Tor.com opening for novella submissions

oooh thanks for the heads up!

Did anyone here submit a novella to Tor.com's open call last summer? If so, are you still waiting for a response or did you hear back already? They have a queue with numbers, but my number hasn't changed for about two months and it has been over a year since I submitted, so I'm just trying to get a sense of whether or not they're still reading submissions

Hi Beth,

If it helps, I submitted in August of 2018 and got a polite form rejection by email in March, 2019. Hopefully the delay is somehow good news for you?

Thanks for letting me know you got a response--and quite a while ago too! I did submit on the last or second to last day, so my story might just be at the bottom of the pile. I don't think I'm in any sort of hold pile because my number is over 150 in the queue, and I can't imagine that they're holding that many novellas (and have for over a year). I've never submitted to their novella calls before, so I have no basis of comparison--I appreciate the input on your experience!

Posted by: @bethpowers

Did anyone here submit a novella to Tor.com's open call last summer? If so, are you still waiting for a response or did you hear back already? They have a queue with numbers, but my number hasn't changed for about two months and it has been over a year since I submitted, so I'm just trying to get a sense of whether or not they're still reading submissions

I just wanted to follow up on my question from a couple of years ago--I did finally get a response from my Tor.com novella submission...it took over 3 years (and is now my longest submission on the Submission Grinder at 1150 days!). I did appreciate that I received a nice personal rejection, which also indicated that my story had been held a bit longer because they had trouble deciding on it. I don't know if/when they will open to submissions again, but in case they do, I wanted to give anyone considering submitting a heads up--they do eventually respond, but it can be a long wait.

@bethpowers 

Woah. Three years? That seems a bit excessive without some kind of response. I would expect someone like Tor to be more responsive, even if the process is taking a long time. 

3 years is a really long wait. But, for me at least, this would fall into the mixed feelings zone for sure. Well done on them liking it enough to take so long!

I did at least have a few indications that they were still reading the submissions--they used the moksha submission system, so I could see my number in the queue, but there were times when it didn't move for months and I wondered if the queue had been abandoned, especially since I was also seeing significantly shorter responses being logged on the Submission Grinder. I queried at one point and received a response (something along the lines of "we're still considering your story"), and I was about to query again when I received the final response. I haven't submitted a novel manuscript for quite some time, but when I did, the longest response for unsolicited submissions from various major publishers at that time was around a year, so three years seems like a lot!

Now I have to decide what to do with this weird too-long-to-be-a-short-story, too-short-to-be-a-novel novella  

Hi, I know this is a long shot, but by any chance do you know if and when Tor will reopen to unsolicited submissions?

@abestar20 Hi, I asked the exact same question of Ellen Datlow (who acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com) last year and her response was that they won't. They opened it to the general writing population when they first launched because they thought no one would know about the market but the response was overwhelming and that at this point they get more than they can even accept in inquiries from agented, successful authors (read: commercially less of a risk) who have written a novella, so there are no plans to re-open.

I guess it might change some day, but my best guess would be if they ever do open again it will be for a very targeted ask e.g. authors with work that speak to a very specific market or minority, or if they decide they want to launch into a new sub-genre.