For a book that wasn't even a glint in the author's eye until mid-July, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Sept. 13) by George Lakoff has turned into one big bundle of joy for Chelsea Green. The 125-page, $10 guide to the language of politics, which went from manuscript to finished trade paperback in five weeks, has become all-time fastest-selling book for the Vermont independent publisher.
The book takes its name from a favorite assignment that Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute think tank, gives his students to explain how politicians frame public debate. Although many of the ideas espoused in Don't Think of an Elephant have appeared previously in Lakoff's essays and his much longer Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), this is his shortest, most readable, book.
Because Chelsea Green distributes its own books, it was able to alert booksellers to the crash publication and to ship orders almost immediately. "If you're nimble and have good instincts and feelers out there, it's an advantage to be small," said president and publisher Margo Baldwin.
Don't Think of an Elephant will soon have 50,000 copies in print, after three trips to press. Baldwin credits an endorsement from the political Web site the Daily Kos (dailykos.com) for pushing the book to #8 on Amazon just a week after its release date. E-mail blasts from the Sierra Club and left-leaning news site AlterNet.org also helped to move books. But Baldwin said it was MoveOn's e-mail blast that encouraged progressives to download 12,000 copies of the first chapter of the book from the ChelseaGreen.com Web site. Of course, it didn't hurt that Lakoff mentioned the book during an appearance onPBS's Now with Bill Moyers. In recent weeks, Lakoff has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN and Fox News.
For Chelsea Green, Don't Think of an Elephant, which debuted the first week of October at #29 on the NEBA extended bestseller list and has risen to #19 on the BookSense paperback list, marks the culmination of a two-year soul-searching that involved changes in staffing, warehousing (twice) and revitalizing the list. Through September, Baldwin said, "sales were running 47% ahead of last year." The number of new titles is also up from five last year, during the company's makeover, to 15.
