I respect your experience in publishing, but I think it misses my point. It may be that you work with different genres. My point was that for many authors, pa

I respect your experience in publishing, but I think it misses my point. It may be that you work with different genres. My point was that for many authors, particularly authors on the high end of the fiction market, appearance does matter to them. These people love books, not just the words but the physical feel and appearance. They have opinions about the physical form their book takes. Are they wrong? I've helped a few authors get set up with their own websites, and the same concerns translated. They cared very much about how the site appeared, and had intelligent opinions about why that was the case. They weren't web ingenues -- they'd been reading other author blogs for years. Why would their concern with the appearance of the written word change when that word was online? I can't name names, but these authors were far from self-publishing. They had substantial contracts from major houses. Their books were all covered in the NYTRB. The publisher of course paid for one lay-out of the book, but it was not customary to cover three. That's why the author used his personal funds -- for the extra two lay-outs.