Jewcy interviews publishing maven Richard Nash.
From the piece...
Navigating the etiquette of the book business is especially difficult. I’d imagine your perspective on this is quite unique.
What I learned at Soft Skull was that we were stewards of the community. That there was a Soft Skull community as it were. That there was a bunch of people out there that could tag themselves, amongst other tags, with the phrase “Soft Skull” and we existed to serve them. They were writers and readers, very often one and the same thing.
A friend of mine, Peggy Nelson, recently pointed out, writers and readers are behaviors, not different people. When we would get a submission, it would have a cover letter and the cover letter would describe the books we’d published that the person had read. I’m proud of a lot what we did, and I’m grateful that you perceived the important things of what we did because you just described them, but they weren’t nearly enough. I mean, they were enough maybe at the time but they’re not nearly enough now.
What we did was this: we had one or two interns look at them [manuscripts] and if they both liked it, me or someone else would somehow try to find the time to read them, which as the years went by it got harder and harder to even do that. So typically they were just rejected and this person who’d bought five of our books and had spent three years of their life writing this manuscript basically had it sent back to them with a dagger through its heart and we were forgiven. To some degree I think we deserved forgiveness but to some degree, I don’t think we did. Or certainly we are no longer as entitled to that forgiveness as we maybe once might have been.
When digital publishing first happened, by that I mean digital distribution and consumption, it permits sort of production, that was the digital production revolution and to some degree you could call the web the digital promotion revolution. So it allowed you to create a book and then the next bit, printing the book was analogue, distributing the book was analogue, buying the book was mostly analogue, getting people interested in the book was starting to become digital. So, the middle bit, the printing distribution and retail, when that was first started to look like it was becoming digital that was 1999, 2000, 2001, I was first starting to get involved with Soft Skull. At that point, I was like, “Holy shit, this could change everything. Because the corporate publishers are able to get book printed much more cheaply than us, but a PDF costs them the same as it costs us. This could be amazing.” Now that was sort of true. Now, it’s certainly true because of e-pub files and Kindles and that sort of thing, there is actually demand for this stuff. But, I was so used to thinking of myself at the bottom of the ladder, that I didn’t’ really realize that the ladder extended way beyond me in the other direction, to all the writers in the world that me and the rest of us were saying no to, these tools could work just as well for them as they could work for us. Those tools I think, only have so much utility. You can now build it, but will they come? So, a lot more people are building stuff.
It’s not just because of technology, our whole society has become relatively less, sexist racist, classist, and has so dramatically opened access to third level education and given far more people the social intellectual and cultural capital, required to construct a long form narrative, that it’s increased the possibility for the number of books to be created. Then there’s technology unrelated directly to books, but the technology that allows people to record songs and video, that allows them to blog. That I think has increased people sense of possibility, that “I too may express myself, I need not be a passive consumer.” All those have resulted in people feeling like they can and should be able to write and reach some kind of an audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment