“Zig Zag” Published in Japanese!

A wonderful surprise was waiting for me when I came to my campus office this morning! I received the Japanese language translation of my book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. It’s published by Yamaha Music. My Japanese colleague Jun Oshima told me that Yamaha Music has published music books for many years, and they’ve recently decided to publish books about how to be more creative. Zig Zag is one of the first. The print quality is phenomenal, they really know how to print books in Japan!

It’s a paperback with the cover wrapped in a dust jacket. That’s pretty cool because in U.S. books, you only find dust jackets on hardcover books. In this photo, the cover is light blue and the dust jacket is dark blue. The dust jacket is made of a textured glossy paper that is really unique; I don’t know how to describe it. In U.S. books, the dust jacket is always smooth, although sometimes the letters of the title are raised a bit. This texture feels great!

The book cover is actually two pieces of thick paper sealed together at the right edge. The inside piece is glossy and isn’t printed. The outside piece (light blue) is card stock. I’ve never seen this on a U.S. book.

The cover also has a smaller “wrapper” around it. In this photo, it’s the white strip toward the bottom. Looking around online, I couldn’t find a name for this. I’ve never seen this on a U.S. book, but the Korean translation of my book Group Genius also has it. You can see the nine-dot problem displayed at the right. The original English-language edition prominently features the nine-dot problem, but other than this small visual reference, the Japanese cover is completely different from the original English-language cover. The English-language edition was published in hardcover with a dust jacket.

Here’s the back cover. You’ll see that the small wrapper goes all the way around and then folds around the back of the dust jacket.

It’s a wonderful, high-quality book! I wanted to put a link to the Japanese version of Amazon, so you could buy it, but I couldn’t find a way to do that. If you have the link, please post it in the comments. I’m excited to have Zig Zag published in Japanese.