Kev Green, on LinkedIn, about A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown
Why so expensive? £80 is cost prohibitive for many. I’ve no doubt from the reviews it’s a great book but even I’d be hard pressed to pay that for a largely unknown. Please forgive my ignorance if there’s logic. I may well be out of touch. I’ll be recommending it to my 250K community on the testimonials alone. The very best of success Sir. 🤜🏻🤛🏼
That’s a fair question, politely put, by someone who then offered to tell 250,000 people about the book anyway.
I’m glad he said it out loud. Most people who think it just click away, and then I never get the chance to answer.
He’s right that it’s a lot for a book.
A stranger in a gallery
Last month I had a show of my pictures at Burgh House. A man came in, stood in front of a framed drawing for a few moments, and bought it for £400. Not a unique work, but one of 10 identical prints in a limited edition.
A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown has 124 pages, illustrated on almost every one. Nearly 300 drawings went into making it.
I’m not making a clever point about arithmetic. The gallery and the bookshop are different worlds with different habits, and I know perfectly well that book buyers and art buyers have different expectations.
But it’s worth saying what the first edition actually is, because the word “book” undersells it. A first edition of 250. Each copy numbered and signed, Smyth sewn, 130gsm silk, with a dust jacket. Each one comes with a signed, numbered A5 print – Do Your Tapping and Think of Something Pleasant (Anything) – which sells on its own for £35.
It’s an art object that happens to be a book. Different prices apply.
Why it went up
It didn’t start at £80. It started at £45, and I put the price up in July, once half the edition had gone.
Two reasons, and I’ll be honest about both.
The first is money. I earned very little during the years I was depressed, and I need to make a living like anybody else. That’s not a sad story, it’s just arithmetic, and it applies to artists and writers exactly as it applies to everyone.
The second is that I liked the idea that the people who backed me first – before there was a book, when there was only a promise and a pile of drawings – would turn out to have paid the least. A discount you only find out about afterwards, for being early. That felt like the right way round.
When I started this I published my costings: expenses, and what was left over. It was the right thing to do at the time, because I was asking people to back something that didn’t exist yet.
I don’t need to do that any more. Nobody asks a painter to show what they earn on a painting after deducting canvas, paint and postage. Nobody asks a corporate speaker how much profit they make on a talk after deducting travel costs.
I’ve believed for a long time that everything comes in useful eventually. A breakdown turns out to be a case in point.
On being “largely unknown”
I’d like to correct that gently – not to score a point, but because it’s relevant to the price.
I’ve published seven books with proper publishers, in sixteen languages. I was a founding writer and editor on the Financial Times magazine, and later a feature writer on the Sunday Times.
So I know how publishing works. You write a proposal. You send it out. Then you wait, sometimes for months, occasionally forever.
I’ve done that seven times and I’d happily do it again for the right book. But not this one. This one was too close. I was not going to hand over the most personal thing I have ever made and sit waiting for a stranger to tell me if it was any good.
So I bootstrapped it. I made it in a month, semi-publicly, sharing the work in progress with a tiny group of readers that grew as I went. Two hundred and fifty copies, hand-stitched and numbered. The price is what made that possible at all.
What it’s for
I’ve given a talk about this material in a lot of law firms – Slaughter and May, Linklaters, Freshfields, Mishcon de Reya, Clyde & Co, Macfarlanes. At Slaughter and May 250 people came, which was more than had ever turned up for anything in their mental health programme. People came to find me afterwards in tears. Some said they were going to go and get help.
That’s the same material that’s in the book.
And a reader wrote to me not long ago to say he had shown his wife a post about it while they were out walking, and that it started a conversation the two of them had needed to have for a long time.
I don’t know what that’s worth. I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that has a price on it. But it’s the reason I made the book, and it’s why I find the question of what it costs genuinely interesting rather than annoying.
Kev is right
£80 is out of reach for a lot of people. That bothers me, because the people who most need this book are frequently not the people with £80 to spend on one.
It bothers me for another reason as well. Most of the rooms where I’ve told this story have been law firms, because professional services firms are the ones that can pay. I’d like it to travel further than that.
So, two things.
If you’d like to see some of the work and spend nothing at all, start here: four of the drawings I made in hospital, and what happened when I first put them online. No catch, nothing to buy.
And I would very much like this book to exist, one day, in a form that anyone can afford. I’m working on that.
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