Topic: Peer Pressure—The Pontification of Fellow Travellers

October 2010

An Open Letter to Cursor

I received the below email recently, from a French acquaintance J.R. Partel whom I remembered warmly from his year in New York in 2004 or so. He is also a literary translator, a superb one, who translated one of the finest books I ever published. He wrote me in response to seeing a talk I have on Publishing 3.0 but as readers of this blog can attest, it could have been in relation to most anything I’ve talked about! I was about to reply when I realized that it might be might useful to actually do so in public, since J.R.‘s critique was probably the sensitive, most aware and most grounded in actual experience (as opposed to anticipatory anxiety) I’ve yet encountered. Well not necessarily critique, I suppose, he’s writing about what we’re starting to call The Age of Abundance, which J.R. knows is happening anyway, so let’s say a critique of the possibly blithely optimistic strategies some of us propose or are implementing, a call to be alert against insouciance or naiveté. I also feel that I should let his piece stand here for a while, unmolested by me, allow it to take one a life of its own here, be somewhat Slow Web about responding myself. Do feel free yourselves to comment in your own good time…

Dear Richard,

I’ve just watched your presentation at BookNet Canada. I found it enlightening and surprisingly captivating for a non-betablocked disquisition on fairly abstract matters in front of a trade audience, so thank you, thank you and well done.

I’ve spent the last five years running an indie record label, trying to survive elegantly in the war of attrition that is the music business. I wanted to tell you about my experience, as some of the issues faced today by the publishing world, the music industry had to deal with years ago. No doubt you’ve thought about all this already, because you’re clearly on top of what you’re doing, so apologies if this is old-hat, depressingly-rehashed stuff:

I admire the excitement you get from the state of the publishing industry and its impending changes. Now that we’ve seen how the music industry failed to change on time, when it could have co-written the terms of its surrender, it is reassuring to see that other fields might not make the same mistakes. For me, however, building on unstable grounds felt horrible. It forced us to invent a business model for each record we would release, because in the interval the business had changed: vinyls were no longer a viable promo tool, MySpace had fell into irrelevance, new formats, new outlets, our Canadian distributor had folded… I’m not talking about the constant flux of influential blogs, tastemakers and promoters. Tracking all these moving parts to get a feel for the general taste and notice shifts in pertinent communities, it’s what you do to chart the course of your forthcoming records. I’m talking about rethinking the building blocks of the landscape all the time. It can be discouraging. It means spending a disproportionate amount of time on marketing issues and feeling under the siege of newness. New is good, but when you spend so much energy dealing with structural newness, you have too little left to take stock of or encourage newness of content. Stability breeds confidence. (Overconfidence breeds contempt, yes, but that’s way down the line.)

The idea that a publisher is not only a manufacturer of printed matter but also the provider of a human experience (of ways to connect, if I understand you correctly) is true. But what do you make of the shift it entails, from a reader-book connection to a reader-writer connection? When I read a book, the experience I love and treasure is with the book (and its characters, sentences and so forth), not with its author. You could even say that the only necessary part of my relationship with literature is the book (printed or not, of course). But if you want to move into the $200 to $10K price range, you have to sell something else, you have to make the author part of the book experience. On Kickstarter for instance, above a certain price point the project managers are really selling privileges (more access, more involvement, more ancillary information, etc.). I’m not a wuss nor do I believe in purity of intent but are you not scared you’ll have to deal with sad fetishistic behaviors? Crazy fans spending way more than they should on diners with authors they shouldn’t idolize? Is this a necessary shift (from book to author)? Has it happened ten centuries ago and I’m just late to the party?

And what happens to writers who just can’t muster the charisma or aren’t interested in writing their personal legend alongside their books? And those that aren’t writing the kind of books you can build a community on? Many of my favorite books are books that tend to be read by loners who won’t advertise their reading and for each Vollmann that I can see people paying to meet, you have a Lutz. Do you think the “old model” will still be there for them?

Lastly, strong peripheries tend to take over the center, paratext becomes text and side businesses crystalize into the actual thing. Look at what happened to music (certain genres) : participatory practices have cannibalized pop music, they are pop music now. Remixes, fixes, mash-ups, fan-made videos, leaks, in some case the record itself is difficult to locate. The conversation overwhelms the discourse and you scroll down to the comments before anything else. We have something mildly interesting going on in France as far as social publishing goes. You’ve probably heard of mymajorcompanybooks? It’s like they know that the center cannot hold and operate on the assumption that it’s already collapsed. So they’re focusing on everything but the books: what comes before, after, the writer, the strategy… And the communities they build, as strong as they are, are not interested in reading or whatever, they’re interested in gambling and winning, of course, and I knew it, but still, I was expecting to see something beyond the hustle. It’s weird how fans are no longer consumers, experts or activists but want to be VCs, shareholders, editors… The original site, focusing on music, was a big hit. I’m not sure there’s a clear point here, except maybe that I’m afraid of what the systematic harnessing of communities will result in.

