Loudpoet has an interview with former Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash about his new social publishing venture Cursor. ““Social” is taking the book and making it much easier to have a conversation with the book and its writer, and have conversations around the book and its writer.” Is this a way forward for beleaguered publishers? (via The Lone Gunman)
Is Social Publishing the Future?
Where Are You, Mr. Watterson?
This month the Cleveland International Film Festival will show Dear Mr. Watterson, a film exploring “how … a simple comic strip became so meaningful to such a massive and diverse group of people.” Yet despite the subject matter, the actual author of the Calvin and Hobbes series will almost certainly be absent from the screenings. Over at Full Stop, Liv Combe looks at the ways Bill Watterson is “keeping the idea of the private public figure alive.”
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The Cool Kids
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Before “Once Upon A Time”
George Dobbs explores the history of some common cliches for The Airship and makes an elegant argument for being aware of overused phrasing: “The worst fiction might never go beyond widely used tropes, but the best fiction starts with an awareness of them.” We agree, and also hope never to read “It was a dark and stormy night…” again.
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Nash appeared on a panel titled “The Future of the Book” at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend, 2009. The other two panelists were former Atlanta Journal-Constitution book section editor Teresa Weaver and University of Georgia Press sales and marketing director John McLeod. He was the only one to discuss new options for internet book marketing, and received the most questions from the audience. Will enough people pay to make social writing clubs viable? What will he charge and how many subscribers will it take to make it worthwhile? Will his business model then be adopted by other now-free sites (folks like Max)? Could Nash be the internet equivalent of the guy who invented barbed wire (and tamed the wild west)? At the time he was still wooing investors (he told the audience). (Photos of panel here: http://tiny.cc/H3c4S or search http://www.flickr.com/groups/dbf09/).