Posts Tagged ‘Soft Skull Press’

(as told by Seth Godin)

I just listened to an astute speech from a proven guru delivered to a convention of indie book publishers.  You can hear the whole recording here.  It’s a bit long, so I’ve transcribed my favorite points:

Godin breaks the traditional publishing business model into five components: Curation, Venture Capital investment, Production, Distribution, and Promotion.

He says four of five of those components are now dead.  Curation is the only role for publishers in the years to come.  So what does that really mean?

According to Godin, it means four things:

(1)  Curate: collect relevant content.

(2)  Lead: earn the right to talk to your audience by delivering honest, relevant information, then tell your followers what content (movie/book/blog etc.) is worth their time.

(3)  Connect:  Serve as a hub for like-minded individuals to meet and connect.

(4)  Create a movement:  Rally your audience.

We can already see this happening.  TwelvePublishers puts out a book a month, and “seeks to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books.”  FlatmanCrooked is “deeply dedicated to the cultivation of our authors’ careers,” and creates cult followings around books through limited releases, imaginative book tours, and contests.  Soft Skull Press has been called “The literary version of a punk rock label.”

These are just three examples of small presses embracing the new world of publishing.  They curate, connect fans, and create a movement about their releases.

Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution debuts in print on July 14, 2010 (that’s Bastille Day, for you non francophiles).  But it’s already out there for free, on the internet airwaves, for anyone with a Twitter account.

Frustrated by a chain of publisher refusals, Stewart decided to “tweet” the whole thing, gratis, 140 characters at a time.  The feat earned him world wide publicity, a cult following, and–the coup de grace–a coveted publishing deal with Soft Skull Press.

It’s hard to say whether this stunt could work twice, but Stewart gets high marks for enterprise and cojones, winning in the long term by giving it all away in the short term.

The tweets are available under @thefrenchrev.  The Book’s website is here.  The revolution in book marketing and self-publishing is underway.