By Ryan Grim
Action Network (6/27/17)
You may remember a few months ago I said that I was co-founding an independent progressive publishing house, called Strong Arm Press. Well today we’re publishing our first book, Out of the Ooze: The Story of Dr. Tom Price, written by the great Alexander Zaitchik, who is the author of a terrific and brutal biography of Glenn Beck that you may have read a few years ago. [Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.]
We’re going to try to drive Out of the Ooze up to number one on the Amazon charts today and if we can do that with an obscure book from an obscure publishing house, it’ll send a pretty stark signal to Congress about just what the public thinks of this effort to throw 22 million people off health care. It’ll turn some heads, at least.
We’re publishing it as both an ebook and a paperback, and because we’re able to cut out so many middle men in the process, the cover price for the paperback is just $5. If you know anybody who wants to learn the history of how a reactionary wing inside the medical community has spent the last century fighting public health care, buy them a copy of this sucker and send it to them.
The idea is this: by cutting out the middle man (and it’s often a man) we can hugely cut down the price of a book and at the same time increase the amount of money that goes to the author.
Here’s the thing: publishing houses don’t actually publish books, it turns out. They outsource that part of the publishing process to small firms that specialize in printing books. They also don’t write books – that’s done by writers. The covers are made by designers who are contracted by the publisher. So what do book publishers do? They take authors to lunch.
In other words, they’re taking a huge amount of money to do basically nothing useful. So that was the inspiration behind Strong Arm Press. The idea is this: by cutting out the middle man (and it’s often a man) we can hugely cut down the price of a book and at the same time increase the amount of money that goes to the author.
And we can think up and publish books much faster than the major houses, while timing them for the perfect moment. Our first book is one that nobody in New York would ever commission.
If this one is a hit, we’ll follow up with one on Betsy DeVos. Beyond that, I’d love to hear your suggestions on topics that you think are deserving of a long read, but that are getting ignored by major publishers. In the meantime, if you have $5 to throw at this book, I promise you’ll enjoy it.
And if you do enjoy it, please review it on Amazon, too.