Cody Kittle, Sig Ep junior and the newest "Purple Book" editor, at his desk with piles of unsold copies.
Photo: Olivia LaVecchia
On one of the first days of New Student Week, Cody Kittle stationed himself outside the Arch with his latest project in hand: the 2009-2010 edition of the “Purple Book,” a sort of Zagat guide to on-campus life. After four hours of sales, the director of Wildcat Welcome, Elizabeth Block, drove up in a golf cart, and, according to Kittle, tried to shut down the operation on the grounds that the “Purple Book” purveyors didn’t have a permit—despite the fact that police officers had been passing by all afternoon, without a word.
That was not Kittle’s first interaction with Block—he had first tried to contact her several weeks earlier, when she sent out an e-mail blast to all of the Peer Advisors, warning them not to become involved with the book, which Kittle bills as “The Unofficial Student Guide to Happy, Healthy Living at Northwestern.” Nor was it Kittle’s only problem with the book: his issues had begun at the end of summer, when he shipped a mass order to the wrong address, and, later, when he realized that his planning for marketing and sales was drastically undeveloped.
But none of those oversights compare to what Kittle calls “my royal fuckup”: a shipment of 650 books with the cover image skewed to the left, which Kittle deemed unsaleable. Those 650 books now sit, boxed and untouched, on the ground floor of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house, a constant physical reminder of the $1400 that Kittle and his partner, Sean Soderstrom, another Sig Ep junior, lost in the endeavor.
But let’s back up, to the summer of 2008, when Kittle first became involved with the “Purple Book.” At the time, he was writing the restaurant reviews for another student’s “Purple” revival. When school started and there was no book, Kittle began wondering how he could get “more control over the thing,” he says. He and Soderstrom bought out the other student, Weinberg senior Blake Yocom, and by spring Kittle found himself staring at previous versions in the University archives: the first from 2002, plus two successive editions. He contacted the original creators, and secured their consent to update the book for the upcoming school year.
This past summer, Soderstrom and Kittle were both working in New York City. Nearly every night after work the two met in Kittle’s apartment near Wall Street, had a beer, and immersed themselves in the book: updating, laying out, editing.
The largest of these late-night changes was the decision to make their version as objective as possible, in part because of Kittle’s commitment as President of Sig Ep. Because of this call, Kittle e-mailed his fellow fraternity presidents and asked them to write the page for their house, a strategy that produced surprisingly “hilarious” content.
Highlight reel: ZBT “is great, if you are a Mom,” Lodge is “in pursuit of upholding the ideas of the gentleman scholar,” Sig Eps “are a gaggle of obnoxious egomaniacs,” and SAE consists of “rich, brandy-drinking, cigar-smoking assholes.”
Kittle was delighted. “It was so much better than the stuff we could have written,” he says. “You had on the surface ‘this is how we are,’ but secondly, ‘this is how we think we are,’ also.”
And the sororities? “I don’t think the sorority section is going to sell any books,” he says, “but there’s just a certain standard that you have to set for yourself. It can’t just be about making money.”
The book was finished by the end of August, just as Soderstrom was leaving for a fall abroad in Prague. Because they were running behind schedule, when the proof came and the cover was slightly off-center, Kittle didn’t think twice: he edited the cover, ordered another proof, and, to save time, approved the new proof before it was sent to him. He then ordered 650 copies of the book and headed out to a friend’s house in East Hampton to celebrate.
A few days later, his vacation was cut short: the new proof arrived in the mail, and it was nothing like what he had pictured. The cover was set to the left, and after all of his hard work, the error made the book look amateur.
It got worse: 650 copies of the faulty books were scheduled for delivery to the Sig Ep house that same day. But when he checked on the order, he realized that he had entered the wrong shipping address: The books were en route to South Carolina, and he was out another $890.
“I was just depressed,” Kittle says. “I was just sitting in the house like, I don’t want to go to the beach. It was like that space mission when they were sending that thing to Mars and they confused yards and meters. It was that kind of screw-up.”
What was the young entrepreneur to do? Kittle fixed the cover, ordered 300 more, and convinced UPS to give him a full refund on the shipping. But by time he got back to school, Kittle realized that, in addition to his other woes, he had overlooked one key component of the venture: marketing and sales. Because of soliciting rules, Kittle couldn’t technically station salespeople on school property, and gaining access to his target market—freshmen—proved difficult. “I underestimated how difficult it would be to sell the (books),” Kittle says. “That was probably the biggest lesson.”
Yet others think there was another reason the book didn’t fly off the shelves: price. The “Purple Book” sells for $20 a pop. “When you’re talking about students, $20 is tough,” says Medill sophomore Alex Katz, a fellow Sig Ep who worked for Kittle as both copy editor and salesman.
Camille Reyes, a Weinberg freshman, says that she probably wouldn’t have bought the book if her mom hadn’t shelled out for it. But now that she does have it? “I don’t use it as my Bible, but it’s actually useful,” she says. “Some parts of it are supposed to be funny, but I don’t think it’s a complete joke.”
So far, the Purple Book has sold 250 copies, not including the 32 that were ordered online from Amazon and CreateSpace, Kittle’s publisher. Those numbers mean that, if Kittle hadn’t botched the first order, the partners would have turned a healthy profit.
Yet Kittle says “The book’s more to me than the costs I incurred. Some of the stuff is obviously just extremely crude, but a lot of it is funny, and entertaining, and informative.”
“I obviously made a bunch of mistakes,” he says. “We didn’t do marketing right, we didn’t do the sales effort correctly, the cover thing is the worst. But I’m in college; I don’t have to go home and feed a family. I sleep just fine knowing that I fucked up big time. We could’ve made a lot more money, but there’s always next year.”
Turns out this kid is a douchebag AND an idiot.
its cute that tri-delt and lodge feel the need to gang up on sigep. what a classy, dignified publication….
From an unbiased perspective, I think it is ridiculous that someone would take this as a tridelt lodge attack on sig ep. This piece has nothing to do with sororities or fraternities, but instead focuses on the production of a so-called guide to life at Northwestern. I’ve skimmed the book, read this article, and feel that clearly Cody and Sean spent a lot of time on the book in general. This was a long and complicated endeavor which yielded a great end product. N where in this piece do I see sig ep or Cody represented negatively.
What an obnoxious column. I’m so sorry that the kid who got to spend summer in the Hamptons felt too depressed to visit the beach.