Ah, yes. We… I had this couple kissing on the cover.  So, we got a lot of stick from readers, but far fewer from readers, a lot from third-rate journalists.  They said, how can you have a couple kissing on the cover on a Penguin book?  I said, well, forget that it's a Penguin book.  Have you read this book?  They're kissing in the book.  Why shouldn't they be kissing on the cover?  That shut them up.  And they kept kissing on the cover, and people kept buying the book and reading it.

And I think there were other people who said, well, a book that is that large, it won't fit into racks, because the racks are designed for A-size books.  And I remember saying, well, then the racks have become the publisher instead of me.  You'll have to change the racks so the… for the larger size book.

[Q] How did you know how to do all that?

I didn't.  I didn't know what I was doing.  I knew that, if it worked, it would be very good for the author.  It would be very good for the book itself.  It would be very good for readers.  It would be very good for booksellers.  It would be very good for Penguin.  But, in other words, I created a model that, if it worked, would be a virtuous circle.  It would be good for everybody.

But, I mean, I did have the power - I was the CEO - to price the book any way I wanted to, to have the book be in any format, to have a couple on the cover that was sufficiently provocative to make people… it was not very provocative.  They were fully clothed. But it… the shock was that it was on a Penguin cover.  We don't do things like this at Penguin.  Well, you better, because nobody will read your books otherwise.  People are people.