Tor.com has been a venue for original SF and fantasy since 2008, but we’ve never formalized our process for submissions. Indeed, for a long time, we were totally winging it. I was buying and editing the overwhelming majority of stories, but I resisted giving excessively specific information to various “market reports,” because I was reluctant to deal with the explosion of submissions that would generate.
But that barn door has sailed. (As we professional “wordsmiths” say.) Tor.com gets more submissions all the time, and I’ve gotten farther and farther behind at dealing with them. Some people have been awaiting responses for over six months—a few, for embarrassingly more than six months. Clearly something must be done. If only…if only I had an editorial colleague at Tor.com so smart, energetic, and discerning that just this year she’s become the youngest editor ever honored with a Hugo nomination. Oh, wait.
Going forward, then, Tor.com’s original fiction will henceforth be co-edited by me and Liz Gorinsky. Submissions should henceforth be sent via email, not to my personal or work email address, but to the newly-created This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . (If you already sent a submission to one of my addresses, please don’t resubmit. We can cope.) Tor.com welcomes original short SF and fantasy, broadly defined. We’re particularly interested in stories under 12,000 words, although we’ve made exceptions in the past and will do so again. We pay 25 cents a word for the first 5,000 words, 15 cents a word for the next 5,000, and 10 cents a word after that. Although we try to employ common sense in dealing with edge cases, “original” means original—not previously published. Contrary to some previous reports, we do not want you to query first; to submit to Tor.com, just send us your story. Stories should use standard manuscript format and be emailed as Word, RTF, or plain-text attachments. Stories sent inline in the body of an email will be ignored. Questions? Send them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Tuesday May 04, 2010 02:55pm EDT
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VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday May 05, 2010 09:07am EDT · amended on Wednesday May 05, 2010 09:08am EDT
What I'm talking about is a phenomenon whereby Ursula Le Guin, say, or Phillip K. Dick, or Michael Moorcock, creates a short piece for a magazine, and later expands and develops it, into a novel. Rocannon's World is a fine example of this, likewise the Eternal Champion ... is the new novel a truly "new" piece of work, or is it "previously published"?
I mean, I develop a lot of ideas in the flash fiction form, published on the InterWeb - even, heaven forfend, short flash fiction - 50 words or less; some of which I later decide to develop as short stories, or novellas ... even novels, if the fit takes me so.
Just how keen is that knife? I have a 50 worder up on Gabriel's Trumpet - I know I could develop that into a 500 000 word novel, because I almost did.
Angels are so careless, even the archangels ...
so where does this "original" versus "previously published" knife cut?
Wednesday May 05, 2010 04:28pm EDT
Thursday May 06, 2010 04:49am EDT
So he went out of his cave,
and came back with AutoSave!
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday May 06, 2010 06:31pm EDT
Throwaway Contact: Not only do we require that all submissions be scanned by Gmail's servers, we also copy everything we receive to the orbiting Google surveillance satellites, via the uplink facility on the roof of the Flatiron Building. (It's where the dirigible mooring mast used to be.) For this, Eric Schmidt pays us in gold bars that he's personally removed from Fort Knox. On the level and on the square!
VIEW ALL BY · Friday May 07, 2010 03:41pm EDT
He could write and delete
hundred-thou words a week...
VIEW ALL BY · Saturday May 08, 2010 02:47am EDT
Avoiding Gmail might indeed make sense for personal mail you're concerned about keeping private - but does it make sense to worry about the privacy of mail that you are sending there specifically in the hope of getting it published on the Internet?
Monday May 10, 2010 12:15pm EDT
Your comment sounds a little... um... degrading towards publishing online. Like it's not good enough if its not in print.
VIEW ALL BY · Monday May 10, 2010 01:27pm EDT
Tuesday May 11, 2010 01:06pm EDT
And do you respond to all submissions, or should we expect no reply=not interested?
Thank you.
VIEW ALL BY · Saturday May 15, 2010 04:33pm EDT
This is a professional publication, so I'm sure they send out notifications if a submission is rejected.
Tor has historically had a fairly long response time, though hopefully this new system will improve that. I wouldn't really worry about your submission until you haven't heard anything for a couple of months. Don't bug the editors before then because their hands are full with sorting through piles and piles of awful manuscripts. Just be patient, it's the nature of this business.
Monday May 31, 2010 05:21pm EDT
Please, let's not be rude to each other by calling slush pile submissions "awful". Some may be. Some may not be. But it's no favor to new authors to make that assumption.
I asked, because I never received any reply to a regular submission I made to Tor more than a year ago... and neither did a fellow author. So I didn't know what the procedure here would be.
