Posted on 06/25/2003 10:35:45 PM PDT by LdSentinal
Hillary Clinton would have been well-served if her publisher, Simon & Schuster, had hired a few political consultants, some Carvilles or Begalas, to direct the company's marketing campaign on behalf her latest book, Living History.
Despite reports of record first-day sales, the publisher mismanaged a crucial event in Hillary's political career, and she will be forced to pay for its errors with even less credibility in the future than she started with.
The first and biggest mistake from a political perspective was allowing -- even encouraging -- expectations for the book to grow out of control. An $8 million book advance and initial printing of 1 million copies set the tone. CNN quoted a Simon & Schuster publicist as saying, "We don't know of any political memoir that has had such a high initial print volume."
High-profile TV interviews and leaks titillated the public to a frenzy. "There is practically nobody who won't want to read her book," predicted literary agent Elaine Markson.
Barnes & Noble executives joined the hype by announcing that Living History sold more first-day copies than any nonfiction book in Barnes & Noble's history, more than 40,000 books in 24 hours.
Simon & Schuster quickly upped the ante by very publicly ordering 300,000 more copies within days.
The first impression was this was a tsunami of public opinion and demand. The left coast Eugene Register-Guard caught the wave as it washed across the nation.
"Clinton fans mob store for memoirs," screamed its headline. The article described Clinton's Manhattan Barnes & Noble book-signing kickoff as the beginning of a "rock-star-like tour."
Never mind that the "mob" was 1,000 middle-aged people standing orderly in line. And from looking at the autographed books listed for sale on eBay this week, half of those in line must have been entrepreneurs getting books signed for resale, not to read and cherish.
But the initial hype campaign created expectations that Hillary and her book will never be able to meet. The book had fallen to ninth place on Amazon.com's bestseller list yesterday, already surpassed by Ann Coulter's Treason.
Is Hillary's book somehow special or unique if it sells close to a million copies? Not particularly. Quite a few political books sell in that range. Some sell many more.
Rush Limbaugh's second book had an initial printing of 2 million copies and sold out in eight weeks. Even Hillary's previous book, It Takes a Village, has sold 700,000 copies. And it doesn't even titillate with tales of marital infidelities, a supposed strength of the latest book.
Nor are sales actually living up to objectively measured pre-publication expectations. A pre-publication Gallup poll said that 10 million adult Americans were "eager" to read the book. Perhaps 8 or 9 million plan to mooch a neighbor's copy rather than buy one of their own.
Will the book energize and mobilize Democrat readers? There are more than 40 million Democratic voters in America, but how many buy and read books? I suspect more copies will be bought as gag gifts for Republican golfing buddies than by Democratic union guys wanting to read Hillary's version of history.
Will the book help Hillary gain support from crossover voters by convincing them to give her a second look? Probably not, judging by who is buying the book.
Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble report that customers buying Hillary's book have also bought Robert Dallek's book on President Kennedy, Queen Noor's book and books by Sidney Blumenthal and Susan McDougal. Sounds as if most purchasers are Kool-Aid drinkers just pouring another cup full.
When all is said and done, Tucker Carlson may have to eat a shoe. Simon & Schuster may sell more than a million copies. But it's Hillary and her political backers who will be eating crow when we ultimately see how far this book came from meeting its lofty expectations.
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| how far this book came from meeting its lofty expectations.
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So what do we really have, then? Simon and Schuster is left holding a bag that used to bulge with eight million dollars - either this was one of the clumsiest attempts at backdoor political support ever made or those folks figured that if it were a bet as to who is stupider, them or the American public, that they had a lead-pipe cinch on their hands. Hoping that a tide of feverish housefraus eager to offer the contents of the cookie jar to "do something to fight those Evil Republicans" and ease their fall with a lovely mattress full of loot turned out to be a sucker bet after all, but it looked pretty good at the time.
Why should they? It's advancing the agenda that matters, not truth.
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They misspelled "lefty."