Tor Books founder and publisher Tom Doherty is one of the several Guests of Honor Who Aren't Neil Gaiman at this year's worldcon, and as such there was a panel titled "Locus interviews Tom Doherty." Which might better have been titled "Tom Doherty Tells Cool Stories About His Career in Publishing, with Occasional Prompting from Gary Wolfe and Liza Groen Trombi. That might've drawn more than the twenty-ish people who turned up, which would've been nice, because he has some cool stories to tell.
I won't attempt to reproduce them in detail-- the best involved a distributor in Philly literally shooting at somebody while Tom was waiting to talk to him. It is worth noting, though, that (at least in his own telling, and I see no reason to doubt it given what other people say about him) he's a canny operator who has really done right by the field. Among other things, he was among the first publishers to let his editors work from their homes in other cities rather than requiring them to live in New York; when Jim Baen wanted to stop working for Tor and start his own company, Tom helped him set up Baen Books (and still owns a chunk of it); and when he sold Tor to St. Martin's, he negotiated a pretty amazing deal to keep Tor free of meddling from upper management.
You don't often hear about successful businessmen who succeed by doing right by people, but Tor has come to dominate the SF field without any real hint of obnoxious or cutthroat behavior. So, good for Tom Doherty, who's been really good for the field.
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"You don't often hear about successful businessmen who succeed by doing right by people"
Among SF publishers, how about Viktor Gollancz?
A bookstore worker recently told me that Tor leads the trend to force budding novelists to release their first book or two as online freebies before they can be considered as candidates for having later works printed.
As someone who (a) likes real, physical, books, (b) thinks that authors should be able to make a living and (c) expects her employer to disappear in a few years, she was not happy with Tor and its policies.
Who exactly has Tor forced to do this?
My father, a significant editor of trade books, Science Fiction, and Mysteries before becoming an executive in the transnationals that own publishers, remarked to me that Tom Doherty had a good grasp of the industry, among this younger generation. They had only one phone conversation whose specifics I know -- about rights for a chain story that had some very big name authors. TOR has sophisticated rules that allow its award-winning editors autonomy up to the limit where they might interfere with each other (i.e. over which authors are off-limits). Tom Doherty has always been a gentleman in conversation with me, and (as we are often interrupted when we speak at Worldcons) is patient with people rudely rushing up to him and amateurishly pitching projects.