Cursor…represents a new, “social” approach to publishing. To call [it] “niche” or another “independent” publishing enterprise would be a poor approximation, because those terms fail to capture the organic gurgle of culture at the heart of the venture, the exchange of insight and opinion, the flow of memes and the creation of culture in real time that is now enabled by the Internet.

My business plan is now out with investors—I will spare you the P&L numbers and just offer the broad strokes. Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities. To start, this includes Red Lemonade, a pop-lit-alt-cult operation, and charmQuark, a sci-fi/fantasy community.

The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Other revenue opportunities include the provision of electronic distribution services to other publishers; fee-based or revenue-share software modules, especially for online writing workshops or seminars for publishers, literary journals, teaching programs; fee-based linking of writers to suppliers of publishing services, including traditional publishers and agents; corporate sponsorships and site advertising; and events and speaking fees. Yes, I envisage Cursor obtaining a larger basket of rights than is the industry standard, but that will be in exchange for shorter exclusive licensing periods. Our contracts will be limited to three-year terms with an option to renew.

The Cursor business model seeks to unite all the various existing revenues in the writing-reading ecosystem, from offering services to aspiring writers far more cheaply than most vendors to finding more ways to get more money to authors faster. It also will create highly sensitive feedback loops that will tell each community’s staff what tools and features users want, what books users think the imprint should be publishing, how the imprint could publish better.

Cursor is not designed to “save publishing,” but simply to offer the kind of services that readers and writers, established and emerging, want and the Internet enables. I believe especially strongly that the model must be viable in a world where the effective price of digital content falls to zero, and paper becomes like vinyl records or fine art prints. After all, the world is littered with things that people won’t buy at the prices their producers want to charge—like, say, the contents of remainder bins.

If recent experience is any guide, there is little reason for me to think that people, given so many other options for their leisure time, especially in the wired world, will continue to give up hours and dollars for the sake of our industry, any more than they will for big cars or daily newspapers. We are going to have to find new ways to earn those hours and dollars, and at the prices our readers—and writers—set.

http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/back-issues/issue-62

Given the documents’s unabashed criticism of the greed, avarice and economic disparity fueled by capitalism, the NY Times and the Washington Post had little to quarrel with. Both papers covered it in a sympathetic way, a departure from the usual editorializing found when they cover Papal news.

Many politically conservative Catholics are up in arms over the “Social Justice-y” cant of the encyclical, seeing the call for a more ethical and equitable distribution of wealth as caving to the Social Justice camp within the Vatican. No surprise that conservative Catholic intellectual George Weigel, Pope John Paul II’s official biographer, came out with both barrels blazing at the National Review online.

Damian Thompson, blogging for the Telegraph of London, has some nice insights on George Weigel’s furor here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100002538/george-weigels-intemperate-attack-on-benedicts-incoherent-encyclical/

My favorite line from the news coverage so far is this one from the New York Times:

There are paragraphs that sound like Ayn Rand, next to paragraphs that sound like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ That’s quite intentional,” Vincent J. Miller, a theologian at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution in Ohio, said by telephone.

Ayn Rand, not so much. But Grapes of Wrath? Sign me up. The timing of this encyclical is uncanny for me. I’m in the process of re-reading Weber’s work on the connection between the Protestant ethic and capitalism, as well as a barn burner of a book called The Fear of Beggars by Kelly S. Johnson. All of this will show up somehow in my new book.

The Sun Magazine | By The Color Of Their Skin

Shared via AddThis

The New Atlantis » Shop Class as Soulcraft

Man, my bed side table is getting full. Right now it looks like this (in order from top to bottom):

Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster
Fear of Beggars by Kelly S. Johnson
The Elephants Teach by D.G. Myers
Infinite Jest by DFW

Shared via AddThis

The occasion for the discussion is the publication of two biographies, Flannery by Brad Gooch and Cheever by Blake Bailey. Actually, I have a review essay comparing these bios and their subjects forthcoming in the July issue of IMAGE. Look for it on newsstands near you.

Well, today, walking through the Wal-Mart parking lot, a young woman and her small son (he was maybe 2 years old, a whole head shorter than my daughter) came up to me and asked for money to get something to eat for her and her son, and to get some medicine for her son’s face. The skin around the child’s eyes and across the bridge of his nose was dry and scabbed over. I looked down at the woman’s stomach. It was clear she was pregnant. The boy didn’t speak. He just looked up at me solemnly with big, naive eyes. I looked through my wallet–two fives and a single–and gave her a single. The moment I handed her the money, I simultaneously wished that I had given her more and not given her anything at all.

About a week ago, passing through South Bend, Indiana, where we used to live. We got together for lunch with some old friends, a young couple with two young children. We belonged to the same parish, and before we moved away we spent some good evenings cooking out and playing music on their front porch. They live on the border of a poor neighborhood. Break-ins are way up in his neighborhood due to the struggling economy. Driving to their house this time, after having been away for two years, I struck by how landscape and architecture hold in them codes for poverty and privilege. Small, low-slung ranch houses with peeling paint and uncut grass and shaggy bushes, living room furniture in the front yard stands for one economic situation. Two-story house with big shade trees, a lush, thick green lawn, a hammock and matching lawn furniture on the porch stands for a very different situation. So, grilling out in the back yard, my friend Jonathon tells me an anecdote about how recently while picnicking at a nearby park, some kids came up and asked if they could have some of their food. They shared, but it was an awkward moment for them.

So now I’m going to order Kelly Johnson’s book. I didn’t fear the woman and her son in the Wal-Mart parking lot so much as I resented having to make the choice between a principled decision to not encourage begging, which is seen in our culture as dishonest and lazy, and a belief that we are called to show hospitality and compassion to the stranger, despite economic status. This is a hard ethic to defend and adhere to when you yourself are broke.