I thought I'd share with you the email I received about the opening of Red Lemonade (blockquotes omitted): Red Lemonade is live, come say hello. By way of reminder: Red Lemonade is a publisher, the world's first instance of a Cursor-powered social publishing community. Our goal is to make Red Lemonade a home for powerful writing and engaged reading. And to make Cursor the best possible platform to power the world's next 50,000 independent publishers. At some point in the last year, you signed up to find out more. Sorry it took so long. If you decide to register (you can poke around anonymously), we're...

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...

Many pundits (myself included) talk about the need for the publishing industry to make changes in order to survive the digital transition. But at least one of them is putting his money where his mouth is. Richard Nash, whom we’ve mentioned a few times already, is leading the way with changes to various aspects of the publishing process in his new venture, Cursor. Among these changes are shortening contracts to three years, and eliminating advances (the amount that authors are paid before their books are published, which the books then have to earn out before they get paid...

Last year I concluded my contribution to the Frankfurt Book Fair’s website with an opinion piece on what I thought the Fair signified—a perhaps hubristic attempt to issue a personal, idiosyncratic, opinionated State of the Industry address. To add bloodymindness to hubris. I’m going to try this again, and again crosspost from the Fair itself. (Do please note that these are my opinions, not those of the Frankfurt Book Fair or anyone therewith associated and do also check out that blog in general, there’s a lot of really good stuff there) So I was attending a party thrown by the good...

From the press release: On the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair and on the day of Tools of Change Frankfurt, Cursor’s founder and CEO, Richard Nash, is pleased to announce the line -up of books for Red Lemonade, their first publishing imprint. Someday This Will Be Funny Lynne Tillman (Apr 2011) Zazen Vanessa Veselka (May 2011) Follow Me Down Kio Stark (June 2011) They will be available in the book trade in trade paperback, as digital downloads in all formats and channels, and as a limited edition artisanal object direct from the publisher. Tillman’s...

Kio Stark on The Literary Platform has an interesting essay looking at the success of “pay what you want” payment schemes that have been tried in the last few years for digital media. Musicians have released albums, studios have released computer games, authors have released e-books, and so on under a model whereby consumers pay whatever they want to pay in return for the download. Stark likes the model, but suggests a change in terminology—the model should not be “pay what you want,” she feels, but rather “pay what you can.” In other words, pay a fair price...

For an author to “build a community” with his readers has become a popular catch phrase in recent times. In particular, Richard Nash has talked at length about how community-based publishing is the main purpose of his new venture, Cursor. When you have a close relationship with your readers, the thinking goes, they are much more likely to buy your stuff. However, community-building can have a darker side as well, as this March editorial by Guy Gavriel Kay, one of my favorite authors, reveals. Kay talks about how some authors, such as George R.R. Martin and Patrick...

Richard Nash, who used to run Soft Skull Press, has founded a new imprint - Cursor. Richard also has an absolutely fascinating accent - though I'm not sure that's quite relevant to his new venture. Recently he published an article in The Literary Platform which is well worth reading: I’ve spilled much ink, and darkened many pixels describing the community dimension of Cursor, but I’ve had relatively little to say about its publishing dimension, in particular as it relates to established writers and the traditional publishing infrastructure. I have mentioned that we would be doing some classic indie publishing,...

While it is true that C-Span is not a “book”, it is a living repository of history. Over 160,000 hours of video footage of our government at work, spanning 23 years of network history. And C-Span has now made all of that footage available for free, at C-SpanVideo.org. This is every bit as valuable a resource as the Internet Archive—and searchable, too. Including on e-book related matters. For instance, searching on “Digital Rights Management” brought up a number of results, including this clip of Soft Skull Books founder and Cursor developer Richard Nash (who we covered...