Art on Fire has done surprisingly well for a book that publishers were not interested in a decade ago. After we sent out the initial proposals, they were more or less unanimous in saying thanks, but no thanks. There were already too many books about Burning Man on the market, we were told. And besides, Burning Man was a “fringe” event with little more than a “niche readership.”
We had nearly given up on the project when an editor at Quarto reached out to us expressing interest. They liked the concept, she said, especially our focus on the art of Burning Man.
It took us a year and a half to get the first edition into print. When it came out, the book climbed to the top of the Amazon bestseller list in several categories and garnered reviews in a number of leading newspapers and magazines. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a cover story about the book in its Sunday Style section, Tatler magazine gave it a glowing write-up, and Rolling Stone called it one of the best books about Burning Man.
The book went through several printings and was subsequently published in a revised second edition with a new cover. In 2017, it appeared in a beautiful Japanese edition. The book also spawned several museum shows and gallery exhibitions about the art of Burning Man. It even inspired a full-length documentary film by the same name, “Burning Man: Art on Fire,” released in the summer of 2020.
