Soft Skull News

Anne (the other half of Soft Skull's New York office): What do you keep laughing at?

Me: David Rees finally has an RSS feed.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Unlikely as it might seem, we've something to offer in this regard. Earlier this year, Kurt Andersen's Studio 360 commissioned a story from our Lydia Millet on the LHC. Martha Plimpton reads:

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our author Tim Wise (White Like Me, Speaking Treason Fluently) wrote on white privilege and the election last Sunday. I loved the piece, as usual, and sent it out to our media list: "This is Your Nation on White Privilege." It's now all over the internets...Exhibit A. Twenty blog-postings between midnight and 8am today.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...says Charlie Anders on io9. Literary respectability might not at all be what science fiction needs.

In so doing, she give some excellent perspective on the literary fiction creature, although, to be fair, there are practitioners of the literary genre who are as dissatisfied as Charlie herself with the habits of the genre.

Two exception hilarious observations in her list of what would happen if SF went lit:

3) Paragraphs that start with numbers. I have no idea where this fad came from — maybe poetry? — but I still see it a lot, especially in short fiction. It used to be lists, or fake memos, but I think those are out now. But numbers are still around.

6) A fetishization of a certain kind of person. People joke about the literary story revolving around suburban malaise, but it's sort of true nonetheless. During my year of reading piles of literary books, I read tons of near-identical stories of growing up with a nanny, or being a soccer mom, or being a business dad. For some reason, a lot of literary novels start with a funeral, forcing a successful thirtysomething or fortysomething person to return to his/her family and uncover the buried secrets of his/her childhood. (Think Sweet Home Alabama, but not quite as cute.) In science fiction terms, this would mean more stories about middle managers, shuttling around below decks on the starcruiser and wondering if this is all there is to life.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...he's right about book publishing too. Bob Guccione, Jr. that is. Via HuffPo.

The future of media will boil down to, and pivot on the axis of, one thing: imagination—how creative we are in exploiting technology and, equally important, with content. The future will not be a war between new media and traditional media, but between obsolescence and vision. In that sense, it will be far more apocalyptic and transformative than just a bunch of old-line companies going away.

That does not mean that print has nothing to worry about. It has, quite literally, everything to worry about: from the expense of its materials, workforce and delivery, to loss of revenues and the erosion of its dominance as a source of information. But the print medium can fix that set of problems. "Can" is the operative word.

Too often publishing executives complain about their ill fortunes rather then set about the necessary reconstruction, like depressed home owners shocked to discover their homes are not impervious to nature and weather. Newspapers have to change, because they've become anachronistic. Magazines are going through a natural (and I personally think very useful, if we're smart enough to learn from this) market correction, as Wall Street likes to call the periods when the floor gives out from under them.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So Canadian publishing thinker Mark Bertils just pointed me to this, from a while back, from Wired.

"The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand." The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers.

Read the rest of the piece, because it's a fun piece, though it is about creating an algorithm for a film recommendation engine for Netflix. But that quote, about supply and demand, an almost paranthetical observation in the article, describes the book industry superbly.

For much of the 20th century, the book bottlenecks were in supply: lack of education, censorship soft and hard, racism and sexism, brutally expensive and time-consuming text composition, printing machinery focused on volume rather than flexibility, poor distribution infrastructure.

Those issues have not been solved, of course, but there has been across-the board amelioration. With an consequent explosion in supply (cf. all the complaints about too many books.)

So now the problem is demand. I believe—this is where I'm an irrepressible optimist—that the issue is precisely as he describes, sorting out demand. My emphasis because he presupposes demand. So the problem is matching up demand with the supply. And that, ladies and gentleman, is yet another way of expressing what I'm continually poking and prodding at here in these The Future is Now posts. Publishing is about connecting writers and readers.

Publishing is doing a much better job of finding talent than it was doing in the 1940's and 1950's (which is not to say that it is great now, but that it was appalling then, and I think literary agents can be credited with a lot of the improvement) but it is much less effective at matching those readers with the writers who'll turn them on best. That is the task of the 21st century publisher. And any supplier with any kind of market power who finds we're failing them will dump our asses. Fast.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...we have Andrew Mueller to prove it's universal. Or at least British, also. From Part One of his tour diary for The Quietus.

There is no aspect of the rock & roll life more mythologised than touring, and I should know. Having given rock & roll the proverbial best years of my life, writing for Melody Maker, then assorted others, I did my little bit towards furthering the idea of touring as a splendid and enviable mobile Saturnalia. Which is to say that I lied. Not lied as in related palpable untruths, but lied in failing to pass onto readers the whole truth, which is this: tours are only fun when they're someone else's tour, in which case they're about the most fun you can have. When they're your own tour, as most people who undertake such things will confide after a few drinks, they're an excruciating, dignity-destroying process which will steadily cause you to loathe, in this order, your most recent work, your audience, yourself, everyone, everything.

