital serial first, early next year. He wrote it so that each episode is short story length. They’re for sale weekly, for 13 weeks, 99 cents each. It’s a good idea but it might totally flop. Even if it totally flops, we’ll be smarter for it.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Before I was working at Tor.com, Fritz had me stationed over in the e-books division, because all of a sudden e-books were getting traction. Macmillan had zillions of backlist books that needed to be converted. I was helping with new sets of paradigms and procedures for things like converting front and back matter, and what’s necessary to turn a book into an e-book, and coming up with rules for that, which was interesting.’’

  PNH: ‘‘There are very smart people in the rapidly growing digital departments of big trade book publishers, but many of them come out of the tech world. They’re smart and well intentioned, and learning fast, but nonetheless they have a tech world belief that all problems can be reduced to a set of algorithms. You’ll try to explain to them just how many weird things even the simplest books can throw at you, and they’ll say, ‘Ah, it’ll just be an algorithm with a few more variables.’ It’s more complicated than that, even just fiction book publishing with no illustrations, charts, or footnotes.’’