If I Had Ten Million Dollars
Here’s what I’d invest in:
Digital Publishing - New platforms that offer immersive media experiences for literary fiction lovers
The literary fiction part is due to my own personal interests (and my fear of the death of imaginative work in a dumbed down world) – but this model could be applied to all fiction and non-fiction. The innovation and technology put into gaming could be applied to merging documentary, non-fiction writing, photojournalism as well as literature, independent cinema, the best in illustration, cinematography, music composition to create rich multi-lateral access to imagination, knowledge and story. Hell it could work for low culture too, that’s the low hanging fruit after all.
Pinterest Retail
I read on Fast Company that this already exists as The Fancy so I signed up – but Pinterest still gets my vote because it builds context with such fluidity as a visualization board for all kinds of planning and creativity. By placing objects or experiences that would lead to acquisition next to the the stuff of life that thankfully does not – plants, a cityscape, a curled up cat – buying becomes more of an act of careful consideration than blind consumption. Organic self-directed retail. Facilitated by a platform that takes the whole spectrum of your life and imagination into account.
Farm-to-Table Fast Food
A farm fresh menu with crops chosen by ease and season. The company would work in cooperation with various local producers. It would mimic the fast food experience in some useful and familiar ways but act as a teaching tool for change in the food system. Done right, it could be replicated anywhere (along the sidelines of the football field? On a corporate campus or at a university? In lower income or subsidized housing estates?) I haven’t worked out the kinks, but I’d invest in this. Jamie? Where are you?
Open Education and Other New Education Business Models
Browsing articles on the rise of homeschooling, statistics in online learning, and the movement against traditional degree programs, nothing on the horizon is due for such a complete overhaul as education. I’m appalled by the idea of the 40,000 dollar Manhattan preschool. (Nobody wins.) Nonetheless, I think progressive dynamic and creative education is invaluable. I look back to my fondness for Montessori and Bennington (no grades) and the New School (essays instead of tests) and know this approach, and ones that incorporate working in a natural environment, is applicable to the future. I’d love to sign on to a new model of education which balances real world social interaction and problem solving with democratic access to the best possible learning tools from top educators.
Micro-Manufacturing
Skip the middleman. Think. Plan. Make. Sell. I love the 3D printer and I can’t wait until prototypes can be passed onto small factories that can afford to make small batches putting the designer / maker / entrepreneur in the drivers seat. A mini version of this idea exists in Spoonflower.
Data-Mining For Good: Customer Service 3.0
Ignoring the spook factor of privacy concerns, I’d defer to someone else on that one – if you could know enough about your customer to serve them as well as they expect to be served, remembered, listened to, customized for, well I find that very exciting. Innovations in customer experience that really put the customer first could extend to healthcare and safety, travel, home buying, and finance. It could be a good thing put in the right hands. -Chauncey Zalkin
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New York Now: From Didion to Start Up Successes
What Women Make went from being European-based to New York-based in October. Since then, the posts are slow coming as we develop our first core business, Show Love, and develop ways to bring WWM to life on my home turf. In this discovery phase, I’ve met tons of likeminded energized women playing vital parts in the social and business paradigm shifts taking place.
Here are 4 women in 4 key arenas:
Design
Annie Coggan – In a city lacking in design activity, Annie’s a breath of fresh air. Outside the world of decor and decoration, there doesn’t seem to be much of the rich critical design discussion you get in other world class cities save for This Is Product Placement co-run by Julie Taraska who I have met but that was in Italy so she doesn’t count for this post. Annie runs a design blog called Chairs and Buildings, is an architect, is a teacher, and is a resident at the women-run Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn working on a very innovative upholstery project. She’s been in the decoration blogs like Design Sponge and design blogs like Yatzer. She’s on this list for being a woman who keeps evolving and is a true artist. She also happens to have gone to Bennington College, where I went as well, and during one of the best times in its history. More on her later. More on the women at the Textile Arts Center later too – they are also entrepreneurs and supporters of community arts definitely fitting the bill as paradigm shifters. You can follow them at @textileartscent
Tech Start Ups
Kathryn Minshew – at 25, she’s the co-founder of the online magazine start-up The Daily Muse; has been awarded with Y Combinator financing and counsel; led a strategy to provide HPV vaccines in Rwanda with the Clinton Health Access Initiative in her even earlier career; she’s also incredibly unpretentious and nice, and though it shouldn’t matter she’s super pretty which doesn’t hurt in this world. (Of course if she wasn’t beautiful inside it really wouldn’t mean diddly.) She’s been supportive and warm and receptive to me and about What Women Make and she’s just the kind of person that WWM is always seeking to show to the world.