Richard Eoin Nash, Oct 25, 2010

August 2009

Amanda Palmer wants human connection

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Typically I reserve this space for proper-ish essays. And my tumblr for quotes too long for Twitter. But I just have to quote this, an email from Amanda Palmer to Bob Lefsetz. Almost needless to say, what Amanda says for music, I believe to be true for writing also.

Amanda Palmer:

the new art of twitter and blogging and realtime connection with hundreds and thousands of people means that the very role and meaning of the rock star is changing.

watch it happen.

i started making the music in the first place not because i wanted music, but because i wanted human connection.
music was the bridge there.

(it took me a long time to admit this to myself, because i felt guilty and like a naughty/bad/inauthentic artist when i truly discovered this, in my mid-twenties, classic crisis time).

BUT this is, hands fucking down, also why people listen, why they search, why they want art.

connection = primary.
music/art = secondary.

yes, you need a filter (like you’re often saying) to FIND the music you love and connect to (and that filter has evolved and will continue to evolve….radio-vinyl-MTV-blogs and on and on)
BUT
the music ITSELF is a filter to connect to another human expressing mind/heart that blows your skirt up and makes you feel alive, not alone, etc etc what have you.

so in a weird way, music may take the backseat and act as a filter to those you follow on twitter….not the other way around.
fucked up, but maybe not.

it’s a symbiosis. one will need the other, but don’t discount the realtime human connection as only a tool.
it is and it’s not.
for many people, it’s the thing that they NEED and WANT, the holy grail of Not Feeling Alone in a world where that used to be JUST A FANTASY as you lay in bed with your headphones on, imagining a connection with the artist and the other people who might be out there in beds just like yours, imagining the same thing.

the music simply provides the necessary room in which the miraculous happens and all these bed-worlds collide in cyberspace.

there is a reason that i often find myself wanting to sit behind twitter and connect instead of sitting at the piano and writing.
there is a reason that the fans on there would often rather be connecting than lying in bed with their headphones on.

we do both. we need both.

twitter = realtime connection.
at the very end of the day, humans crave realtime connection.

that is Why It Works.

twitter.com/amandapalmer
amandapalmer.net

Richard Eoin Nash, Aug 18, 2009

July 2009

Eoin responds to Richard Eoin who reciprocates, gratefully…

So the excellent Irish publisher Eoin Purcell reviews my Publishing Perspectives editorial and provides a nice exegesis.

He is concerned about a few dimensions of it, and I thought it would make sense to respond to this, as I think that the problems he perceives lie in my poor expression of the ideas, rather than the not-poor ideas themselves.

HIs chiefest concern has to do with what he’s coined “Publishing as a Service (PaS)”—“the idea that if publishers want to survive they should adapt to become facilitators of the people who are creating and consuming content.” He contrasts this notion with one recently elaborated by Mike Shatzkin who believes “the focus should be on curating those niches and in re-engineering a publishing portfolio around a vertical segment.” He advocates that a new publishing enterprise not choose only one of those options, especially not the first only, lest “they have become software engineers.”

in large part his concern is that publishers not reinvent the wheel—“I don’t think that most publishers should spend their time creating design software or better printing presses, leave that to the odd genius who happens to also be a publisher or the software programmer.” I absolutely agree. I can’t specifically speak for Andrew Savikas (who outlines his most current thinking here in a excellent essay, Content is a Service Business) but I know that I have no intention of building anything from scratch. My understanding of Publishing as a Service Business is to distinguish it from one that sells a product in a supply chain, a peddler of tchotchkes. It does not exclude the notion that we would create physical objects, preferably gorgeous, expensive, high margin ones that are never returned and that the purchaser passes onto the next generation, it rather advocates for a mentality, a philosophy, a corporate culture, that is a service, rather than manfacturing-and-distribution one. Much in the way that Zappos is a service business.

Indeed, I concur still further with Eoin in that, as he writes, “far better for us to spend time curating and filtering content, because filtering is what the web needs.” Even more so when he argues that “that doesn’t necessarily mean gate-keeping [for] we may be facilitating the filtering-by-readers within a community, rather than choosing what floats.” Nicely put, sir!

He again warns, don’t reinvent the wheel, and I again concur. I do use (in fact in the “About” page of my blog) the admonition “Now is time to build their infrastructure” but I mean it more metaphorically. I don’t mean invent the infrastructure—I simply mean let’s take all the existing tools out there and start to put them together in the appropriate configurations. This will involve levels of customization, tweaking, both of the software itself and of the user interfaces, and of any number of business processes. And that’s the process I wish to embark on, as soon as possible. I’m not going to invent a new kind of brick, but it is time to figure out the architecture of the right kind of niche publishing houses. Indeed, my goal is to create a small portfolio of houses, in order to see how much is similar, how much is different, what the user preferences are with writers, and readers, and reader-writers in different areas and styles of story-telling.

Richard Eoin Nash, Jul 19, 2009

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I ran Soft Skull Press from 2001 to 2007 when we sold it to Counterpoint for whom I continued to run it until early 2009. I founded Cursor and am publisher of Red Lemonade. I now run content and community for the new cultural discoverer Small Demons. After the jump is my bio, since I know some folks come to this site looking for it, and I thwart them by not having a proper one. read more »