(“I don’t care that it’s Little, Brown’s book,” says one rival publishing executive. “There wasn’t one person afterwards who said he wasn’t worth the money.”) And then, in New York and New Jersey and all over the United States, there are the booksellers, who are hoping that, amid fears of a global recession, Outliers will prompt their customers to do that thing that’s become a rarity these days-plunk down $28-and thus offer a slim reed of hope to the sagging publishing industry. (“He was by far the most expensive speaker we ever contracted,” says Charles Cohen, the president of a dental-supply company, whose trade group paid Gladwell $80,000 to address its annual meeting. (“The hardcover of Blink sold three times what the hardcover of Tipping Point did,” says Geoff Shandler, Little, Brown’s editor-in-chief, “so his audience has grown and grown.”) Across the river in New Jersey is the Leigh Bureau, which fields Gladwell’s speaking requests and negotiates his stratospheric fees. Not far from The New Yorker are the offices of Little, Brown-the publisher of Gladwell’s two best-selling books, The Tipping Point and Blink-which paid him a rumored $4 million for Outliers. A couple of miles north in Times Square are Gladwell’s editors at The New Yorker, who don’t see him in the office very often-owing to his self-professed “aversion to midtown”-but who grant him a license to write about whatever he chooses and accommodate him with couriers to pick up his fact-checking materials, lest he be forced to overcome that aversion. His Lexus IS-a car, he concedes, he rarely drives-is parked down the street in the space he pays a small fortune to lease. His writer’s life is part anachronistic, part futuristic. He is a well-known figure around his neighborhood, fond of tapping away on his laptop in coffee shops and cafés. He looks, in short, like a caricature of Malcolm Gladwell. His trademark Afro, which he had cut about a month ago, is at frizz-level yellow. He’s wearing jeans and one of those wickable running shirts, which fits snugly over his thin frame. Gladwell is offering this modest self-assessment while seated at the kitchen table of the apartment he rents in a stately West Village townhouse. “At the end of the day,” he says, “I’m just a journalist.” It’s a Friday afternoon in mid-October, one month before his new book about incredibly successful people like Bill Gates and the Beatles and Mozart-the people whom he calls outliers-arrives in bookstores, and Malcolm Gladwell is insisting that, honestly, he doesn’t have anything at all in common with his subjects. “I don’t really think of myself as an outlier.”
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