A Proxy for a Future Blog Post + Book Expo America Schedule

I’m so very mindful of how remiss I’ve been in blogging–I’m generating lots of material that will wend its way onto this site over the month of June. Basically, for little spasms of thought, see my Twitter feed. And for what will functionally be essays, for the most part, see here, as frequently as I can bang them out.

The delay inheres in my efforts to try to figure out an entire cosmology for an economic ecosystem for writer-reader interactions–the chiefest complexity being that readers write/writers read. I can’t pretend that what I start posting next month will be the answer, or even an answer, but I want it to have some level of internal coherence.

Moreover, because I’ve two presentations at Book Expo America at the end of the week, I’ve focused this month of May on figuring out how to squeeze this research into a one-hour presentation, and a seven minute presentation (both replete with PowerPoint slides, a first for me, and the former in cahoots with my research partner, Dedi Felman…) So, for those of you attending (and I do urge you to go to BEA if you’re in this business–the trade show is the analog analogue, as it were, to the gorgeous social media network on which we’re all wee little nodes, and its anticipated demise is partly the result of our industry’s own benightedness about whom we should be reaching and how…), here’s my two dog & ponies…

The Concierge and the Bouncer: The End of the Supply Chain and the Beginning of the True Book Culture
2:30PM – 3:30PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
Knowing what we now know, about media and content in the digital networked age, and recognizing we may not yet know that much, let”s now ask ourselves: what might the ideal publishing company look like? Had we it to do over again, how would we build a system for connecting writers and readers? Richard Nash gave up his job in order to start to answer those questions and here offers his thoughts so far…
Panelist: Dedi Felman – (formerly) Sr. Editor, Simon & Schuster
Presenter: Richard Nash – (formerly) Publisher, Soft Skull Press

7x20x21 at BEA
Publishing’s most innovate thinkers talk about what inspires them
4:30PM – 5:45PM (Friday, May 29, 2009)
Join us for a most unusual panel: 7 speakers * Each with 7 minutes to talk about anything they like * Accompanied by 20 PowerPoint slides * That move forward automatically every 21 seconds * A unique event designed to inspire conversation, creativity, and passion for the future of publishing. It was born in the UK, where the most recent event at the London Book Fair was presented to a standing-room-only crowd.

Debbie Stier, Harper Studio; Pablo Defendini, Tor.com; Jeff Yamaguchi, Doubleday/Knopf; Matt Supko, ABA/Indiebound; Chris Jackson, Spiegel and Grau; Richard Nash, ex-Soft Skull; Lauren Cerand, independent public relations representative

And for y’all who can’t go, I will post as much stuff as the organizers happen to record, as well as the sequence of essays I’m writing for this blog that underlie these presentations…