wotwiki
Interview #976: Talking With Tom: A Conversation Between Tom Doherty and Harriet McDougal, Entry #8
Tom Doherty
Another great—and profitable—thing Harriet did for us was cartoons. She brought some great cartoons over to Tempo. In 1980, the very first year, we wouldn’t actually have shipped any books, because it takes a while to get things organized and written. We’d just started incorporating late in ‘79. To get books out in 1980 would have been a challenge, but King Features had two movies that year: Flash Gordon and Popeye . We hadn’t come up with the Tor imprint yet, but we rushed out tie‑ins for those movies, both in comic form and in novelization.
Harriet McDougal
Harum‑scarum. Conan with one hand and Popeye with the other. As the years went by, Tor grew and grew and grew. From my point of view, there came a year when Jim [James Oliver Rigney Jr., AKA Robert Jordan] was beginning to make some real money. I was commuting up to Tor for one week a month, every month. I had a TRS-80 machine with tape storage, and it would record the entire inventory of Tor books so nicely, but then I could never unload it when I got up here. It was a pretty miserable system. Then there came a year where I thought: “This is the year I could either add a third stress medication, or I could stop being editorial director of Tor.” It was time to do that.
Tom Doherty
I hated every time she ever cut back. I understood, but I didn’t like it.
Harriet McDougal
Well, I was doing a lot of editing. Heather Wood told me once, when she was working here, that I was editing a quarter of the hardcover list, which meant I was also handling a quarter of the paperback list because of the previous releases. It was a lot. But it was a great ride.
Tom Doherty
(To Irene Gallo) That was her problem for doing the best books.
Harriet McDougal
I don’t know about that. But I loved working with Michael and Kathy Gear, Father Greeley, Carol Nelson Douglas. All manner of creature. Lots and lots of them.
Tom Doherty
Yeah. Andy [Greeley]’s books used to make the bestseller list back when you were editing him. That was fun. He came to us first with science fiction, right? Then we did a fantasy, with your editing. He loved your editing. We ended up doing all of his books.
Harriet McDougal
I really loved working with him.
Tom Doherty
You must have some stories like mine about Jerry Pournelle. What kind of crazy things happened to you in your early days? You were editing Fred Saberhagen, David Drake, people like that.
Harriet McDougal
They were just great to work with. Nobody was yelling and screaming down the phone at me.
Tom Doherty
Fred’s Swords, the first three Books of Swords were bestsellers for us, too.
Harriet McDougal
They were good. I used to tease Fred about his day job as a pitcher in the professional baseball world. I think he’d heard that maybe too many times. “There was a Saberhagen pitching.” “Saberhagen pitches shutout” and so on.
Contributing
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.