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Survival of publishers
May. 28th, 2014 11:01 pmTor.com has announce they are starting their own book imprint - specialising in the e-books and the best part is they will be available worldwide.
It's a little bit weird because the site started as a publisher blog site and is strongly affiliated with Tor still so it's a little weird that there is going to be books published by Tor and the ones from Tor.com as a separate entity. But I suppose this will allow Macmillan (that owns them both) to experiment with direct, global book distribution - some of the titles offered will be coming from Tor Books and TorUK catalogues.
With the recent dispute between Amazon.com and publisher - Hachette about the terms for selling Hachette's e-books on the site. Amazon has slowed the delivery Hachette books, raised prices and has removed pre-order buttons. If you need any of the Hachette published books fast Amazon advises you to use another retailer. But it has dominated the market so well that it's getting harder and harder to get stuff somewhere else. So maybe Tor.com (and Macmillan) are right to go global by themselves while they still can. Not the Macmillan isn't a big company who wants to dominate as much of the market as possible. It's just that at least there are one of a few and not the only one. At least there are alternatives.
Tor.com is excited to announce that we will be expanding our original fiction program via a new imprint dedicated to publishing novellas, shorter novels, serializations, and any other pieces of fiction that exceed the traditional novelette length (17,499 words).
Each DRM-free title will be available exclusively for purchase, unlike the current fiction that is offered for free on the site, and will have full publisher support behind it. It will have a heavy digital focus but all titles will be available via POD and audio formats. We will also consider traditional print publishing for a select number of titles a year. All titles will be available worldwide.
It's a little bit weird because the site started as a publisher blog site and is strongly affiliated with Tor still so it's a little weird that there is going to be books published by Tor and the ones from Tor.com as a separate entity. But I suppose this will allow Macmillan (that owns them both) to experiment with direct, global book distribution - some of the titles offered will be coming from Tor Books and TorUK catalogues.
With the recent dispute between Amazon.com and publisher - Hachette about the terms for selling Hachette's e-books on the site. Amazon has slowed the delivery Hachette books, raised prices and has removed pre-order buttons. If you need any of the Hachette published books fast Amazon advises you to use another retailer. But it has dominated the market so well that it's getting harder and harder to get stuff somewhere else. So maybe Tor.com (and Macmillan) are right to go global by themselves while they still can. Not the Macmillan isn't a big company who wants to dominate as much of the market as possible. It's just that at least there are one of a few and not the only one. At least there are alternatives.
