Red Lemonade
By:
October 5, 2010
Today, HILOBROW’s friend Richard Nash announced the Spring list for Red Lemonade, Cursor’s first publishing imprint. Someday This Will Be Funny, by Lynne Tillman (Apr 2011), Zazen by Vanessa Veselka (May 2011), and Follow Me Down by Kio Stark (June 2011) will be available in the book trade in trade paperback, as digital downloads in all formats and channels, and also as a limited-edition artisanal object.
Cursor is “a social approach to publishing that focuses on the establishment of powerful, self-reinforcing online membership communities made up of professional authors, reader members, and emerging writers.” Nash is Cursor’s founder and CEO.
Last year, the magazine Utne explained Cursor like so:
Cursor, scheduled to launch in early 2010, is Nash’s vision for making social networking and crowd sourcing integral to book publishing. Online platforms will support social publishing communities for readers and writers; Red Lemonade, for example, will harbor the pop-lit-alt-cult inclined, while charmQuark will cater to science-fiction lovers. Among other things, members of these communities can give feedback on each other’s work, participate in writing groups, and access editing tools. Each group will also have its own imprint and the potential to earn money from digital downloads, print editions, and artisanal runs.
Want to learn more? Nash has written about Cursor for Publisher’s Weekly (which, in 2006, named him one of the ten editors to watch in the coming decade). He explained why he’s building “a more robust, dynamic, creative, democratic version of the reader-writer relationship than what I once called publishing.” Excerpt:
In my next venture, how would I reconcile the traditional author-agent-publisher-printer-warehouse-wholesaler-retailer-reader supply chain with the potential power of the Internet as a platform? I say “as a platform” to distinguish from how most publishers currently use the Internet — mostly as a logistics and marketing tool. Working with my friend and fellow publisher, Dedi Felman, what emerged from my research is a model that to some will seem unconscionably radical, to others unconscionably conservative: a business that properly avails itself of all the tools that now exist to enable the creation of writing and reading communities from which all else emanates — print books, downloads, marketing and publicity, editorial services — and, of course, revenue.
We’re thrilled about Cursor — congratulations to Nash and his first three authors!