Co-working Spaces
Adelaide Lancaster – As soon as she sat down with my partner and I at the end of a long day for all three of us, she exuded an incredible sense of calm and wisdom that was truly infectious. It was a bit like having a cup of tea – if tea had any practical takeaway to offer. She gave us great advice and encouragement about our business Show Love and put us in touch with resources and lovable companies she thought would appreciate our approach to social content via storytelling. I’ll be teaching one of their workshops in the Spring. More on that later too. She and her partner Amy Abrams have a shared work space called In Good Company whose name could not be more appropriate. They also just published a book called the Big Enough Company.
One of my Heroes
Joan Didion – Okay, ‘meeting her’ is a bit of a stretch. She signed my book and spelled my name correctly after I saw her on stage discussing her magnificent career with her nephew the actor Griffin Dunne. She also said ‘thank you for coming’ and looked me in the eye. Though I wouldn’t be able to exactly call her my best friend, I felt a little bit of Didion magic dust rub off on me as I left Symphony Space and had a slice at the Upper West Side Two Boots before heading back to Brooklyn.
Stay tuned next week for my Christmas post on the Tythe Design blog.
-Chauncey Zalkin
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Print Turns to Pixels Series: She’s a Literary Agent and a Bookshop Owner
What Women Make Interviews London-based Literary Agent and Bookshop Owner Felicity Rubinstein.
Felicity Rubinstein and partner Sarah Lutyens were colleagues at two publishing houses and partners as literary agents for sixteen years before deciding to open a bookstore in the north end of Notting Hill, a shop which has several times been praised as one of the loveliest in London. Being both retailers and longtime literary agents makes them ideal interview subjects for women in all kinds of creative businesses; They are creative entrepreneurs in a tough economy and their business of choice is in an industry that is in peril but also one with fierce loyalists who want to retain this most sacred of cultural experiences. I asked Felicity to share her thoughts about agenting and owning an independent bookshop in an era of such tremendous change.
It turns out that their decision and the timing of the store was not a stance against digital books or chain stores like Waterstones (The U.K.’s Barnes & Nobles) or Borders or WH Smith (which she spoke highly of), nor did it have anything to do with the marketshare taken by Amazon. “We’d been talking about opening a bookshop for a long time. It just finally happened to come together in 2009.”
Between then and now, the popularity of digital books has moved so fast and still there’s no way to determine what will happen in either digital publishing or the bookseller landscape in the months and years to come. Still, like all good small business owners – and all writers actually who are endlessly told ‘write what you know’ – she expressed great passion for her neighborhood, an area she’s lived in her whole life, and one where she has an intimate knowledge of the market.
They saw a gap and filled it: “North Notting Hill is a highly literate area. We were sure the neighborhood would appreciate a place to buy books you wouldn’t find in a supermarket.” Felicity feels that everyone in the book business harbors a fantasy of owning a bookshop. “It’s a bit like all children wanting to own a sweet shop.” (a candy store in ‘American’.)
I personally don’t want to imagine a world without aisles of books – the smell of fresh paper, a quiet public space to browse and discover – and she doesn’t think it has to be one or the other. “The curated experience at the heart of forward-thinking retail and that’s what we offer. Change is in the air and people are frightened of change. New developments are happening very, very fast. We don’t sell digital books in our stores, clearly, but we do work on digital royalties as agents. These are exciting and scary times. One of the best things I’ve noticed is that kids are reading more than ever. If reading is on the rise in children, we feel very encouraged.”
It’s clear that their love of agenting hasn’t ebbed. In their mid-30s, both working in publishing they realized that there were very few agents their age. “Most agents at the time were half a generation older than us. We felt we’d gone as far as we could in publishing and wanted to do something new and there’s still nothing like taking on a new author and announcing that their life is going to change because their book has been accepted for publication.”
