Richard Eoin Nash

articles

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

• futureisnow
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• startup
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• cursor
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• socialpublishing

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Discuss this article.

An [url=“http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/books/a-book-is-a-place/2009/07/23/1247942011314.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2”]

earlier experiment,[/url] which bodes well.

Cheers

    – MF (07/28 05:07 PM)

http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=420&mode=one

In a nutshell, I think the social media component is so exciting because it is so easy, but it is only a small component of the future of the book.  A book is a powerful thing because it is an object that contains a new world.  If books can’t contain the borders of these new worlds anymore, than we need new objects capable of containing new dimensions.

    – Miracle Jones (07/29 07:38 AM)

I’ve been watching and examining both trad. publishing, indie/alt as well as the e-sphere to get a handle on “whence from here?” Like many unpublished writers, it has been very easy to get disheartened by two major confluences: Trad. Publishing’s increasing aversion to risk of any kind in the face of falling sales, and the increasing pressure for more open access, more ease in self-publishing, more e-networking.

I may be flawed in my thinking, but there is a missing component here: improved book promotion to encourage variety and innovation in the product.

Writers are usually the last group who would classify what they do as production of product, but given the response of the publishing world to economic pressure, it has become clear, that Product has superceded Art as the focus of energy. What’s more, quality as a component of the product has been pushed down the sales points list. What has emerged is margin above all else.

Add to that the increasing activity online, in various forms, to e-net the work of both published and unpublished writers. Having myself been engaged in two mainstream online writers’ forums, I’ve been able to see the direction that acceptance in an online forum is moving the art of novel writing.

The sheer volume—increasing daily—of new voices emerging online, is beginning to show signs of overload already.  One of the signposts of market-saturation in the production of, say consumer goods, is that eventually, a niche’s products all look and perform exactly the same. All good, nobody different—free choice for the consumer! Rah! Rah!

I’m already seeing a lot of similarity in the prose of new voices that are ascending within their e-spheres, as well as a bit of antagonism—veiled in the guise of “education” or “guidance”—turned towards writers whose work is not as easy to pigeon-hole into a mainstream genre, or who use punctuation marks. The same holds for writers whose prose is truly unique, edgy or raw.

For example, I’m not sure that a book like Tom Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon would find a readership online at all. The physical constraints placed upon readers reading from a monitor screen, I believe are such that work that requires time to read, is too difficult to read online.  Possibly the new personal reader devices will improve on that, but it seems that a jump to e-books is more like abandoning the bound book for for a return to the scroll!

In a world that seems to be heading towards a homogenized future, I fear that unless publishers of all kinds rediscover their “huevos”, we may be headed towards the end of interesting reading.  That would hold no joy for folks like me, of the over-50, “paper” generation.

    – Richard Sutton (08/17 01:34 PM)

Amazing how the underground Press of 2009
wants to migrate everthing to a Department
of Defense computer network named The Internet?

You sound like one of the hucksters in Hal Hartley’s
classic film, “Henry Fool”.

There’s a scene in that filme where one of the hucksters
tells the Book Publisher CEO,
that he needs to stop publishing books because the
Digital Age of the internet is at hand.

The CEO replies, “So you want me to stop publishing
books…” 
I guess it is only appropriate that in 2009 we now
have not only the re-distribution of wealth under Obama, but also
this entitlement-thinking brought to a whole new level.

I want *everthing* for free! All movies, music, books,
magazines, newspapers, housing, health care, food,
education, transportation….

Socialism doesn’t create wealth- it creates poverty. Study
Central America.  The internet doesn’t create wealth, it
strips it from us.  Look at the economy, silly.

You won’t find the true underground press on the internet.
A small business owner once asked a “consultant”:

“Should I put my business on the internet?”

The reply was:

“Absolutely not!”

    – Royal Raymond Rife (10/05 11:03 AM)

Hey, Richard!

This sounds very compelling. Any movement on it?

I would be interested in trying it out on my new book as I’ve decided to either self-publish digitally or just leave it to collect dust on my shelf.

I simply want my work to get out there and have grown tired of the rigmarole of standard publishing - your proposal sounds very interesting.

Hope you’re well…

    – Brian Gage (10/22 04:55 AM)

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