Richard Eoin Nash

Amanda Palmer wants human connection

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Typically I reserve this space for proper-ish essays. And my tumblr for quotes too long for Twitter. But I just have to quote this, an email from Amanda Palmer to Bob Lefsetz. Almost needless to say, what Amanda says for music, I believe to be true for writing also.

Amanda Palmer:

the new art of twitter and blogging and realtime connection with hundreds and thousands of people means that the very role and meaning of the rock star is changing.

watch it happen.

i started making the music in the first place not because i wanted music, but because i wanted human connection.
music was the bridge there.

(it took me a long time to admit this to myself, because i felt guilty and like a naughty/bad/inauthentic artist when i truly discovered this, in my mid-twenties, classic crisis time).

BUT this is, hands fucking down, also why people listen, why they search, why they want art.

connection = primary.
music/art = secondary.

yes, you need a filter (like you’re often saying) to FIND the music you love and connect to (and that filter has evolved and will continue to evolve….radio-vinyl-MTV-blogs and on and on)
BUT
the music ITSELF is a filter to connect to another human expressing mind/heart that blows your skirt up and makes you feel alive, not alone, etc etc what have you.

so in a weird way, music may take the backseat and act as a filter to those you follow on twitter….not the other way around.
fucked up, but maybe not.

it’s a symbiosis. one will need the other, but don’t discount the realtime human connection as only a tool.
it is and it’s not.
for many people, it’s the thing that they NEED and WANT, the holy grail of Not Feeling Alone in a world where that used to be JUST A FANTASY as you lay in bed with your headphones on, imagining a connection with the artist and the other people who might be out there in beds just like yours, imagining the same thing.

the music simply provides the necessary room in which the miraculous happens and all these bed-worlds collide in cyberspace.

there is a reason that i often find myself wanting to sit behind twitter and connect instead of sitting at the piano and writing.
there is a reason that the fans on there would often rather be connecting than lying in bed with their headphones on.

we do both. we need both.

twitter = realtime connection.
at the very end of the day, humans crave realtime connection.

that is Why It Works.

twitter.com/amandapalmer
amandapalmer.net

Richard Eoin Nash, Aug 18, 2009

The End of Indie

I awoke in the middle of the night last night and checked email and Twitter around 4am (they say when you can’t sleep, it’s best to get up, and tire yourself out, before returning to bed). A Twitter follow announcement came in from Kaya Oakes, with whom I had been trying to scheduling an interview off and on in 2007 and 2008—I felt a pang of guilt as I checked out her tweets and saw that the book, for which the interview was to be conducted, was done. Finished, published. Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture is more or less what the subtitle say it is. I’ll spare you the appalling copy from the publisher, which manages to be both glib and patronizing, and give you a little of Publishers Weekly’s description:

“[A] lively and highly literate explication of various American indie scenes and art forms . . . [Oakes’] focus on independent publishing and writing—provides a worthy parallel narrative to Michael Azzerad’s essential indie music history, [Our]Band Could Be Your Life . . . Oakes begins the book with a much appreciated primer on some of the intellectual forebears of her book’s central characters, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the revolutionary street theater group the Diggers. As an explanation and excavation of the already fading recent past, it is essential reading.”—_Publishers Weekly_

I was momentarily rather bummed that I’d missed out on a chance to discuss the topic with Kaya when it dawned on me that I’d have had nothing very useful to say eighteen months ago. All is changed, changed utterly. Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won. We won, but at the cost to many folks personally of suddenly becoming unnecessary. This was most visible in the last few years in the magazines like Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, Clamor. But it’ll come for us all.

You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly replicate the indie production process—how could they seize the means of production? They already had it! And now the means of production has devolved yet farther down, past the indie publishers and indie record labels and pirate radio stations of yore.

This is not to say we’ve entered Nirvana. Just because we’d seized the means of production in the 1990’s didn’t mean that poverty had been eradicated, racism ended, and the intellectual property land grab thwarted. We all have to use the tools we’ve been given, find value in, rather than discard, the tools of the past, hold feet to the fire, undermine monopoly, and so on. All things we tried to do with the means of production we seized in the 90’s, we have to continue do with the means of production that technology has handed to us in the 21st century. Moore’s Law is value-neutral, apolitical, amoral, just like Gutenberg’s press. Its how we use it.

So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?—Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them.

Richard Eoin Nash, Aug 10, 2009

My start-up: Cursor

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an editorial for Publishing Perspectives and got a rather dynamic response, including small group of commenters who were particularly exercised that I had not offered guidance on how to move forward.

In this week’s Publishers Weekly cover story, I offer exactly that guidance, although I couldn’t help but include some anecdote and sundry color. The article describes what I want to do, why I want to do it, and how I came to it. It’s not yet the perfect business model for the writing-and-reading community but it is I believe the right place to start, and critically it is designed to have powerful feedback loops, so whatever we’ll get wrong, we’ll be able to fix.

If you’d like to be a part of it, let me know. Here’s an excerpt from the Publishers Weekly piece.

Cursor…represents a new, “social” approach to publishing. To call [it] “niche” or another “independent” publishing enterprise would be a poor approximation, because those terms fail to capture the organic gurgle of culture at the heart of the venture, the exchange of insight and opinion, the flow of memes and the creation of culture in real time that is now enabled by the Internet.

My business plan is now out with investors—I will spare you the P&L numbers and just offer the broad strokes. Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities. To start, this includes Red Lemonade, a pop-lit-alt-cult operation, and charmQuark, a sci-fi/fantasy community.

The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Other revenue opportunities include the provision of electronic distribution services to other publishers; fee-based or revenue-share software modules, especially for online writing workshops or seminars for publishers, literary journals, teaching programs; fee-based linking of writers to suppliers of publishing services, including traditional publishers and agents; corporate sponsorships and site advertising; and events and speaking fees. Yes, I envisage Cursor obtaining a larger basket of rights than is the industry standard, but that will be in exchange for shorter exclusive licensing periods. Our contracts will be limited to three-year terms with an option to renew.

The Cursor business model seeks to unite all the various existing revenues in the writing-reading ecosystem, from offering services to aspiring writers far more cheaply than most vendors to finding more ways to get more money to authors faster. It also will create highly sensitive feedback loops that will tell each community’s staff what tools and features users want, what books users think the imprint should be publishing, how the imprint could publish better.

Cursor is not designed to “save publishing,” but simply to offer the kind of services that readers and writers, established and emerging, want and the Internet enables. I believe especially strongly that the model must be viable in a world where the effective price of digital content falls to zero, and paper becomes like vinyl records or fine art prints. After all, the world is littered with things that people won’t buy at the prices their producers want to charge—like, say, the contents of remainder bins.

If recent experience is any guide, there is little reason for me to think that people, given so many other options for their leisure time, especially in the wired world, will continue to give up hours and dollars for the sake of our industry, any more than they will for big cars or daily newspapers. We are going to have to find new ways to earn those hours and dollars, and at the prices our readers—and writers—set.

I believe Cursor’s communities are a new way forward.

Richard Eoin Nash, Jul 27, 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 »