Booknews: Family Values in Finance
-- 2/28/00
'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' becomes linchpin of a self-publishing empire in Ph nix
When Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon L. Lechter printed the first 1,000 copies of their book Rich Dad, Poor Dad in 1997, they thought the supply would last for years. Since then, the homespun tale of Kiyosaki's financial education has sold more than one million copies, in combined English and foreign-language editions.
Published by the authors' own Tech Press, Rich Dad, Poor Dad has achieved its stellar success without benefit of agent, publicity campaign or paid consumer advertising. What it did that has carried it to the bestseller lists (#1 on the Business Week list and #2 on the Wall Street Journal among others) was offer a whole new slant on the meaning of family values.
According to Kiyosaki, a fourth-generation Japanese-American now based in the Ph nix area, most families educate their children for careers that make them wage slaves. What they are failing to teach is how to use money to make more money. "I am not saying don't become educated and follow your interests, I'm just saying you need to get some financial action going on the side," he said.
The authors believe that what makes the book so appealing is Kiyosaki's dramatic retelling of his childhood experience of the Rich Dad/Poor Dad split. Kiyosaki's father was a Poor Dad, a Ph.D. and superintendent of education in Hawaii, who died broke and bitter. His best friend's father, who dropped out of school at age 13 and went on to become one of the wealthiest men in Hawaii, became the Rich Dad adviser to the young Kiyosaki.
But while Kiyosaki embraced the financial wisdom of his Rich Dad, and enjoyed success marketing Velcro surfer wallets in 1977, he also inherited the passion for education that was his Poor Dad's legacy. (Both men passed away before Kiyosaki felt comfortable telling his story.)
By 1996 he was hosting financial education seminars and had created a board game called Cash Flow, to teach money management. He began Rich Dad, Poor Dad as an extended brochure for the game. Sharon Lechter, a CPA and former magazine editor, soon joined Kiyosaki and his wife, Kim, to create Cash Flow Technologies; the three remain partners, with Lechter as president.
Distributors initially turned down the book, but Ingram agreed to list the title in its 1997 holiday catalogue. Cash Flow Technologies also filled orders from its Web site, www.cashflowtech.com. Word of mouth among seminar attendees helped bring the book its first sales. LPC Group in Chicago finally agreed to distribute, and the first orders from Barnes & Noble and Borders came in February of 1998.
Amazon.com was also an early buyer; Rich Dad, Poor Dad has ranked among its top 50 sellers for more than a year. The Web site for the financial software Quicken includes the book on its resources list, and the e-trade industry at large is a popular market for the book.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad is now at the center of Cash Flow Technologies' line of products, which includes the board games Cash Flow and Cash Flow for Kids, and a line of video and audio tapes. The team's second book, CashFlow Quadrant, published in 1998, has sold 300,000 copies and will be joined next month by a third book, Rich Dad's Guide to Investing.
Though several trade publishers, including, it is rumored, IDG, Pocket and Time Warner, are in discussions to offers to pick up the book titles, the team is more interested in a company that can market the entire line of educational products created by Cash Flow Technologies. The company recently let Time Warner buy audio-only rights to Rich Dad, Poor Dad. When asked if the recent Time Warner-AOL merger might make Warner a good choice as buyer of the multimedia line, Rich Mom and mother of three Sharon Lechter replied, "That thought did cross my mind." Stay tuned.
A New Grisham?
I was rather skeptical the world needed another legal thriller written by a lawyer."
That was Bantam publisher Irwyn Applebaum's first reaction upon receiving Sheldon Siegel's debut novel, Special Circumstances, from agent Margret McBride last year.
But the special circumstances of the book soon shook Applebaum out of his cynicism--and into a rumored seven-figure, two-book deal with the San Francisco-based author.
First and most importantly, the book was quite simply a well-written example of the genre. "I was knocked out by the story and the characters," said Applebaum about Siegel's tale of mysterious murders within a law firm, starring what will be series sleuth Mike Daley, an ex-priest and just-fired attorney attorney of the firm.
Expected praise from a publisher perhaps, but the book flew right out of bookstores at its February 1 release.Thanks to a site review that compares Siegel's debut to that of John Grisham and Tom Clancy, the book also moved on Amazon.com's Hot 100 list.
