A little brainstorm for the weekend.
Tor's new site marketed as Watch the Skies starts tomorrow. For the information we already have, it's going to be a mix of SF&F portal, blog, social network and magazine with original fiction. And based on their long gift marketing and the assumption that Tor, the big boss of genre fiction, will sure put a lot of money and effort in it, the site promises to be a blast! But will it?
So, the poll/meme here is: what are yo expecting from Watch the Skies? From a reader and writer perspective (if any writer actually reads this blog), how the site will impact on the genre market? Comment and discuss.
And just a reminder: those that have not downloaded one or any of the 25 free books given so far, Tor says all of them will be available again for a short time starting on the site's launch. There are great stuff there, like (my favourite) A Shadow in Summer, Mistborn and Spin.
UPDATE: SciFi Wire has details and talks with Tor's editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. (Via SF Signal)
illustration by Fabio Cobiaco
To be quite frank about it, I don´t expect anything from it. Maybe it´s a good thing, maybe it isn´t.
On the other hand, I´m all for initiatives like The Red Room, though, which aims to unite readers, writers, agents, in what seems to me real networking, no strings attached.
It would be nice to see a publiher venture into the realm of Web 2.0 and to experiementially include the hive-mind of the consumerverse in industry decisions ---I did say experimentially yes?