Each day, Felicity Rubinstein and Sarah Lutyens walk downstairs, slide open a wall of books in the back of the store, and enter their offices where they go to work for their writers. The day-to-day decisions in the bookshop are trusted to their full time staff. Sometimes at lunch and on weekends they’ll go behind the counter “because if you have a job that involves sitting on your bottom all day answering the phone, it’s nice to get up and talk to people in the shop,” she says laughing, but she’s adamant that their day jobs as agents are as busy as ever.
The two roles compliment one another. As agents, they have to take on authors they think they can sell but “as booksellers, we recommend books that we’d give to a friend or ask our mothers to read and we can sell books that were published any time in the last 200 years.’ The balance keeps them inspired and excited – and that’s what the energy of change is all about.
Q & A
What would you say to female writers looking to the future of the publishing industry?
Keep writing!
3-10 female living authors whose books you love
Jennifer Egan – A Visit From the Goon Squad
Cressida Connolly – My Former Heart
Melissa Bank – The Wonder Spot
Mary Lawson – The Other Side of the Bridge
Emma Forrest – Your Voice in My Head
Claire Messud – The Emperors Children
Gabrielle Hamilton – Blood, Bones & Butter
Visit:
Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop
21 Kensington Park Road
London, W11 2EU
Tube: Ladbroke Grove
(I thought this would be a great time to post this as I run out to go here Joan Didion speak at the Peter Jay Sharpe theater…)
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Friday Diary: Poets & Writers Magazine Party
August 9, Brooklyn, NY
Enjoy cocktails and mingle with agents Elyse Cheney of Elyse Cheney Literary Associates, Emily Forland of The Wendy Weil Agency, Ellen Twaddell of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Eleanor Jackson and Julia Kenney of Markson Thoma Literary Agency, and Laura Nolan of Paradigm, as well as editors, authors, and the staff of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Admission is free and includes a cash bar. RSVP and check out the full list of agents attending by visiting P&W’s Facebook page.
8/9: 6:30 – 9:00 PM
Union Hall
702 Union Street (at 5th Avenue)
Park Slope, Brooklyn
Directions
R to Union Street
Q, 2, 3, 4, 5 to Atlantic Avenue
F to 4th Avenue
B71 to 702 Union Street
B63 at corner of 5th Avenue and Union Street
File this under: “wish I could be there”
Another publishing / writers post you may enjoy, Persephone Books and the Resurrection of Early 20th Century Female Writers in London.
0 CommentsInspired Monday: Two Visual Visionaries & A Young Playwright Who Stole the Show
Meet 28 year old Katori Hall from Memphis. She won Best New Play at the Olivier awards. The Mountaintop is an imagined account of Martin Luther King
Pauline Van Dongen 3-D Printed Shoes. Featured on Fast Company. (later part of our What Women Make – Women in Design 1st edition show at the London Design Festival, autumn 2010)
Shanan Campanaro surface design reminiscent of Rorschach test
0 CommentsWhat Women Publish: How Miss Pettigrew Came to Live Another Day
Persephone Books is a female-run publishing house and London bookstore that publishes out of print 20th century female authors. It’s a quintessential example of the kind of business built of passion, intellect and saleability that inspired Girl on the street and What Women Make.
On my way from Brompton to Bloomsbury to interview Nicola Beauman, Persephone’s founder, I had to quickly change gears from innovation and novelty-seeking to the section of my brain that strikes even closer to my heart, creative writing and its hopeful end product, publishing.
When I walked into the store, I further detached from the streamlined design arena and took in the intimate, cluttered and well-lighted store stacked sky high with books in gray and floral print covers. There I was ushered toward the back to a room that was even more cluttered and more charming, filled with the smell of new paper from boxes of books.
