Behind the scenes

The €45 question

From my newsletter, 22 July 2026

Short on time? The order page is here — this is the story behind it.

Let me start with something a little peculiar about me: I love good-quality things.

This isn’t about branded stuff - I couldn’t care less about logos. But I love certain makers for one reason: craft.

Sure, Claire, everyone does. If you are rolling your eyes, trust me, people say they love high quality, but many don’t care enough to actually tell the difference.

If you’re the sort who buys good leather shoes because they’ll last twenty years, who picks up a hand-blown wine glass and can’t quite believe something that light hasn’t shattered, who watches the movement of a mechanical watch and feels quietly satisfied - then this one is for you.

If you’re not, you’ll probably find this page (and possibly me) a bit pretentious, and I’d gently suggest you sit this one out. That’s the full disclaimer. Here we go.

Self-publishing on Amazon

One lovely thing about publishing on Amazon is that it’s print-on-demand. I hold no inventory. Sweet.

The downside? Well, there are two of them.

First, the options are limited - white or cream paper, the size, that’s it. You don’t get to choose how you bind or how you print.

Second, they don’t allow pre-orders for paperbacks.

Neither is fatal, but neither sits right with me. And since I happen to be in Taiwan right now, I thought I’d poke around and see what else was possible. That opened up a whole world of printing I knew nothing about, and I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole.

What makes a book feel like quality before you’ve read a word

Before you buy almost anything, there are signals that tell you you’re about to spend money on something good. The signals aren’t always true - a lot of them are psychological - but they shape how we judge a thing before we’ve even used it.

For example, people rate wine as better when it comes in a heavier bottle. Plenty of winemakers know the trick and use it all the time. Same with heavier silverware - the weight reads as quality.

Sometimes it’s the opposite.

Take a good wine glass: there, lighter is better, because lightness signals skill - only a master can blow glass that fine without breaking it.

So what makes a book feel premium before you open a single page?

It came down quickly to three things:

1. The texture. Ever been handed a business card you couldn’t stop touching? Here’s why: the skin on your fingertips has ridges (aka fingerprints). And when you drag a finger across a surface, those ridges turn texture into vibration. Coated paper - with a thin mineral layer on top - makes colours look sharper but fills the pores between the fibres, and you lose that pleasant sensation of touch. Uncoated paper leaves the raw fibre bare, and that’s the moment your hand registers something as warm and high-end.
2. The thickness relative to weight. The trade calls it high bulk: paper that’s thick, yet light and airy. If you can’t imagine this, just picture the opposite - the old phone book: thin pages but weighing like a brick. High bulk takes real craft to make.
3. And finally, the way it opens. A cheap book fights you. You have to press hard, otherwise it snaps shut. A well-made one falls open and lies almost flat. That takes a better binding, which I’ll come back to.

So here’s my problem

I’m not writing all this just to give you a lesson on paper and binding.

I want to make a book that belongs on a coffee table or in a museum shop, not on the Oxfam shelf. (No offence to Oxfam. I donate a lot of books there.)

The catch? Printing something like that is not cheap, and honestly, it shouldn’t be.

What I’m not yet sure about is what other value I’d need to build in for someone to spend €45 on a book - when many of you have already read the introduction free on my website.

Before you tell me what you think, let me show you exactly what I want to make, and why.

The cover paper

The paper I’ve chosen is called Rasha (羅紗紙), made by a Japanese maker called Takeo (竹尾). It was invented almost a hundred years ago, in 1927, and was Japan’s first fully automated, domestically produced paper. Before that, Japan’s fine printing paper was mostly imported.

If you speak Japanese, the name gives the feel away. Rasha (ラシャ) means a thick, densely woven wool cloth. The paper is 25% cotton, and the long cotton fibres give it a texture closer to wool than to paper.

This is the kind of paper used for art, photography and poetry books. You’ll almost never see a business book printed on it - that’s exactly why I want it.

The subject of The Price of Influence may be business, but at its core, influence is about people. I want a paper with warmth - one that carries the human meaning underneath the argument.

Takeo’s president once defined paper as something that should be “friendly to human senses,” and it really resonated with me.

As technology takes over more and more of what we do, paper shouldn’t be treated only as a way to move information around - that’s a dead end. It’s a way to carry culture, history and story. It’s the same thing I write about with pricing: we don’t buy the feature, we buy the value. So it felt right to choose a paper that means what the book means.

The interior paper

For the inside pages, I went with Stora Enso, a Finnish maker whose roots run back over 700 years. Their paper has a bluish-white shade and a light coating, so the ink sits on top of the page and the cool tone makes the text look razor-sharp.

Bluish-white background would be tiring over a 100,000-word novel, but mine is a short read - around 40,000 words with generous margins - so this is where I can choose beauty without giving up comfort.

The binding

You already know I love a book that opens almost flat. What I haven’t told you is this: the more you open a book, the more the spine shows wear. It turns out there’s a binding method - Smyth-sewn - that lets the pages open fully without cracking the spine, so it stays flat (and signals made to last).

Now the question

Still with me?

When this went out to my newsletter, I threw the challenge back to my readers. What would I need to put into this book to justify charging €45 for it?

→ At what circumstances would you ever spend €45 on a paperback? (And yes, paperback, not hardcover. At 40,000 words, a hardcover would look like it’s trying too hard.)

→ What extra value would make it feel like a bargain rather than a splurge?

→ And feel free to argue with the number - I hadn’t fully settled on it.

The answers came back within hours - and they shaped what happened next.

This is one of the behind-the-scenes letters from the making of The Price of Influence. More of these will live here after launch.