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Interview #976: Talking With Tom: A Conversation Between Tom Doherty and Harriet McDougal, Entry #16
Tom Doherty
I like the Fallon books. I like the Conans he wrote. But when I read The Eye of the World , I just thought, boy, this is just wonderful. This is special.
Harriet McDougal
Yeah.
Tom Doherty
Harriet and I decided we were going to make this a bestseller. We did it in trade paper because we were afraid we couldn’t get enough out of a fat hardcover book. Trade paper wasn’t anywhere near as big then as it is now, but we thought that’s good, too, because it will call attention to itself. It’ll be different. So we did it in trade paper and sold 40,000 copies, which was huge for trade paper in those days, for the first of a fantasy series.
Harriet McDougal
When I called you the first time, I was about halfway through reading the partials Jim was handing me. I said: “Tom, you’ve got to read this one.” He said: “Yeah, why?” [To Irene Gallo] You know Tom. I replied: “Because either I’ve fallen into the wife trap after seven years of marriage, or this book is wonderful.” I sent it to Tom, and you didn’t just go the whole hog, you did the whole hog and all the piglets. A truly magnificent job of publishing.
Tom Doherty
Oh, we had so much fun with that. You know, it’s funny. People think that, when you get a success like that, you don’t want to mess with it. The second book doubled the sales of the first in trade paper. So when we got to the third book, we decided to do it in hardcover, and sales just screamed. People asked: “Why would you do that? Look how wonderfully it’s growing where it is.” And that was our first book to hit the bestseller list.
Irene Gallo
Really?
Tom Doherty
Yeah, it hit the New York Times , not high up, but it did. And from then on, always up. How about you, Irene? You’ve been working on the covers for a lot of years.
Irene Gallo
It’s hard to say. I came on in ‘93, when Maria [Mellili, former Art Director for Tor Books] was here. It was already the big book of the year. Many of the cover decisions were set. My earliest memories were that the production schedules were set by hours, not days.
Harriet McDougal
Really?
Irene Gallo
There would always be four different versions of the production schedule, based on what day it came in. Contingency plans on top of contingency plans.
Harriet McDougal
For one of the books, Jim and I stayed at the Murray Hill Hotel, with twin laptops. He’d do a chapter and give it to me, I’d read and edit it, and then I’d bring a disk in. I had a terrific carryall I’d bought at the Morgan Library, but it was not up to carrying my laptop and gave up the ghost in the middle. That was, I think, the craziest.
Irene Gallo
I remember Jeff Dreyfus, our production manager at the time, spent the days walking back and forth from the office to the hotel.
Harriet McDougal
And Jim ended up having to stay up here to proofread. It was going to take a week or more, and I had to go back and deal with stuff at home. That’s funny about the production schedules by hour, though. I’d never heard that.
Irene Gallo
They would set up four of them: if it comes on Monday, it’s this, but if it comes in late Tuesday, it’s this.
Tom Doherty
But hey, you know, it worked. We did a book each year, and each book built. By the time we got to the fourth book, we were selling the first book in mass market paperback. It was hooking people and bringing them in. Then the next book would grow, because people wouldn’t want to wait.
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