I tripped down a step, a graceful entrance, and took a seat opposite Ms. Bauman and settled into a worn leather chair adjusting my bags and jacket around me. When I looked up, she was smiling and unaffectedly curious, not a word or sneer of disapproval about my clumsiness. An hour later, after her urging me to move to London, listing all of its charms and scholarly offerings, my blossoming crush on the city and it elegant restraint had cemented itself. Not to mention that the part of me that perennially wishes for the mentor / teacher / editor I never had had been piqued. Here are outtakes from my conversation with the smart and funny-as-hell woman who started and runs Persephone Books. Without her, Miss Pettigrew would literally not have lived to see another day.
How did you get started?
I didn’t know that much about publishing but one can learn these things really.
Why mid-20th century women?
Nowadays, women who could be writing are doing a million and one other things but in the mid-20th century, women stayed home and took to writing. Also, there isn’t the same sense of tragedy now because we don’t have the same moral conflicts do we? Today everything goes. These books have plot. They’re page turners. Now a novel like this would have to be set against a historical background. This is a chance to see what really went on during that time.
When did you start Persephone Books?
1998.
How did you start your career?
I had children young. At 26, I secured a contract to write a book on female authors. A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39. I was writing and reviewing books for the Observer in my twenties.
And your children?
They are about your age I’d say. I have three sons and two daughters, all in the arts. My oldest son is a children’s book writer. Another son just wrote a cultural history of the pineapple.
Wishes, regrets?
I wish I was more techie. I’m a little late getting to the party. (She has an amazing blogging concept and a great website. For her blog, she sends out an image every day that is historically relevant to her titles. I’d say she’s got quite a handle on the medium..)
Can you touch type? (I answer in the affirmative.) Oh good! It’s very important to be able to touch type!
Wisdom?
I tell my son, find a stable of people who can help you. An electrician, a handyman, a type setter, people who you like who won’t be offended if you call up for a last minute request, people that you don’t have to explain yourself to. I’ve had the same delivery man the whole time, the same accountant, the same bank but I do have a new printer. (She considers this.)
What are your plans for the future?
Well, we’ll just continue as we are! We put out 6 books a year. We have 3 new books coming out next month. 80% of our business is mail order. Ms. Pettigrew is our best seller. You know there are 30M women in this country. We have 20k on our mailing list. You know only 3% of London buys books?
I love these prints. I told a pattern designer I was meeting with you and she told me she had tried to reach you about using her designs in your books.
We are quite ruthless about requests. I just get so many requests and I can’t answer them all. Most of the books are gray though. They have to have a uniform look you see because they are coming by mail and then they know what they are getting when they open the package. The books we sell to stores have a print pattern because it catches the reader’s eye. They expect that. For those, we use prints from fabrics produced the year the book was written.
Who are some women you find inspiring, from any field?
Lucienne Day, fabric designer. She’s 95 years old. Marjorie Scardino who runs Pearsons which owns the Financial Times. She’s gone very far in a man’s world. Sarah Waters who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She’s a very very nice person. She just gets on with it. I admire her. Jane Brocket. She’s in the domestic arts and lives in Windsor. She bakes a lot. She writes about tapestry. She’s interesting without being annoying.
-Chauncey Zalkin
*See some Lucienne Day Converse sneakers here.
0 CommentsTwo Kinds of Stories: The Page and The Screen
I’m been working on a long, big, involved writing project since January 2007. And not one that can be done via tweets, posts, or powerpoint but instead in chapters employing reams and reams of paper crisscrossed into piles and filed with ink markings.
I started in Paris and two years later ended up in Barcelona in a markedly less charged, less anxious environment than New York. I grew my hair long, stopped getting highlights. I stopped wearing high heels and stopped shopping on Saturdays. (Shopping-as-hobby in euros and without a corporate paycheck, in a markedly less consumerist environment, feels absurd). I live in an ancient building with uneven stairs. Wearing heels would be impractical to say the least. . Instead, I’ve become quite the chefette. Fresh fish at Boqueria (and later Santa Caterina market) has led me to Google searches with alarming news of overfishing and the politics beyond my dinner table. Yikes.
But I left to cut the chatter out. To smell the sea and know thy butcher. The longer piece of writing is still not done (now it is!) but it is a living breathing thing that I will sorely miss when it is done. It’s what I do mornings. It’s my real and tangible life.
