Tor Joins the Digital Age

[Spriggan]

I also suspect one of the reasons they don't allow e-mails for standerd submissions is that it cuts down on the amount of stuff they get and probaly weeds out a lot of crap.  If someone was serious and actualy thought they're story was good (weither it is or not) they'd got through the hassle of printing it out and makeing sure the book was the way they wanted it.  If you could just e-mail a manuscript people would probaly just type stuff up and send it more willy nilly.  (I cant beleave I just said willy nilly)

[fuzzyoctopus]

Even if you used willy-nilly, it's a good point.  Although if I were an editor and I accepted electroic submissions, I wouldn't give the email address out to many people...

[EUOL]

Well, I know that I, for one, edit better with a hard copy in front of me. It's just easier to catch things on paper, rather than on the screen.  

This was an interesting tangent, but you'll note that in my original post, I was talking about saving on postage, not paper.  Also, Sprig's comment is a valid point--however, I think if there was some system by which you sent the piece, then had to pay for it to be printed, it would cut out some of the willy-nilly-ness.

Yes, Moshe is Jewish.  I agree with you--it's a very cool name.  Kinda wish I could use it in a book....

[stacer]

Sprig's point is also valid. At the small publisher I worked for in Chicago, we were always getting press releases for electronics and other things that didn't fit our magazine. People just saw that our title was Electrical Apparatus and assumed that we published about electronics. Wrong. We covered a highly specialized niche market, the repair and replacement of industrial electric motors. Anything not related to that was just annoying spam, so we were careful not to give out the magazine email to just anyone.

[House of Mustard]

With the exception of my initial submission to Covenant, everything there has been electronic.  It's handy.  Once they get the submissions, they print them out--so that they can still work on a hard copy.  I'm not sure why they prefer this method, but it transfers some of my cost to them, so I'm not complaining.

[EUOL]

It seems like this way you could also have more control over the text format.  If you hate reading courier, you could just change the story to times before you print it off.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

I've been doing most of my work on printouts so far but last week I edited two scripts on the computer. It was very annoying and took far longer than I liked--I was editing the rewrite of the manga translation and comparing it with the translation to make sure nothing got munged, and also with the book in hand to make sure nothing got missed. But I'm not sure printing out the script would have been faster. Probably not, since all the changed would have to be entered anyway, and there were a lot.

I do greatly prefer working on stuff that's printed out, but it's easier on the layout people and saves time (for them) if the text is corrected before it's laid out in the balloons. I highly doubt I'll catch everything though until I do see a laid out copy.