Will 'Zippergate' Unleash Book Boom?
Judy Quinn -- 2/2/98
With the publishing world already involved in the Clinton scandal, what's next?
I can't believe how fast this story has grown," said Scribner v-p Lisa Drew, last week.
The story is, of course, the constantly breaking news related to the allegation that President Clinton may have had an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This PW reporter had lunch with Drew the day after the story first broke on January 20; since then media coverage has been nonstop, not only causing the usual hair-pulling by publicists losing valuable media time for their books but leading many in the industry to speculate that this story may indeed bring about, or at the very least affect, book projects.
"There will no doubt be a raft of books on the subject," said Peter Osnos, former Times Books publisher who now heads up independent house PublicAffairs. "I just hope publishers don't do what they did in the Princess Diana spasm and cancel each other out." Osnos also believes that this scandal has now taken on proportions that have implications for any upcoming Clinton biography.
And in this case some recent publishing conventional wisdom -- that publishers shouldn't compete on breaking news and that political books don't sell -- is being challenged. "People said that the O.J. story was too played out in the media and that books about it wouldn't work, but clearly some did. And in this new case there will be some that will, too," said Carol Publishing Group president Steven Schragis.
Political books already in the stores are experiencing some benefit from the Clinton scandal. Schragis said he's seeing reorders for 1996 books -- The Private Lives of the Three Tenors by Marcia Lewis (Lewinsky's mother); Presidential Sex by Wesley Hagood; and The Dysfunctional President: Inside the Mind of Bill Clinton by Paul Fick. Although the reorders are nowhere near what happened to Princess Di backlist titles after her death, Ingram's Debbie Pressnell told PW that she is seeing a spike in reorders, particularly among the various Regnery books related to Clinton, including R. Emmet Tyrrell's The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's The Secret Life of Bill Clinton and Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access. Barnes &Noble spokesperson Jennifer Belodeau told PW that stores are reporting that people are coming in asking about Clinton books, although not necessarily buying them in droves.
At least three publishers have pushed up pub dates on books to bring something fresh to stores. Ballantine moved up to mid-February the release date of Vincent Bugliosi's No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones vs. Bill Clinton: The Supreme Court on Trial, previously to be part of Ballantine's launch of its new Library of Contemporary Thought trade paperback series in April. In the two weeks since Ballantine made that decision, the house has taken 125,000 orders for the book -- 50,000 more than an originally planned print run. The end of February is now the release set for James Retter's Anatomy of a Scandal: The Undermining of the Clinton Presidency, a previous April release from General Publishing Group, which will now have a new intro. The Free Press has moved up to March Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz's Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, originally scheduled to be released in May.
And tying into the scandal, SMP is rushing 200,000 copies of Sex Lives of the Presidents, first published in the U.K., that will be updated to include the Lewinsky affair. The $5.99 paperback will reach stores by, appropriately, President's Day.
Literary Agent in the Loop
But the hottest book speculation, of course, centers around key players of the scandal. In the New York Post ReganBooks publisher Judith Regan has already weighed in that Lewinsky and government worker Linda Tripp, who made the tapes of Lewinsky's conversation that sparked the scandal, could get as much as $5 million and $1 million advances, respectively, to tell their stories. Regan hedged such numbers, however, by noting that if too much information from these women spills out in the meantime, there will be less interest in their story. Previous affair claimant Gennifer Flowers ended up publishing her tell-all books privately due to lack of publisher interest at the time, for example, although sources say her agent is now shopping for a reprint deal.
But perhaps most of all there's literary agent Lucianne Goldberg and her role in the scandal. Goldberg, who urged Tripp to make the tapes, has said that she formed a relationship with Tripp four years ago in connection with a failed proposal for a book on former Clinton aide Vincent Foster. (Tripp was reportedly the last person to see Foster alive before his suicide.) In a report in the Washington Post last Wednesday, Regnery publisher Al Regnery said that Goldberg had shopped a Tripp book about Clinton only last year.
Publishing sources speculate that Goldberg, who has both written and ghostwritten a variety of fiction and nonfiction, could either ghostwrite a book for Tripp or, as she intimated to PW, write one herself. Goldberg's copies of the tapes are now in the hands of lawyers, however, and Goldberg, like Tripp, Lewinsky and Paula Jones, is restrained from moving ahead on book deals at the present time. Goldberg has said that she has already turned down a $2 million offer from the National Enquirer to get the tapes. "It's an agent's worst nightmare," Goldberg told PW.
At a Pocket Books party for author Linda Wolfe last week, guest Goldberg eclipsed the guest of honor as reporters peppered her with more questions about her role in the affair. Goldberg, who, media reports allege, spied on behalf of the Nixon campaign in 1972, and also has attempted to land book contracts for tale-bearing Arkansas state troopers and alleged Clinton mistress Dolly Kyle Browning, nonetheless denied being part of any right-wing conspiracy to bring down the Clinton administration. "I don't work on the side of the right," she said. "I work on the side of the right."
Random House editor Jonathan Karp told PW the book he'd consider acquiring would be from whichever reporter ends up "owning" the case, à la Woodward and Bernstein. At press time, one candidate is a strong possibility: Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who had access to the tapes and decided against running a premature story and has since done extensive followup reporting as well as media appearances including Letterman. He is represented by Gail Ross, who told PW that they've been talking about a book, "but he's kind of busy right now reporting the story."
New Slant for Books in the Works
Karp already has a project under way that will be affected by the Clinton news: a book by reporters Gene Lyons and J Conason that was to have argued the case that the assorted Clinton scandals are part of a concerted right-wing smear campaign. Karp told PW he expects the book, which likely won't get published for another six to nine months, to address the Lewinsky situation.
Crown editorial director Steve Ross had a few moments of panic that he'd have to cancel conservative columnist Arianna Huffington's comic Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom, which will ship to stores in March, since the focus of the book was intended to be on the previous Clinton fundraising scandals. But Huffington "proved to be prescient" in her writing, said Ross, so the rewrites now going on are not as extensive as imagined.
But perhaps the most high-profile book in the works that may attract more interest due to the breaking scandal is the memoir by former Clinton aide, now ABC-TV commentator George Stephanopoulos, expected to be released by Little, Brown this November. "I can't imagine this won't now be part of his story," said Little, Brown v-p Bill Phillips. The house, which paid a multimillion-dollar advance to Stephanopolous, has no plans to move up the pub date of the still untitled book, said Phillips, in part because of a wariness about the Clinton scandal that is still affecting many publishers. "We don't want the book to be too much tied to this sordid, sad affair," he said.
Back To News
---> |