Afternoons, now back in the drink of digital and work life in the form of What Women Make and planning curriculum for teaching and workshops in branding and ethnography for the fall (done!), I am swimming deeper into digital space, a place where I find no up, down, or center, just endless self-perpetuating time. Time to infinity if you let it. As part of this, I have nestled myself deep in Twitter-land.
Sitting here in Barcelona, thinking about one of my characters, I scribbled in my notes, ‘are we all building concentric circles and burying ourselves in the middle of them?’
I began my dive into Twitter by looking for women makers online and swimming down that path I ended up finding scores upon scores of tech heroines – connectors, doers, investors, travelers, oracles – and I’m amazed at the female talent, passion, and community that’s showing it’s face.
I haven’t done that much writing outside my book ever since I started working on it but I realized this question has nothing to do with my book and everything to do with my digital observations. We are blowing bubbles of concentric circles every time we add a twitter connection. We float in our bubbles and we seek out: The Conference. Conferences seem to be a crucial oxygen seeking mission in all this. We come up for air there. After all, people want to speak, laugh, see one another, share the same carpet.
After the conference, we all go home, follow one another on twitter and go on building our concentric circles. But hopefully that’s not all.
How often do our circles land in tangibles?
When do they form intersecting points that lead to applications, products, services, marriages, babies, and all that good stuff?
They do, I know they do, but I’m interested in those stories. The ones grafted on the page of social networking that come alive in physical space.
I want even the physical space tinkerers or artisans to have a foot in both without compromising their craft.
I love this rapid evolution. As it changes life itself, I’m pleased with the slippery easy online glide. I remember when it was so much more cumbersome.
I think of what it can and will look like – the synergistic evolution going on in the ever widening half of our life that is lived online also happening in equal measure in physical space. To me, that is the ultimate and most critical pursuit.
-Chauncey Zalkin
0 CommentsArt vs. Marketing
I used to think if I pursued art, it would be like spitting in the ocean. Who would care? Who would hear me? I told my 25 year old self, if you attach yourself to brands and big business, play not by the rules of making money, but in acknowledgment of them, you can get a word in edgewise. If you make art you’ll be like that hippy dancing in the crowd at a Phish concert with her eyes closed. (for me that’s a bad thing). You’ll be in your own art universe. And starving. It seemed to me: make your contribution quantifiable, make it count, make it consumable, make it tangible.
But that was then. Now everyone’s selling to one another.
‘Buy me’
‘No buy me’
‘Buy me!’
It’s another form of taking turns talking. It seems pointless. All this clever stealth marketing is zapping creativity from the creative population. Everybody has an agenda.
How can anybody even see?
I went onto a Paris hipster site tonight someone sent me to learn more about the FIAC art fair going on here this weekend. On the site, famous Paris personalities listed their favorite spots here. Of course an actress listed a regular movie theater that will be debuting her movie and another woman talked about a store that carried her clothes. Give me a break.
When I hosted a panel of marketers at a conference last year, I carefully planned out questions that would probe the evolution of online marketing but my guests got up and one by one plugged their brands, products, and websites. At one point, one of the panelists hijacked the whole thing by standing up in the middle of the thing to click through a powerpoint of his companies services! Something I explicitly told him not to do. It was the Jerry Springer of Marketing Panels. Each one, especially the young guns, got up to outshout the other.
Sometimes what used to excite me about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creative class is starting to look like the spit of a thousand jaded and corporate-ized cool kids sinking into the ocean. They are turning into the monsters they were running from.
No matter what you do for $$$, if you commit yourself to art, your art, as few people as there might be who see it, you can rest assured that you are actually saying something that is not related to a consumable, profitable, interchangeable, extinguishable, questionable, suspicious, depleting thing. It’s something actual. Something human. something flawed and living. Something that means something, even if it means something to 5 people or 2 or just you.
I’m not being idealistic. We have to make money. We have to produce food and machinery and fashion and ipods and shoes and beverages and hand soap. I just think we need to do have some separation again of church and state. The French seem to still be able to do both but that capacity is diminishing. The production of free time that we’ve nurtured seems to be actually just the production of more work time. If you want to discuss this, I’ve formed a What Women Make group on LinkedIn. Look it up and ask to join.
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