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July 17, 2009
Richard Eoin Nash and the Text Entire
There is no one out there working harder to rethink publishing than is Richard Eoin Nash. His willingness to take that thinking to places where conglomerated publishers are completely incapable of treading is, I think, a challenge and a gift to the industry. And I think it likely that his assertions will prove a force in developing the Next Synthesis that publishing will be.
Most thinking on the industry begins with the publisher (corporate bottom line) or with the delivery stream (ebooks, POD, DRM). Where Nash begins, it seems, is with the reader. (I, myself, am inclined to begin with the author—but more on that later.)
I wholly agree with Nash that what is currently for-profit publishing cannot be saved. (I know I’m nuancing his assertion there, but I hope not misrepresenting it.) Certainly there’s nothing to argue with in his statement that we need new business models to “offer services that both readers and writers want and are happy to pay for.”
And it’s refreshing to hear Nash use “democratization” positively after those months when the mainstream media was shamelessly attacking bloggers and citizen journalists by arguing that one must earn the right to publish an opinion.
The direct challenge that is the thinking of Richard Nash will surely move us forward—even though the corporate publishers have yet to acknowledge fully the need for new models (other, of course, than in their aggressive downsizing).
The industry’s focusing on finding the right means of delivering books electronically is, I fear, little more than fiddling while readers are developing their own, non-msm-driven networks—that is, while readers are independently making their own reading selections. (Note: Mainstream content delivery is by nature averse to readers’ independence.) Last year’s continuous assertions by corporate editors and superagents that the Brand Author is more important now than ever were simply denials that the market for novels has already fragmented, denials that the readers are now beyond their control. Those corners of the book community that continue to attend only to what corporate publishing is pushing (and I don’t think I should name names here) are turning their backs on the readers—turning their backs on the people with whom Nash is telling us, the next synthesis begins.
Quite rightly, the online community is already lauding Nash for where he’s pushing the conversation. I mean to do the same here.
But what I’d like to focus on while we’re moving toward those services that readers and writers want and will value is what I believe to be the core of the matter. I want us not to forget the author and not to forget the text—what I’ve called the Text Entire. In future posts, I’d like to examine what the thing is that we’ve called a book and what wholeness is in the reading experience—that is, I’d like us to examine once again the value of content.
Fred Ramey works in Colorado as Co-Publisher of Unbridled Books.
Posted in: Publishers Blog, News/Press, | Keywords: fred ramey, future of publishing, newspress, publisher's blog, publishers blog, richard eoin nash
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Comments
Fred,
Exactly right! After all is said and done, content is what matters.
and hello…hope all is going well. I think the new website is REALLY nice.
Posted by Laural Bidwell 07/23 08:44 AM
Fred, thanks SO much! I am very much looking forward to reading forward. You rightly infer my focus on the reader as a corrective to the status quo ante, not as an absolute. And a good deal of my thinking in the area of literary fiction broadly construed has to do with the fact of the reader-as-writer. How do we better engage with the slush, in effect! And if there is anything that the reader-as-writer is dying for, it is a soupcon of attention as a writer.
In my vision of a social publishing community/imprint, I see the need for two people in each, one an Editor, writer-tilted, text-tilted, the other an Advocate, reader-tilted. The former more intimate, the latter more extroverted. Also not an absolute, of course! I can also imagine the different communities will have different temperaments, stylistic tilts, and I can picture Unbridled as having an exceptionally high, perhaps unsurpassable level of writer-facing warmth, that certain writers, readers, and reader-writers will be draw into…
Posted by Richard Nash 07/27 03:47 PM
Thanks for commenting, Richard.
From your fingertips to G-d’s eyeball.
Suddenly, your comment brought the cover of Barthes’s S/Z to mind, showing just how long I’ve been walking in these circles. (I’ll try to resist such references in the future.)
Where publishing conglomerates in the past 20 years have marshalled an undifferentiated mass of readers toward a series of brand names, current technologies require that surviving publishers engage complete, intra-communicating communities. We’re working hard to do that here and I see that this will be the very reason for Cursor (great name, by the way).
What I want to assert—have been asserting; will do some more—is that in each development of community and technology, we’ll need to consider Why writers write and what within the delivery system is essential to their doing so.
Posted by Fred Ramey 07/28 09:12 AM
Nice info on Richard Eoin Nash and it’s publishing and gifts info. Actually i was searching for Diwali corporate gifts and shopping info, but i found your post and got nice info. Thanks for sharing really very nice info.
Posted by Diwali Gifts to India 08/22 04:51 AM
This is a good blog but drifts into a philosophy of the issue just like my comment does rather than the direction book publishing will eventually take. Recent new technology can scan manuscripts, out of print work and publish any author
Posted by Robert 'Bob' Gordon 08/22 10:07 AM