Interview (PART 2) With “Supreme Models: Iconic Black Women Who Revolutionized Fashion” Author Marcellas Reynolds!

“I’m not going to make any money off this book,” Marcellas Reynolds tells So Booking Cool. “I spent my savings. I spent my advance. I took out credit cards to finish it, the licensing fees were double what we estimated them for. But if this book…makes one person happy, and they see it and they go, ‘I’m beautiful, too,’ then this book is worth it.” Prior to this emotional moment that you hear in Part 2 (here is Part 1) of our conversation with the Supreme Models: Iconic Black Women Who Revolutionized Fashion author, Reynolds explained that he and his publisher, Abrams Books, were aligned in their pricing.

Art and photographic books like Supreme Models usually can and will sell for hundreds of dollars. But setting the price at $50 was important to both author and publisher for accessibility.

“For me, the book is a celebration of diversity, and that’s why the book is so cheap,” Reynolds shares. “People keep telling me every day ‘this book is too cheap.’ I priced this book really inexpensively and Abrams, thank, God, believed in the same way that I do because I want some little black girl that wants to be a model or loves fashion to be able to go to the store and buy this book.

Maybe she saves her allowance up for 2, 3, 4 weeks and she buys this book or if she says to her mama ‘I want to be a fashion designer, model, a hair and makeup artist, her mother goes to Barnes and Noble and buys this book for her.”

Check out Part 2 to learn about Reynolds’ first job that opened the doors for his long career in fashion including how he made the most out of the opportunity; the time he almost gave up on life; how people have responded to Supreme Models thus far; how he wasn’t initially “woke” in the publishing process of his book; his thoughts on Barbara Summers’ book Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models arguably paved the way for Supreme Models and more! For more information, visit Reynolds’ official website.