Topic: Pontification

February 2010

In the Internet, No-one Knows You’re a Gay, Knitting Dog, and other things I guess I meant to say…

PS. By way of clarification, as some were confused, “On the internet no-one knows you’re a gay knitting dog” alludes to this iconic New Yorker cartoon from 1993 http://bit.ly/bManci

Richard Eoin Nash, Feb 25, 2010

January 2010

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

December 2009

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

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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 »