About a year ago, a book showed up at my house. It was Die Numerati, the German translation of The Numerati.
The cover featured a dark image of swirling sharks. I stared at it,
wondering what those creatures signaled. Then I went to the computer
and got a translation of the subtitle, Datenhaie und ihre geheimen Machenschaften: …”data sharks and their secret machinations….”
Oh, I thought. That kind of shark.
It’s a strange thing to propose a book, sell it, and then watch what
happens to it in different places. My book, it turns out, has given me
access to a highly focused global laboratory for marketing and design.
Each publisher has its own angle, and each version is created with a
different home market in mind. …quot;Meet the Numerati,…quot; warns the Brazilian
edition. …quot;They already know you….quot; The publisher of the British
paperback, the Mariner division of Random House, gave it a new and
slightly
menacing title (They’ve Got Your Number…). Its U.S. counterpart,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, focuses instead on utility. Its cover blurb
from Wired editor Chris Anderson trumpets a …quot;must-read for anyone who
wants to understand life and business in the Google Age…..;quot
The changes began shortly after selling the proposal, nearly four years ago. The original pitch was for a book called The Age of Numbers.
It would describe the analysis of the oceans of digital data we all
produce, and how this process would reshape history. I wrote:
Abacus and slate. Numbers and
words. It was a neat divide for nearly 3,000 years. But the border
between the two worlds is fast vanishing. Mathematicians are gaining
the tools to turn the entire universe of knowledge–words, sounds, even images–into symbols. As they do, their domain extends into industries far beyond the ancient divide.
Weeks after Houghton Mifflin bought the book, I got a call from my
editor, Amanda Cook. She told me that she had read again through the
proposal, and she had a suggestion. …quot;I think the whole book is in
Chapter Four,…quot; she said. Originally, I had planned to explore much of
the world of math. My research would even take me to India, where I
would compare how students were learning it there to what my sister was
teaching in Portland, OR. But Amanda saw the entire book as …quot;the
mathematical modeling of humanity….quot; We could have chapters, she
suggested, on how we were modeled and predicted as workers, shoppers,
patients, potential terrorists, and lovers. It sounded fine to
me–though I was sorry to lose the trip to India.
Amanda went on. …quot;Do you think The Age of Numbers is the
best title?…quot; she asked. Clearly, she didn’t. My title, she said, was
fine for selling the proposal to a publisher, but perhaps too static to
attract browsers mulling about a Barnes …amp; Noble store or clicking
through Amazon. The Age of Numbers, she said, evoked Greek columns and would likely scare off the general-interest readers we had our sights on.
Instead we settled on The Numerati. It brought to mind a
global elite (which readers are said to find appealing), with a hint of
intrigue. It recalled the Illuminati of the best-selling DaVinci Code.
(Practically anything that connects a book in readers’ minds to a
bestseller is desirable.)
The British publisher, the Jonathan Cape imprint of Random House,
wasn’t so crazy about the new title. They finally relented, but
insisted on addressing the hot-button privacy issue with the subtitle:
…quot;They’ve Got My Number and Yours….quot;
During this period, I gave a lot of thought to subtitles. One friend in
publishing suggesting incorporating one or two of the following words:
Masterminds, Shadowy, Fraternal, New Order, Enlightened, Mystical,
Secret. I tried a couple. …quot;Can the Global Math Elite Predict Your Next
Move?…quot; or …quot;How a New Order of Masterminds is Mapping Your Next Moves
and Changing How You Work, Shop, Vote, and Play……quot;
But the editors at Houghton chose to omit the subtitle. They feared it
might cheapen or pigeonhole the book. To attract readers attention,
they designed a shiny white cover with metallic lettering. Half of a
worried face composed of math code looked up toward those shiny
letters, as if they were wired with secret cameras. The only written
guidance came from Chris Anderson’s Google quote. To give the book a
little viral boost, we inserted some code into the art, and gave a
signed copy to the first readers to uncover it. (It was the geo-location of the Starbucks in New Jersey where I wrote most of the book.)
It was last summer that the British
surprised me with the suggestion of changing the title. …quot;We…rsquo;ve been thinking carefully about where in the market to place the paperback, in relation to the current affairs and business market that the hardback was aimed at, and we plan to target the popular science market more,…quot; an editor wrote…….quot;The title needs to be very punchy to catch the eye of the casual browser. The team here really like the title …ldquo;They…rsquo;ve Got Your Number…hellip;…rdquo;, derived from the subtitle to the hardback. If we go with this title, we…rsquo;d need a short subtitle to explain further what the book is about …ndash; intriguing and urgent enough to make the reader turn over to read the blurb….quot;
I went along. These people know a lot more about selling in books in
Britain than I do. But I asked them to retain …quot;Numerati…quot; in the
subtitle. Otherwise people might take it for a different book….nbsp; They
settled on: Data, Digits and Destiny — How the Numerati are Changing our Lives.
I’m especially curious about the Italian
edition, to be published by Mondadori. While …quot;Numerati…quot; is a made-up
word in every other language, it actually means something–…quot;the
numbered ones…quot;–in Italian. I asked the Italian translator how she was
going to handle it. …quot;Since the word
Numerati is frequently used in the text,…quot; she wrote, …quot;I think they’ll keep my
translation, which is… no translation at all!…quot;
Whatever works, I say.
