Richard Nash Pushes Social Publishing

Richard Eoin Nash, former publisher at Soft Skull Press–home to work from Lynne Tillman, David Ohle, Lydia Millet, and  Matthew Sharpe–answers questions about Cursor, his portfolio of niche social publishing communities, on Guy LeCharles Gonzalez’s media marketing blog.

So, what is social publishing, anyway? “For the reader-as-reader, what ‘social’ means is that there’s going to be more information about books, more scope to interact with the books (your own commenting & annotating and reading others’), more scope to interact with the author, more scope to interact with one another,” says Nash. “‘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.”

When Nash left Soft Skull in March, he had big plans for the future of publishing. “I really want to be engaged in helping figure out a new model for independents. And I am enormously optimistic.”