Sorry for the slow pace of content creation here from the publisher! I've plans to speed up production: rather than wait for the perfect post,  I'm going to write about this process a few days a week no matter how boring i fear the topic might be! Why? Because I find I've learned a lot about building a business from watching writers build their books. So you, as writers and readers, might find this business creation process useful too. Moreover the lesson many writers learn, that when stuck you just have to write no matter what, is a lesson I...

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...

Richard Nash's new experiment has gone live (with cutesy url that will make it hard to find, unfortunately: redlemona.de).  Here is Richard's Avanti! statement (blockquotes omitted): Publishing is saddled with this terrible reputation for being reactionary and Luddite, our denizens known largely for caviling against technology and the new-fangled. It is perverse, truly perverse since publishing is in fact at the center of two major social revolutions that dramatically disrupted the status quo ante. The first, printing, we all know and understand to a degree, but let me remind all concerned, pace Clay Shirky, that printing upended the established religious and political orders...

Galleycat is reporting this after an email interview with Richard Nash, Red Lemonade's founder. ...  Nash explained his unconventional policy: “Well, I don’t think consumer books should have DRM, so putting DRM on reviewers’ books is even dumber. I want to make it as easy as possible to get it to you, as easy as possible for you to read it, as easy as possible for you to assign it to a reviewer, as easy as possible for you to send it to a friend.” More info in the article.  ...

Last year I chose some folks who I though had made 2009 interesting in publishing terms and I believed would do the same in 2010. I think I was broadly right about them. You can see the 2009 list here. For 2010 I’m doing the same. Richard Nash ~ The Risk Taker Nash is moving ahead with Cursor a new type of publishing company based on communities, authors, shorter contracts and generally many of the ideas that have been floating around books for a few years now. He’s fiery, inspiring and willing to take a gamble (and be wrong...

Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation that presents the National Book Awards, discusses this year's winner, a book published by a small independent press, and what that means for the future of publishing. Also, Richard Nash, who ran the New York indie press Soft Skull for almost a decade, weighs in on the rise of independent presses. (function(){var s=function(){__flash__removeCallback=function(i,n){if(i)i[n]=null;};window.setTimeout(s,10);};s();})();...

A Red Lemonade Sampler In a matter of weeks, links like I’m about to offer will be offered on Red Lemonade, but I didn’t want to wait to share these little digital objects with you. Independent publishers with print distribution from companies like PGW, Consortium, IPG, NBN,SCB and from corporate publishers who offer outsourced distribution all create sales kits for the sales reps—little samplers than contain excerpts from the books they’re publishing the next season, combined occasionally with some information about the authors. Incidentally, most presses xerox the materials, but we used Lulu to create an 84pp little paperback. Anyhow, I thought I’d share digital versions...

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...