Another take on what Russ Marshalek, Ami Greko, Ryan Chapman and myself had to say at the Twitter conference…

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In the spirit of keeping things a little livelier on this blog, as my alleged essay-writing evolves, I’m following up on yesterday’s posting of the BEA video with a posting of this morning’s conversation with GalleyCat’s Jason Boog, and AgencySpy’s editor Matt Van Hoven. I could enumerate the topics we covered, but everything really just comes down to price. Pricing, I suspect, is a proxy, or a vehicle we use to be able to have at least the semblance of a conversation about what we need to be doing…

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One of my two speeches at Book Expo America, characterized by one Twitterer as being like Tom Cruise in Magnolia. (Compliment? Not sure…) My most quoted sentence, at least on Twitter, from this seven minutes is “Twitter will not save publishing.”

And, yes, believe me, I know there should be essays galore here, they really are coming, I’ve had all kinds of other writing projects going on with more vigorous deadlines. But that’s what RSS feeds are for, right, laggards like me?

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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…

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I self-identify myself in the title of this post because my personal background likely has more in common with the Amazon employees, however high up, than it does the with authors whose books are affected. As such I’m hereby saying to the ham-fisted error-makers: what happened was really really bad. Here’s why:

Not so long ago, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and queer/questioning individuals had bookstores that functioned effectively as community centers–providing books, videos, bulletin boards, safe spaces, workshops, to the community. However, of the course of the past twenty years “mainstream,” heteronormative capitalism made social contracts with GLBTQ persons. We’ll sell you all that stuff, and we’ll give you discounts, and it’ll be even more convenient, and customer service will be more predictable. We’ll have shelves just for you, we’ll have categories and tags that will allow you to find all the stuff you need. (No, no one signed this contract–like the social contract that made democracy, it’s one you go along with, it’s not handed to you at birth, or on reaching the age of majority.)

Amazon breached that social contract. The breach was no less problematic if it wasn’t entirely intentional, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s excellent post makes clear (and boy does he have a great commentariat…). Because in a world where whiteness and straightness are “norms” and males benefit from our patriarchal history, it is always the GLBTQ books, the queer books, the non-normative books that get caught in the glitches, the ham-fisted errors.

The onus is on us, as Tim Wise has taught so well on the topic of white privilege. We cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, because it is always us who get the benefit of the doubt in our society, and if we are to take the pink and lavender dollars, and if we are to say, you don’t need A Different Light, or Oscar Wilde Bookstore, we’ll hook you up just fine, then we can never let this happen. I learned this as a straight white male publisher of queer books, it was why I took care to try to find staff who are gay or trans, to catch my complacency, my temptation to think I deserved the benefit of the doubt.

I didn’t, nor does Amazon. The vigilance and outrage demonstrated on Twitter are necessary, not because the folks at Amazon are bad people, but because the books that were de-ranked were de-ranked because it is always the outsider whose books get de-ranked and “mainstream” society and the capitalist institutions that operate within it, whether my old company or Amazon, must self-police ruthlessly in order to guard against this kind of thing happening.

They didn’t, hence #AmazonFail.

In effect: guilty until proven innocent is the standard to which we must hold ourselves. Because that’s how the other half lives, without any choice in the matter.

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This is a short one, I might have even left it as a tweet, were it not for the pseudo-series I got going here. The upshot is that Jay Rosen, whose field this really is, has provided a superb summary of post-Shirkian thinking, emphasis on the more front-facing stuff. I do still need to do one last post on Shirkian thought in relation to books, which I’m likely to combine with one on the Steven Johnson SXSWi speech. (And just so’s you all know, I am, in the background, working on a by-my-standards-at-least epic series on supply, demand, and pricing since 1950. I shirk not…)

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