Future-Proofing the Printed Word: A Q+A with Richard Nash

Richard Nash, the publisher, answered the door of his apartment in Clinton Hill carrying a big cardboard box filled with paperback books.

"You know," he said, holding the door open for me with his foot, "I don't think most tech start-ups also have to worry about running a traditional fucking publishing company."

Nash, the founder of independent publisher Soft Skull, is fowl-mouthed, ambitious, and could talk for hours about the history of the printing press.

Red Lemonade, the first publishing imprint of Nash's new start-up Cursor, is like an online creative writing workshop mixed with a publishing house. Once you become a member, you not only get to read the authors being published by Red Lemonade—the excellent Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman is available now and is highly recommended—but also upload your own manuscripts to be read by other members and, hopefully, find yourself published.

Books will be available in a variety of formats, from cheap digital downloads, to more expensive limited print editions. It's a way of connecting writers who need readers with readers looking for writing outside of the basic framework of corporate publishing.

The site is young—it had its soft launch in beta last week—and even Nash isn't exactly sure where it will go next, but that's what he's most excited about. After a week of scheduling and rescheduling, I caught up with Nash at his home in Clinton Hill to talk about jumping into a tech start-up, the institutional racket of MFA programs and book publishing as revolution.

Motherboard: Could you say something about leaving Soft Skull?
There were two reasons. The negative reason is that the owners of Soft Skull were living in the past. Really badly in the past. Like, corporate publishers were way ahead of them.

How so?
Corporate publishers basically realized that they had to get customers into bookstores. Whereas the people who bought Soft Skull fundamentally conceived of themselves as being in the bookseller supply business: your job is to get books in bookstores and send out some review copies and that's it. Move on to the next one. There's no effort to galvanize the reader. They were hammer manufactures supplying hardware stores. And they weren't out there advertising how their hammer is an amazing hammer and you should go to the hardware stores and buy that hammer. So I had to leave.

But there was also a positive reason, which was it's very hard to build something completely new when you've got something to lose. You have to kind of burn the boats, as they say. I realized I'd have to burn the boats, which is not to say that I didn't think boats are useful—or even wooden boats are useful—'cause there I am carrying that big box of books downstairs that are review copies, that are print. So with Cursor, you see the historical power of print culture, and you also see the interactive and cheap communication based on the web.

How did the tech element become a part of this?
Even though I was in my little publishing world, I had all these friends in common with these people on the front lines of 2.0 everything. But I realized what interesting lives they had. It reminded me of why I originally came to New York in the early 90's. I wanted to be an avant-garde theater director.

I read all about Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson and Einstein on the Beach and Meredith Monk and all the overlapping that went on in that world with dance and music—John Cage and Merce Cunningham—and going to parties with poets and going to the Factory and Soho and the East Village and all this shit. It was mad exciting.

But I came to New York in '93 and that was over. It was utterly done [laughs]. So we weren't going to parties and smoking pot with the studio assistant for David Salle or any of that stuff that we imagined was going on in the ’80's. But what I began to sense is that kind of ferment that was going on amongst tech people reminded me—it was not as debauched—of that same kind of cross-fertilization. So the theory I have is that the internet, imperfectly, is the cheap real estate that made all that possible in the ’70's and ’80's.

I know it's early, but in your mind, how do you intend on balancing the traditional publishing aspect of this with the—
The webby, techy va va voom? Yeah. I have this gut feeling that the digital aspect of consumption, the sort of everybody's gonna stop reading books and start reading on the screen, is kind of overblown. To kind of immediately answer your question, I think that it's easier than it looks to reconcile these things. Now I'm going to throw out some slightly nittier grittier explanations.

One is historical: people underestimate how revolutionary book publishing has been. In part because it is so reactionary and fearful now. It's just that there was a moment a few years ago when most people in publishing said, "we don't care if they read a physical book or they read on screen, so long as they pay us $10-$15 for it." [laughs] The second corporate publishers started to embrace digital downloads, I realized the digital download isn't what counts.

That seems to be the easiest solution to the crisis of publishing: ‘We'll go digital.’
Right. So all these vendors throwing enhanced e-book applications at us. In my mind it's just an extension of web design. But publishing's history is revolutionary. The printing press blew a lot of shit up. It blew up religion, it blew up science, it was a big part of what allowed democracy to really take hold, it was a big part of allowing the transmission of thought from other eras—Greek and Roman and Arabic thought—to really penetrate.

The printing press would change the circumstances incrementally, and then that incremental change would be the platform to allow the next change. The biggest thing the printing press was used for early on was not printing the bible, but printing indulgences! It basically triggered the reformation. If you compare radio and television, they did not change the world at a political or religious level. The establishment co-opted television. They couldn't co-opt the book. What we don't know yet is if the internet is going to be that disruptive.

The second revolution, and people talk about this a lot less, is the bookstore was the first retail environment where the thing to be bought was available on shelves for the customer to touch and look at. Up until then there was a storeroom in the back and you went up to a counter and asked them to give something to you and you handed them money.

But bookstores were the first people to say, "Check this stuff out for yourself." Which is really the beginning of consumer capitalism—which, as with any revolution, has brought with it a whole bunch of shyte. But also a whole bunch of really good stuff. In book publishing you want the fewest number of individual books and the most number of people buying that fewest number. So the publishing business is trying to keep away as much content as possible. And that chokehold is the thing that's gone. That's what the internet has killed. It's not about what format people are reading in.

It seems most independent publishers have latched on to print-on-demand models. I don't believe that's viable at all for corporate publishers, but it seems to be the more thoughtful solution then let's kill print and make everything digital. Giving someone a choice in the matter.
It absolutely has to be a choice. I remember seeing one site that was supposed to be a writing community in the UK called Completely Novel. Its homepage had two big buttons: ‘Are you a writer?’ ‘Are you a reader?’ There's a great rift in the industrial revolution that turns people into one or the other. People aren't. We sat around the fireside and told each other stories. Some are better than others, so some people monopolized the fireside time. But reading and writing are activities that provoke one another.

The Industrial Revolution told people that 99.95-percent of you are no longer writers; you are consumers of the writing we have selected. What's critical about Cursor is that we put humpty dumpty back together again. We restore this Edenic, prelapsarian state where everyone was a writer and reader and no one had the shame of believing they weren't worthy to be published.

So how does one accomplish such a thing?
To me, it's about creating ways to satisfy all the different relationships between a given writer and all her potential readers at any given moment. A person in their role as reader and a person in their role as writer, they have a demand curve.

Traditionally, we have basically just told people who want to engage with a writer, ‘Buy this trade paperback for $15.’ And everybody that doesn't want to pay $15 gets sweet fuck all. So what I want to do is what we see happening in the music industry—lots of different ways to productize that relationship. At the bottom it's $2.99 digital downloads of a book. At the top, it can vary from writer to writer, but we already know in the world of fiction and creative writing what the top is: a number that's around $60,000, which is the cost of an MFA.

That is a reader and his relationship to a writer. So Lynne Tillman [a writer-in-residence at SUNY Albany]. I mean, I don't know what an MFA at Albany costs, but it's probably $35,000 over two years. So there is someone paying $35,000 for Lynne Tillman. And the publishing industry just handed that all over to the universities. And universities see MFA programs as profit centers.

MFA's pay for fucking electron microscopes in the science labs. Often times they're just selling access. What do students really want? They want the professors. They want them writing blurbs and access to their agent and their publisher, none of which is specific to the university. So what I hope to have eventually is [Red Lemonade author] Vanessa Veselka and Lynne teaching a couple of online classes, where we split the money with them.

How do you see that working exactly?

We'll find out.