I once interviewed Harry Shearer, now best known as the voice of much of The Simpsons, but a genuine rock & roll immortal due to his portrayal of bass player Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap, the purest essence of the touring experience ever distilled. While wrangling my tape recorder, I remarked that I'd first seen the film as a teenager, and thought it amusing satire. "Well, thanks," said Shearer. And then, I continued, I became a rock journalist. "And now," grinned Shearer, "you know better, right?"

I embark on my own tour, therefore, with some trepidation. In order to interest the reading public in the UK edition of my new book, I Wouldn't Start From Here [Soft Skull's publishing in January in the US] - an account of one peripatetic hack's bewildered stumbling around the political, philosophical and actual frontlines of the 21st century -­ my [UK] publisher, Portobello, has arranged for me a series of manifestations in bookshops and associated establishments. My first reaction, naturally, is to become gripped with visions of Artie Fufkin, the hapless press officer from Polymer records, penitently inviting Spinal Tap to "kick this ass for a man" after organising an in-store appearance at which even the two men and a dog of fable have failed to show. Nobody, I reason, knows who I am. My book contains no boy wizards, no excruciating accounts of childhood hardship, and isn't by someone who is on television.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...we have Andrew Mueller to prove it's universal. Or at least British, also. From Part One of his tour diary for The Quietus.

There is no aspect of the rock & roll life more mythologised than touring, and I should know. Having given rock & roll the proverbial best years of my life, writing for Melody Maker, then assorted others, I did my little bit towards furthering the idea of touring as a splendid and enviable mobile Saturnalia. Which is to say that I lied. Not lied as in related palpable untruths, but lied in failing to pass onto readers the whole truth, which is this: tours are only fun when they're someone else's tour, in which case they're about the most fun you can have. When they're your own tour, as most people who undertake such things will confide after a few drinks, they're an excruciating, dignity-destroying process which will steadily cause you to loathe, in this order, your most recent work, your audience, yourself, everyone, everything.

I once interviewed Harry Shearer, now best known as the voice of much of The Simpsons, but a genuine rock & roll immortal due to his portrayal of bass player Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap, the purest essence of the touring experience ever distilled. While wrangling my tape recorder, I remarked that I'd first seen the film as a teenager, and thought it amusing satire. "Well, thanks," said Shearer. And then, I continued, I became a rock journalist. "And now," grinned Shearer, "you know better, right?"

I embark on my own tour, therefore, with some trepidation. In order to interest the reading public in the UK edition of my new book, I Wouldn't Start From Here [Soft Skull's publishing in January in the US] - an account of one peripatetic hack's bewildered stumbling around the political, philosophical and actual frontlines of the 21st century -­ my [UK] publisher, Portobello, has arranged for me a series of manifestations in bookshops and associated establishments. My first reaction, naturally, is to become gripped with visions of Artie Fufkin, the hapless press officer from Polymer records, penitently inviting Spinal Tap to "kick this ass for a man" after organising an in-store appearance at which even the two men and a dog of fable have failed to show. Nobody, I reason, knows who I am. My book contains no boy wizards, no excruciating accounts of childhood hardship, and isn't by someone who is on television.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm completely astonished that an era that consisted of white men publishing white men could possibly be described as golden. Frankly, we should be ashamed of ourselves to go along with this hypocritical drivel.

Then again, this from a book that says “There’s no such thing as a poor publisher.” Oh Lord.

(Inter alia, Christ, is anyone watching Madmen? Publishing and advertising were operating with the same mores...)

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alright so first off, props to Chad Post for being the first to notice Bob Stein's post at the Institute for the Future of the Book and for the usual excellent job both summarizing and responding to the post.

Second, major demerits to every other publisher blog (me too, me too) for not noticing it til now.

The whole thing is excellent, and typed by hands possessed of a pinky which alone has more experience [re]thinking the author, book, and reader than my head does, and probably any head in the business. (When, early in the piece, he recalls "[t]here was an important aha moment early on when I was trying to understand the essential nature of books as a medium," early on means 1981! There weren't eBooks in SF movies in 1981.)

Anyhow, here's the key excerpts.

e) Once we acknowledge the possibility of a flatter hierarchy that displaces the writer from the center or from the top of the food chain and moves the reader into a space of parallel importance and consideration — i.e. once we acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between reading and writing as equally crucial elements of the same equation — we can begin to redefine the roles of publisher and editor. An old-style formulation might be that t publishers and editors serve the packaging and distribution of authors’ ideas. A new formulation might be that publishers and editors contribute to building a community that involves an author and a group of readers who are exploring a subject.

f) So it turns out that far from becoming obsolete, publishers and editors in the networked era have a crucial role to play. The editor of the future is increasingly a producer, a role that includes signing up projects and overseeing all elements of production and distribution, and that of course includes building and nurturing communities of various demographics, size, and shape. Successful publishers will build brands around curatorial and community building know-how AND be really good at designing and developing the robust technical infrastructures that underlie a complex range of user experiences. [I know I'm using "publisher" to encompass an array of tasks and responsibilities, but I don't think the short-hand does too much damage to the discussion].

g) Once there are roles for author/reader/editor/publisher, we can begin to assess who adds what kind of value, and when. From there we can begin to develop a business model. My sense is that this transitional period (5, 10, 50 years) will encompass a variety of monetizing schemes. People will buy subscriptions to works, to publishers, or to channels that aggregate works from different publishers. People might purchase access to specific titles for specific periods of time. We might see tiered access, where something is free in “read-only” form, but publishers charge for the links that take you OUT of the document or INTO the community. Smart experimenting and careful listening to users/readers/authors will be very important.

Incidentally I concur with Chad's skepticism that fiction becomes like video games. Some writers of novels will also write for interactive narratives, but the premise of the appeal of a novel is not just immersive, like a video game, but submissive—give me all the words, and I'll do the rest, but for this experience, I don't want to create the words, the characters or plot points...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The excellent designer Adrian Kinloch is designing, and reflecting on, some covers for us. Specifically for a book we're publishing in early 09 called Watching the Door. (Subtitle also under discussion.)

Key considerations:

Book's about Northern Ireland, written by Irish guy with no platform in the US.
Book is hilarious, violent and a wee bit raunchy.
Selling books about grim, violent housing projects in northwest Europe 30 years ago not always that easy.
Book doesn't fit into conventional categories so well. (Part memoir, part political history, has "current affairs" type appeal...)

Occurs to me, writing this, that I shall also ask Jessa Crispin, who is a big fan of the book. [Here's her Smart Set review too.]

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

John Fox makes an absolutely critical observation here:

I'm afraid to give a book.

Because when you give someone a book, it's not giving someone a DVD or movie tickets, which requires two hours of time, two hours that requires virtually no mentally energy. No, you're requiring five to ten hours of their time. And especially if the book is dense or difficult, you're requiring a thick chunk of concentrating brain matter.

Now, if this is an issue just giving a book away, what does it mean to try to sell it?! (Se of you have heard me say it before...) I think I know the answer.

1. Charge almost nothing for it.
2. Charge an arm and a leg for it.

The publishers who figure out how to effectively execute 1. and 2. will be in business in 2018. The others...well, they might still be in business, but only if they've a big fat backlist. Cause it's not as if we'll stop reading Steinbeck. But who, in 2018, will license their intellectual property to a publisher who can't find readers through either of the two remaining ways. Unlike in the music business, where it was the consumer who stuck the dagger in the heart of the labels, in publishing it'll be the writers...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The November 3rd club re-offers an excerpt in response to be finally managing to actually publish Coming of Age at the End of History, after two cover changes, a title and subtitle change, and three re-catalogings. It is a remarkable book, very successful in France and in Germany, and it's immensely frustrating to me I've been unable to give it a proper life in the US. But, at least this time, I actually published it. Here's an excerpt of the except the Nov 3rd crew picked, and the author will be on Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm next week.

The idea that open markets are the only alternative to open war has worked its way into almost every cell and capillary of our daily lives. It streams invisibly through our bodies like a virus, subtly influencing everything we do. Its secret hold on our minds is such that it is hard to believe that any of our thoughts go uncolored by the memory of the war. After all, this is the pretext for the whole deal — today’s economic system is literally built on the rubble of WWII. The horror of the past has been distilled into a concentrated liquor. It runs continually from our pores like a nervous sweat, and sweating guilt for the war’s unspeakable barbarities, our bodies are engulfed by its reeking vapors.

(It is well, if not entirely uncritically, reviewed by Andrew Bast in the Village Voice—it is the rare political book that truly has answers.)

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah Weinman is in the process of delineating the landscape of American corporate publishing with remarkable clarity. A few days ago, Macmillan; today Simon & Schuster. I'm rather looking forward to the rest, though I have to confess, despite being on the other side of the corporate/indie fence, I do not derive any satisfaction from the paralysis we're witnessing in the Big Six—theirs are not carcasses-to-be on which we indies can ultimately feast—to continue the nasty metaphor the stink from their carcasses could finally drive away all our customers. In less gruesome terms, the ecosystem collapses without the commercial publishers.

Anyhow, Sarah and I agree on the one useful observation that I can make—that they can obtain the advantage of branding by using their imprints more wisely. (See inter alia Love Letter to Our Corporate Brethren, as Inspired by GalleyCat.)

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although I owe y'all a summary of what I got up to over at Jeff's place, I didn't want to let me delay in doing so interfere with the responsibility to draw your attention to Dennis Cooper's glorious summary of what he's been up to at "Johnny's place", viz announcing the two most recent titles* in the Little House on the Bowery series that Akashic will have hosted for ten books, as of Spring of 2009. Dennis explains all, and offers a superb manifesto from a guy who like our Lynne Tillman has seen the evolution of the processes whereby boundary-testing fiction is disseminated...

*One of those titles being Derek McCormack's, a truly gifted young writer of nasty luscious micronovels, one of which, The Haunted Hillbilly, we had the honor of publishing.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)