Incredibly, Jonah Lehrer is only the second most unlikely person to have scored a book deal this past week. During my trip to the East Coast last week, I spent a day in New York and met with several publishers to pitch my new book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done. It’s a book-length version of the subjects I’m writing about here.
This week, I accepted an offer from Basic Books to publish the book with them. I’ll be working with a great editor, Alison Mackeen, and love the Basic Books catalog: they publish terrific books in science, business, history, and the social sciences, and so I expect to be drawing heavily on their expertise to make this book great.
Books in New York: The old New York Public Library catalog
Of course, I’m sad to leave Little, Brown & Co., with whom I had a tremendous experience writing and publishing The Distraction Addiction. I learned an immense amount from them about trade publishing, about being an author, and supporting a book, and I had nothing but positive experiences with them.
However, I’m looking forward to starting this next chapter, as it were, and I’m very glad to be working still with my terrific agent, who I’m now convinced went to Hogwarts because she got me such a great deal.