Entrepreneur and consultant Richard Nash will give the opening address at the Australian Booksellers Association conference in July. He tells Angela Meyer why he’s passionate about connecting writers with readers in the ever-changing world of publishing.
You’re coming to Australia in July to give the opening address at the ABA conference. Can you share some of the things you’ll be discussing with Australian booksellers?
The key thing is community. While reading is a solitary activity, talking about books is profoundly social. Some of our most intimate social interactions are around books—books, after all, demand most of our minds so they are the most emblematic of our minds. Two people who’ve shared the experience of having a singular voice inside their heads for 15 hours have much more connecting them than two people who laugh at the same five generic sitcom jokes. In the US, Oprah is considered the saviour of books, but I think books were the saviour of Oprah. Her ratings were really just average, but she figured if she could get her core audience reading a book together for three months then she was there with them in their bedroom, during their lunch break, in their heads for all their waking hours. By being their book recommender, she could become their best friend, a status far more powerful than a talkshow host. And if booksellers and publishers and other intermediaries between writer and reader can learn to harness some of that power …
Can you tell us a bit about your background in publishing and what led to your current profession and interests?
I ran a quirky independent publisher called Soft Skull Press—part Scribe, part Text, part Spinifex. We were basically part of the first wave of the digital revolution, the production wave, or the desktop publishing revolution, where what it cost to design and typeset a book collapsed. My time in publishing, which effectively began in 2001, has been one of constant change and I realised in early 2009 that not only would the industry never stabilise, the rate of change was also increasing. And I wanted to be in a position where I could be better oriented.
Why is it important for Australian booksellers to be aware of ‘publishing 3.0’ and can you explain that term a little?
Publishing 3.0 could be called Publishing Ground Zero too. The business of publishing is the business of connecting writers and readers. Full stop. A reader pays a certain amount of money and/or time to the author, and some intermediaries take slices of that money the reader intends to give the writer for services we intermediaries have rendered. Given that the supply of books has increased so dramatically, we now need to justify again why we take out slices. The primary service we can offer is match-making because any website can offer selection. So we all—agents, publishers, wholesalers, booksellers—need to comprehend that we’re in the reader-writer connection business, or we’re out of business.
What are some of the mistakes you see both booksellers and publishers making in this brave new world?
Assuming that the best way to connect writers and readers was through an elongated supply chain, because for the past century that’s the business we’ve been in. It’s not, it was just the best available means to the end. It may still be the best means, but it’s not and never was the end. I suspect booksellers mostly understand that better than publishers because they’re closest to the readers, but I fear that closeness is taken for granted. You need to basically own your customers, not just sell them books.
Could you give us a typical day in the life of Richard Nash?
Drop my two-year-old daughter off at daycare. Spend an hour in a wifi café. Meet the co-founder and COO of my start-up when his train gets in from the far, far suburbs. Engage in finicky brainstorming with him and an intern over what one of the pages of the web app we’re creating will look like. Go with him and intern (never too early to learn) to meet with a prospective investor in said start-up.
Check email on iPhone while walking. Do another couple hours in wifi café focussed on my publicity consulting which is how I’m paying the rent. Make it home by 8pm to spend an hour with my daughter before her 9pm bedtimes. Make dinner for my wife and eat. Do a couple more hours on the laptop after she goes to bed. Rinse. Repeat.
And what are some of your future plans (for yourself and for the industry)?
Build a new business model that reflects the actual ecosystem of writing and reading. Build multiple publishing imprints/communities that utilise that model, which combines a lot of familiar ‘old skool’ indie publishing with a lot of new stuff that looks newer than it is, and adapt, change, transform in response to what the readers and writers are telling us can be done to better serve them.
This interview first appeared in the April issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.
Tags: ABA conference, Australian Booksellers Association, Richard Nash
