Getting our Supply Chain Unkinked

The book is now available in our store (at least for the next few hours)

Dustjacket from The Neurobiology of Connection. Trim the edges, rotate 90 degrees, and you have a poster.

The reason that we started a publishing house is that I don’t enjoy getting screwed. I have a lot of friends who are writers, and the number of them who are like, “Oh, I just love working with my publisher,” I can count on two fingers¹.

When you sell a manuscript to a traditional publisher, unless you have incredible sway, you basically turn over everything about the look and feel of the book, its typography and design, its illustration, to the publisher. Since most book covers have the visual poetry of something made by a middle-schooler learning QuarkXpress², the book you end up with may not be what you had in mind.

This is the actual cover of one of the books in the Neapolitan Quartet, which the New York Times declared the BEST BOOKS OF THE CENTURY. Not year. Not decade. Century, people. And the cover, I must say, looks like it was photoshopped by someone making a collage from a mishmash of old wedding photos and travel pics of the Italian coast with fonts pulled from Microsoft Word. You guys couldn’t find two distinct complementary fonts to distinguish the title from the endorsements? Wow. Seriously? Not to digress too far, but you’ll notice that book covers nearly always, when they show people (unless it is a biography or the book is about the person) have them facing away from us. Thus we get to see Nancy Pelosi from the backside, etc.

At least this cover has a primary font that conveys power, the subject of the book, and a secondary font that is visually distinct. You’ll notice that the primary font is tall, slender, and visually relating to both the theme of the book and Nancy’s silhouette. More balanced visual design, better use of inversion (white title against dark background, dark subtitle against light background), more compositional balance, but the photograph is still weird, because if you allow yourself to focus on the image itself, the eyes are drawn not to her figure or to the Washington monument, but the curlicue of the balustrade which, although interesting visually, is not where you (as a designer) want to send it.

Because of my interest in visual design, product design, experience design– color, texture, cartography, architecture, branding, aesthetics– I want to design an experience for someone in the form of a book. I want them to pick it up and be moved by the experience of interacting with it as an object and as a text. I want the look and feel and the message and the meaning to harmonize.

For this reason, I want control over the layout, the look, the feel, the fonts, the visual design: in short, everything.

And while I value great editing, which a traditional publisher often provides, the construction of the modern publishing business is largely a vast gatekeeping enterprise. Perhaps I wouldn’t be so cynical about this if I hadn’t watched it very up close at the Stanford University Creative Writing program, which is reliably producing some of the most exciting young writers in the country.

Yet the reality is that the publishing business is politics, who you know, and how marketable publishing executives believe you are. By the time you are able to get a publishing deal in non-fiction you don’t really need one, because at that point you’ve already got an audience, which is why the publisher has said yes. It has stunningly little to do with how brilliant your book idea is, and much more to do with whether or not the publisher thinks they can make a lot of money.

They don’t do much marketing unless you are at the very top of their list for a season in a category, so you are basically gifting them 95% of the cover price of the book to pay for editing and printing your work and distributing it to people who are already looking for it. If you were not primarily marketing it yourself, this might make sense.

What publishers are very good at is production and distribution. If you get a good publishing contract your book ends up in bookstores around the country. If you get a good foreign rights agent it can end up in bookstores around the world. And for people who are making their primary living as a writer, this calculus can make a lot of sense. I’m not suggesting that there are people for whom it does not.

In our case, however, having control over visual design, being able to hire the illustrators, book designers, and visual designers we want to have on our projects has made more sense. The challenge has been figuring out the unit economics of this, and distribution.

The Neurobiology of Connection is the most technically complex book we have produced thus far. It weighs in at 552 pages, with well over a hundred full color illustrations. The dust jacket on the hardcover is designed to come off, rotate 90 degrees, and convert into a poster. People who preordered the book, embarrassingly up to a year and a half ago (gulp) became inadvertent saints waiting for it. (Thank you all so much for you patience.)

We received the first printing in our warehouse this past Monday, and have fulfilled the vast bulk of preorders. We are now opening up realtime purchase of the books on our website.

What we will be monitoring closely over the next few weeks is the demand pull, because it will govern how aggressively we print.

All of this is to say that if you are outside the United States, ordering from Amazon is probably a good idea simply because their scale allows them to offer purchase protections if there is a shipping issue.

For folks in the United States we are now stocking the book in our store, and can undercut Amazon’s price substantively, because we don’t have to pay Amazon their princely cut ;)

The paperback will be out in a few weeks.

1. One of them has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, so you can imagine that he has a good deal of sway with his publishers…the other connected me with the publisher she likes, they actually commissioned The Neurobiology of Connection, and then told me they didn’t know how to sell a health creation manual.

2. You’ve never heard of QuarkXpress? Don’t even know what it is? My point exactly.