I think talking about "slots" is confusing unless you specifically mean mass market paperbacks.
Mass market lists, which are organized by month, really do have "slots" which represent anticipated distribution levels, particularly on the non-bookstore side of the market. No matter what, every month Tor is going to have a science fiction lead, a fantasy lead, a Tor Mainstream lead, and a Forge lead. In addition we'll have "twos" in each of those lists and possibly "threes" in one or two of them. We have some other "slots" which sometimes appear and sometimes don't, like "super leads" (think Jordan, or a new Ender book from OSC), or books in our "Women in Fantasy" program, which was specifically contrived as a way of getting an additional fantasy "slot", but that's basically the structure of things.
Hardcover and trade paperback publishing, on the other hand, don't have "slots" in the same sense. Some months the Tor hardcover list has a dozen new SF and fantasy titles; some months it's as low as six. Some months we may have four quest fantasies, one literary SF novel, and one YA fantasy; other months we may have three hard SF novels, a humorous fantasy, and two anthologies. We try to avoid too much clumping up of excessively similar material, and certainly we try to schedule things so that our high-earning books get spread around as much as possible (you really don't want to be shipping a new Dune prequel in the same month as the new Terry Goodkind, dissimilar though they are), but there's nothing like the imperative enforced by the mass-market system of "slots". Trade publishing is much less slot-driven.
And no, we don't have literal "slots" for hitherto-unpublished writers; we just have the fact that we keep finding them and that, risky though first novels are, there's very little that's more fun than finding a really good new writer and getting them successfully launched.
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Date: 2006-05-05 12:12 am (UTC)Mass market lists, which are organized by month, really do have "slots" which represent anticipated distribution levels, particularly on the non-bookstore side of the market. No matter what, every month Tor is going to have a science fiction lead, a fantasy lead, a Tor Mainstream lead, and a Forge lead. In addition we'll have "twos" in each of those lists and possibly "threes" in one or two of them. We have some other "slots" which sometimes appear and sometimes don't, like "super leads" (think Jordan, or a new Ender book from OSC), or books in our "Women in Fantasy" program, which was specifically contrived as a way of getting an additional fantasy "slot", but that's basically the structure of things.
Hardcover and trade paperback publishing, on the other hand, don't have "slots" in the same sense. Some months the Tor hardcover list has a dozen new SF and fantasy titles; some months it's as low as six. Some months we may have four quest fantasies, one literary SF novel, and one YA fantasy; other months we may have three hard SF novels, a humorous fantasy, and two anthologies. We try to avoid too much clumping up of excessively similar material, and certainly we try to schedule things so that our high-earning books get spread around as much as possible (you really don't want to be shipping a new Dune prequel in the same month as the new Terry Goodkind, dissimilar though they are), but there's nothing like the imperative enforced by the mass-market system of "slots". Trade publishing is much less slot-driven.
And no, we don't have literal "slots" for hitherto-unpublished writers; we just have the fact that we keep finding them and that, risky though first novels are, there's very little that's more fun than finding a really good new writer and getting them successfully launched.