Richard Eoin Nash

A talking head, I am… A 10-year retrospective, of a sort…

The good folks at Booknet Canada are doing a conference in March Calculated Risk: Adventures in Book Publishing and, for their sins, are inviting me up to do a keynote. But since that’s not expiation enough, they did an interview with me for their BNCTV.

One sign of a good interview is when the interviewee learns at least as much as the interviewer and I was lucky enough to have exactly that experience at the hands of Morgan Cowie. I’d fun doing this, and check out the second frame for a completely different and rather hilarious cut of the interview by Mark Bertils.

And this is Mark’s remix. Thank God he didn’t make me seem like I was trying to rap, or some such.

Richard Eoin Nash, Jan 09, 2010

My Lunch with Richard

I’d a lovely lunch late last month with George Gibson, Publisher at Bloomsbury USA, a man generous with galleys and reading copies. And I, missing the daily activity of scheming how to connect a given book with the right readers, can be a little over-generous, ie maybe a wee bit loquacious, excessively unstinting with suggestions about what reviewer might like it, what bookseller handsell it, what institution host an event, etc etc.

That day George was the unwitting beneficiary of me in full here’s-another-thing-you-could-do! effect. He’d brought along a galley of Wild Romance: A Victorian Story of a Marriage, A Trial, and a Self-Made Woman by Chloe Schama (no prizes for guessing Dad’s first name…), a love-gone-awry story, a courtroom drama (her husband denied they’d ever been married and she had to sue him to prove he was her husband) and adventuress’s tale, I thought it’d be great to send galleys to such denizens of genre romance like Sarah and Candy, Jane Litte, Kassia Kroszer, and so forth. And on I went, with solicited and unsolicited advice.

George, at the end of the lunch, graciously noted that his notes on our lunch could be rather useful, both for that book (I’d also suggested Erica Jong as a blurber) and for a few others we’d discussed. In turn, his advice to me was to start charging for such a lunch! I thereupon realized that yes, in terms of my time, and other people’s money, the best, most cost-effective consulting I could do would be ninety minutes over lunch with a publisher, or editor, or publicist, or agent to talk about a few books and offer some marketing tips. He suggested the sum of $250, which sounded reasonable to me.

So I hereby announce this as the primary mode of consultation I shall do from this point forth! Called My Lunch with Richard, after the movie of almost the same name, it’s a $250, 90 minute consult on topics of your choosing. You pay for lunch, but I swear I’m a cheap date. And it can be over coffee, if lunch ain’t your thing. Over breakfast would be nice, too! And over the phone or Skype if New York ain’t your place.

A way I can be useful and pay the rent as I get Cursor started-up, eh?

Richard Eoin Nash, Dec 12, 2009

Just when I thought publishing couldn’t get any worse…

This morning I got furious about a bit of news, and began to compose a rant so screedalicious I realized I should finally avail of the opportunity proffered me by Amy Hertz at the Huffington Post and write for them. Below, in the interests of those who kindly have me in their RSS feed, is the item in question, cross-posted.

This morning Book Expo America, the largest book convention in the US, and one of the largest in the world, announced that they’d dropped plans to have the exhibits open on Tuesday, the day before the convention opens. (Already the convention had been changed from its customary Friday-Sunday, to a late Tuesday-Thursday schedule, to accommodate publishers’ desire for reduced costs.) The idea was that the floor would be open for a couple hours in the late afternoon-early evening, allowing for an opening night party as is done at the French book fair, the Salon du Livre, and at the American Library Association’s Annual Convention. An opportunity to party, invite media, booksellers, authors, to hang out, have a keg at one booth, cheap wine at another, have a Stormtrooper mix you a cocktail at at third. Celebrate books. Create a sense of occasion, of event.

Nope. Not in publishing. Don’t want to have to rush erecting our foamcore cover mock-ups.

As I confess in this article I wrote for Publishers Weekly the final day of BEA 2009, I’m on the show’s Advisory Committee. I and others have been crying out not just for a party but for at least one day of the show to be open to the public. Witness the remarkable success of events like the LA Times Festival of Books (140,000 attending), the Decatur Book Festival (70,000 attending after only five years in existence), the Brooklyn Book Festival, to name some outdoor events, and New York Comicon, organized by the same folks that organize BEA, but with exhibitors who actually care about the fans, 70,000 of whom show up. (And that’s the me-too Con, not the original Comicon in San Diego!).

Books was once a business where publishers sold to booksellers, and booksellers sold to readers. So BEA was an event where publishers sold to booksellers. But with the chains not needing an event to meet everyone, since everyone beats a path to their door, and with the explosion in the number of books available means that publishers need to motivate readers to read their books, and not take for granted they’ll walk into bookstores and buy, the event needs to be about exciting readers/customers, not hustling the retailers.

But not only are we not getting the public let in for a day, we can’t even be bothered to throw a party for the damn insiders.

Don’t blame the organizers. The decisions get made by the exhibitors that pay for the most square feet at the show. I hate to repeat myself, quoting my own self, but I’m being forced to do so by the obtuseness of the industry I love.

The publishing business is not in trouble because there’s no demand for books. It is in trouble because there are changes afoot in how best to satisfy the demand, changes to which there are suitable responses, two of which are fostering fan culture and generating a sense of occasion, and the leaders of the largest publishing organizations are failing in their professional responsibility to implement these responses. By reducing their participation in BEA at the same time the media participation has increased by almost 50%, by refusing to open the Fair to the readers on Sunday, these CEOs have effectively thrown in the towel. They are managing the demise of the book business, pointing fingers at any generic social forces they can find, failing to see the one place the responsibility can be found, their own damn offices.

Steve Ross, on this site, beseeched folks to stop taking potshots at publishing industry. Steve, our problem isn’t the folks taking potshots at us, it is us. That pain in our foot? It’s not outsiders stomping on it, it’s us, shooting ourselves.

Richard Eoin Nash, Nov 09, 2009

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I ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. Here's why I left. I'm now consulting on how to reach readers (details here) and developing a start-up called Cursor, a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade. read more »