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Interview #510: Recap of JordanCon II - Richard Fife, Entry #9
Harriet McDougal Rigney
So, I got Alan and Maria cornered and did a joint interview with them, which was fun. After that, I went to the “What an Editor Does” panel with Harriet and Paul Stevens. Funny thing, Harriet had a slide show she wanted to show, but there was no projector, nor did that have a computer that would easily display it (Alan had a MacBook, but it was a Powerpoint slide show and no one was willing to trust the reader he had). I ran to the front desk and got the projector on its way, and then went up and snagged my laptop. This seemed amazingly fitting, as you can tell from this picture of my laptop’s lid. (Yes, that is an older picture of the laptop, but it looks the same now, so shush).
The panel was really interesting, by the by. Harriet and Paul really took us into the editor side of things, and not just on the “why do they pick this book or that” or the “how we line-edit” processes. No, we got to see the scary worksheets they have to fill out explaining to Tom Doherty and marketing why Tor should buy the book, samples of manuscripts at various stages of production, and even the cover art summary letter that was sent to Darrell Sweet for The Fires of Heaven with some of the subsequent back and forth correspondence (which we are assured is not really all that common nowadays). Some interesting things that were mentioned was how Tor actually expects to take a loss on a brand new author because they are in the business of building writers’ careers, not just making a quick buck on a single book. To this end, Tor actually tends to sign even their new authors with multi-book contracts.
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