Richard Nash: Publishers as partners, not gatekeepers

BookExpo America’s trade show officially kicks off today, but the annual industry gathering is already well underway. At one of the preliminary seminars on Thursday, indie publishing veteran Richard Nash, formerly the publisher of Soft Skull Press, unveiled the concept behind his latest venture, which he is putting together with Dedi Felmen, a former senior editor with Simon & Schuster. Drawing on social networking technology, Round Table promises to blur the line between writer and reader and will change the role of the publisher from that of a cultural gatekeeper to a partner on equal footing, Nash says.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

[U]sing a subscription system, Round Table will bring to the social networking platform not just finished content, but many aspects of the publishing process – including, for authors open to the idea, peer editing. The idea is that feedback and crowd-sourcing can dramatically enrich the editing, authoring and reading process for all involved – not to mention expose potential talent among members of the community…

Bookmarks: Meet Soft Skull Press’ new editorial director, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• “I’m just an old school punk rock girl with a love of smart thinking, good writing, and culture both highbrow and gutter low,” says Denise Oswald, the new editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Phew, that’s a relief.
• The 10th annual Anarchist Bookfair takes place in Montreal this weekend.
• CNQ previews its new website, which is set to debut with the litmag’s summer issue at the end of the month.
• Authors can start publishing their blogs on the Kindle – the only catch is that Amazon sets the subscription rate and pockets most of the revenue.
• What you don’t know about Nielsen BookScan can hurt you. (Via @BookNet_Canada)

Economy down; Soft Skull’s sales up

It may be counterintuitive, but in an interview with Scott Esposito, Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash says that his company’s sales were actually up last year, despite the persistence and scope of the global recession. The small American press made “a hair short of a million net” in 2008, which Nash calls “a great year.”

Calling the book “the most robust and fine-tuned of the anolog technologies,” Nash claims that people are only now seeing the effect of changes in the way the medium is consumed. According to Nash, the shift in consumer spending patterns is not so much a bellwether of doom as an opportunity for innovation:

And the impact is currently less on the industry itself; it’s more that the cumulative effect of the changes from other industries, chiefly the amount of content consumed online, is drawing people away from the printed book format. The shift can be cause for gloom if you’re of the handwringing temperament, but it is far more an opportunity to rid the publishing business of a lot of cant and laziness and arrogance.

When printing goes wrong

It’s a tale of production specs and hurt feelings. Megan Kelso put together Scheherazade, an anthology of female cartoonists for the New York City indie Soft Skull Press (which, though it’s a propos of nothing here, is a company known for being Canuck author-friendly). Once she saw the final copies, she was horrified at the printing job and is now essentially disowning the project. “This is not a matter of the artwork looking too dark or too light or less than perfect,” Kelso writes in an online posting. “The affected stories have lost all their gray shading, background detail, and in some cases, faces and text are unreadable. Readers know that in comics, images and text are equal partners; comics need clear images as much as words to be understood.” Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash has prepared a long (very long) response, which may be of interest to the production types among our readers, who will readily empathize with woeful sagas of back-and-forthing with printers and creators. (Thanks to Bookslut.com for the links.)

Related links:
Megan Kelso’s posting on Scheharazade
Download a PDF of Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash’s response