VIEW ALL BY · Monday May 31, 2010 07:54pm EDT
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VIEW ALL BY · Tuesday June 01, 2010 05:57pm EDT
MitchWagner: No, there's no autoresponse right now. We could set one up, but it would probably trigger even if something went into the spam filter, so I think we've got to stick with the standard wait-and-query method.
Dannygirl: We will definitely reply as soon as we know we won't be taking a particular submission. The response time is a moving target--especially so at the moment--but I can tell you that we're a week or two shy of being done with 2009 and that the only things left are the twenty or so submissions in our second-look piles. Once we clear that hurdle, we'll make an announcement in twitterland. I do fear that we may have lost track of some submissions we got before the move to gmail, but at least once we can let people know that we've cleared 2009, they can let us know if they think we're wrong.
Ashton_Jones / Dannygirl: Just to fend off further confusion, we want to be clear that the submission process for Tor bears no relation to the process for Tor.com. The Tor Books submission guidelines are at http://us.macmillan.com/Content.aspx?publisher=torforge&id=255#ctl00_cphContent_ctl30_lblQuestion, and they explicitly say, "If you have not heard back from us after six months, please resubmit."
Doorock42: You can query at the same address. Right now we're about six months behind, so if you query any sooner than four months out, it will most likely just be a "haven't gotten to it yet."
Tuesday June 01, 2010 06:17pm EDT
A nice editor at ACE/ROC agreed to look at the novel length submission I suspect got mislaid at "regular" Tor um...a year and 4 months ago. I'll give her a decent chance before I re-submit the work again elsewhere. But thanks.
VIEW ALL BY · Tuesday July 06, 2010 02:27am EDT
Wednesday July 14, 2010 10:01pm EDT
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Thursday July 22, 2010 08:33pm EDT
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Saturday July 24, 2010 07:38pm EDT
Saturday July 31, 2010 03:56pm EDT
I submitted a piece ("Hooked") in late October 2009. Haven't heard anything one way or the other. Queried in June, queried in July--no response to either query, either. Beginning to wonder if you're even getting my emails, hence my posting here. Any way to check, or should I just resubmit?
Thanks,
Lisa von Biela
Thursday August 19, 2010 08:50pm EDT
I'm not complaining, mind, and I'm sure your standards are VERY high, but I'd argue a lot of the professional magazines have equally high standards. This is more than /print/ magazines, by far.
So like I say, just curious. How come?
Sunday August 22, 2010 04:05pm EDT
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 25, 2010 12:24pm EDT
Just for guidance, Duotrope's Digest also reports only 12 responses (and no acceptances) in the past 12 months, but 102 pending submissions. The oldest pending submission has been waiting 270 days. Duotrope's statistics are only comprised of writers who choose to report, of course. My experience with publications that share their own statistics is that the actual number of pending submissions tends to be 5-10x what is reported to Duotrope.
I think it's safe to say that there's still a serious backlog.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 25, 2010 11:41pm EDT
abwells: I'm afraid if it's available somewhere in full, it counts as published.
John Vincent Vale: We're asking for electronic exclusive for a year, non-exclusive after that, and the right (with additional royalties) to include in a Best of Tor.com antho if we ever do one.
Mina Bo / Jeff Alan Brown: Sorry, Tor.com is exclusively a short story publisher at this point.
sabbersolo: A few people have been doing this, but we'd really prefer people submitted one at a time--it slows down the entire pile and seems unfair to others.
I just responded to Lisa Von Biela privately, but I'll mention that her query prompted us to realize that we didn't really have an adequate system for dealing with queries--I respond to all the ones I notice, usually within a week or so, but there were clearly some that were slipping through the cracks. I've added some new filters that I hope will deal with this, and we'll also address it in our submissions guidelines mark 2.
BigDave: I don't think this is the place to get into our finances, but one thing that is certainly true is that Tor.com is an experimental wing of a large publishing corporation (though, we hope, with a great big soul) and the excellent Strange Horizons is entirely driven by donations.
StartEric: We are certainly reading--admittedly slowly, but we're two full-time editors doing this in whatever spare moments we can grab. Given that we have about a dozen submissions left in '09, it seems likely that yours was overlooked somehow. Please feel free to resubmit.
kyleaisteach: As you can tell from my response to Lisa above, we hadn't really thought about the need for query filters--I've been trying to catch them by eye, but clearly a few have gotten through (usually the ones that aren't clearly labeled). We'll definitely address this in the next version of the subguidelines.
VIEW ALL BY · Tuesday August 31, 2010 11:25am EDT