Congratulations(!) go out to Chris Steiner, the author of $20 per Gallon, as we just found out that the book landed on the New York Times non-fiction hardcover extended bestseller list that will be published on August 16th.

Also, the website for the book is now up. It’s at www.20dollarspergallon.com and is worth checking out, as it has a very cool interactive timeline and you can also read an excerpt, check out the reviews, etc.

More great news for Chris Steiner and $20 per Gallon, as he was on The Today Show this morning. Here’s the clip. Congratulations, Chris!

Chris Steiner’s fantastic book $20 per Gallon published yesterday and is generating plenty of positive attention. He was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday, and has reviews published in Publisher’s Weekly, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Chris’ publisher Grand Central has gotten behind the book in a big way as well, running significant ads yesterday in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And here’s a snippet from a TIME Magazine piece that ran yesterday, as well:

In researching this book, what surprised you the most?

Perhaps nothing more than some of the paths our food takes around the world: Norwegian Salmon, for instance, can go from Scandinavian fishing boats to China, where the fish are gutted and cleaned by workers making so little the cost is almost negligible. From there, the fish travel back to their home country, neatly packaged as “local” to smitten shoppers in Norway’s supermarkets.

You mention the relative successes of Shai Agassi, of A Better Place, and Tom Casten, of Recycled Energy Development. What’s been holding back other people with big ideas about energy efficiency?

Congratulations, Chris!

Author Chris Steiner spoke today with Newsweek about his incredible book $20 per Gallon, which is hitting stores now. Here’s a snippet:

In his new book, $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better,Forbes writer Christopher Steiner argues that the increasing cost of fuel will radically change the way we live, from the cities we choose to call home to the way we grow food. NEWSWEEK’S Nancy Cook spoke to Steiner about why he thinks Americans will be forced to restrict plane travel to once a year at most, why solar panels will line the rooftops of apartments, and how gas prices will force suburbanites back into cities. Excerpts:
Cook: What prompted you to write a book that looks so far into the future?
Steiner: The genesis came about a year ago when gas was $4.50 and $5 a gallon. It just got to a point when people who drive a lot were approaching the $1,000 mark a month for their gas. You couldn’t get rid of an SUV. I said to myself, “This price of gas is clearly a psychological trigger that totally got people to change their minds. What other trigger points lie ahead?”

Here’s a link to the complete piece. Congratulations, Chris!

Chris Steiner’s fantastic book $20 per Gallon will be released by Grand Central in early July. The book already features blurbs from people like Alexis Madrigal, editor and lead writer of Wired.com’s “Wired Science” blog, Marcel Pacatte, former Managing Editor of Discover magazine, Peter Senge, bestselling author of The Fifth Discipline, and Stephen Leeb, PhD, author of The Coming Economic Collapse, as well as Game Over. Now we just received the first review of the book from Publisher’s Weekly and it’s a terrific one. PW designates titles of special merit with a “starred review” and that’s what $20 per Gallon received. To provide a little context for that, out of the 33 titles reviewed alongside Chris’, only 3 received starred reviews. The reviewer said of the book:

He reveals the consequences of each incremental hike in gas prices: at $8 per gallon, air travel will essentially vanish; at $14 a gallon, Wal-Mart stores will become empty “ghost boxes”; when gas hits $16 a gallon, sushi will become an extravagance only for the extremely wealthy. While many changes will come at tremendous social and economic cost, Steiner envisions a better future, where human ingenuity will spur greater efficiency and less waste. Although it’s unlikely all the author’s predictions will come true—he goes so far as to forecast the order in which airlines will go out of business—the surprising snapshots of the future (where rising gas prices might revitalize Detroit) make for vivid and compelling reading.

You can read the review in its entirety here. $20 per Gallon appears about two-thirds of the way down the page. Congratulations, Chris!

Every once in awhile an idea comes along that’s so brilliant that you have to do a double take just to make sure you’re not losing it. That was the case when author Chris Steiner, a Senior Writer for Forbes, called me with the idea that became $20 per Gallon: How the Rising Cost of Gas – from $6, to $8, to $14 per Gallon and Beyond – Will Radically Change Our Lives, which was just acquired by Rick Wolff at Grand Central.

Chris and I had been kicking ideas back and forth for months, trying to come up with the right idea to pursue. I find the kind of alternative energy topics that Chris writes about for Forbes to be fascinating, but there’s a lot of noise in that space in the book market, so coming up with a really unique concept is key. One of the books we talked quite a bit about during our brainstorming was The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. If you haven’t read the book yet, I highly recommend it and in fact, the chapter about what would happen to New York City if people suddenly disappeared is worth the purchase price all on its own.

The great thing about The World Without Us is its simple premise that then opens up an amazing breadth of topics that are just fascinating to think about. Chris and I were hoping to come up with a similar kind of concept in the energy space and then one night before dozing off it just came to him. $20 per Gallon will be a thought experiment on the same grand scale as The World Without Us, but where Weisman’s brilliant book explores the hypothetical, Chris Steiner’s book will explore a future that’s quickly becoming all too real for each and every one of us. At $4 per gallon the price of gas already dominates both our everyday conversations and popular media, with stories appearing daily in the NYT, Washington Post, USA Today, and on every major news program. Americans have even started driving less – 11 billion miles fewer this past March than we did in March ’07, the largest drop in history – but that’s just the beginning.

Of the 60% of our gasoline that we import, only 40% of that goes into our tanks. The rest goes into hundreds of other products that we use every day, including plastic, cosmetics, buildings, our roofs and even our roads. As the price of gas continues to spiral upwards it will crank the gears of massive change that will reverberate throughout all facets of our lives. With chapters elegantly structured according to Chapter $6, Chapter $8, Chapter $10, Chapter $12, etc., each chapter will focus on one or two major changes brought about as the price of gas climbs higher, giving readers a glimpse a little further into the future with each chapter. Each dollar increment will bring with it new problems and new pain, but it will also force us to adapt and readers will be fascinated to get a look into the future rushing towards all of us.

What makes Chris Steiner so ideal for this project is that in addition to being a Senior Staff Reporter at Forbes who has written about a wide range of topics, including covering Boeing, Honda, GM, clean propulsion, etc., he also graduated from the University of Illinois as a civil engineer and worked as an engineer at a design firm in Park City, Utah for three years, getting paid to develop real solutions to real problems.

The response from editors on this project was simply amazing. I started talking to editors about it on a Thursday, and by Friday I had received calls from several expressing interest in the book. By Monday we had received a preemptive offer that we didn’t end up accepting, primarily to give those editors who had been looking at it over the weekend a chance to respond, and by Tuesday I had an editor call me about the book that I hadn’t even pitched it to. By Thursday we had setup an auction and we were very pleased that it went to Rick Wolff at Grand Central for what Publisher’s Weekly called a “significant six-figure floor”.

Congratulations, Chris!