Bantam was able to sell in 50,000 copies of the book, rare in these days for a first-time author, thanks in part to positive word of mouth among Bay Area booksellers, historically an influential lot. Siegel has a particular relationship with one of them--Book Passage--thanks to yes, a very special circumstance. In July 1993, a disgruntled former client of Siegel's law firm stormed his offices and fired an AK-47 semiautomatic machine gun, killing eight people and wounding six others. The tragedy proved to be a wakeup call for Siegel to fulfill his dream to write in the tradition of Grisham and Turow. He did this not only in classic Turow fashion--he wrote during his daily ferry ride commute from California's Marin County--but by signing up for the Mystery Writing Conference that Book Passage holds at its store.
No surprise, then, that the book has hit the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list in what is the start of a growing national build. All good news, although it may make Applebaum's job even harder. "There's going to be a lot more writing on those ferryboats," he said. .
Extra ER for 'Ecco Retro'
Looks like a connection to George Clooney is a fail-safe way to spur book sales.
HarperCollins has just taken orders that will quadruple the current copies in print for Ecco Press's trade paperback reprint of the 1962 bestseller Fail-Safe, thanks to the former ER star's upcoming live-television adaptation of the classic nuclear-war-by-accident drama. The program, which Clooney produced and stars in, is set to air on NBC on April 9.
Ecco editorial director Daniel Halpern had no idea of the tie-in potential when he acquired the reprint, which he released this past May with a 10,000-copy first printing. The book is merely the second in what HarperCollins staff is fondly calling a developing "Ecco Retro" mini-genre within the now HC imprint's list. Halpern's wife, Jeanne Carter, formerly associate publisher at Ecco and a collector of old paperback novels from the 1950s and 1960s, had convinced her husband to bring some of her favorites back into print, starting with William March's The Bad Seed in 1997.
Halpern believes there's a healthy market to return once popular commercial novels to the shelves, with smaller presses often at the forefront of exploring the possibilities. Halpern notes with delight Northeastern University Press's success with its trade paperback repackaging of Peyton Place, for example, and said Ecco was built by reprints of somewhat more literary titles such as The Sheltering Sky. "I'd say 95% of our backlist are reprints that cost only about $3,000 each," he said.
Written by Eugene Burdick (The Ninth Wave and The Ugly American ) with Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe sold about two million copies its first go-round, became a memorable 1964 film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, and is said to be the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's satire Dr. Strangelove. All those media tie-ins led Halpern to believe boomers would remember the book and might want to buy it again.
And while conventional publishing wisdom has it that tie-in books fare better when connected to heavily promoted, long-run movies than to a single TV event, the new tie-in opportunity for Fail-Safe is looking to prove the exception. Even without the draw of Clooney on the cover ("there's no time, and besides it's live television, meaning there are not the typical production stills," Halpern explained), the book is already attracting attention, thanks to the adaptation being the first live broadcast of a full-length drama on network television since CBS's Playhouse 90 productions in the 1950s. Apparently retro is working for television, too.
The Butterfly Effect
Forget all the buzz (and legal costs) connected with Pia Pera's Lo's Diary. For Zoland Press, Vladimir Nabokov's fascination with butterflies was (relatively) free and has become the basis of a bestselling book.
In Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius, published this past October to tie into the centenary of Nabokov's birth, Kurt Johnson, a lepidopterist (that's butterfly scientist to you), and New York Times editor Steve Coates share the research Nabokov conducted on the fluttery creatures when he worked at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology in the 1940s. The authors demonstrate how this study led to Nabokov's discovery of a new classification called "blues" in the field of butterflies was a great influence on his literary work.
The authors' premise has proved no flight of fancy; according to Zoland nonfiction editor and marketing director Stephen Hull. "Nabokov's Blues is our first science book and our bestselling book ever," he said.
Zoland, which is located in a two-family house in a residential part of Cambridge, Mass., was founded 13 years ago as a p try press, and nearly a third of its 15 books a year are p try collections by authors such as Patricia Smith. It is also known for its literary fiction, and was the first to publish short stories by National Book Award-winning fiction writer Ha Jin.
But its neighbor Beacon Press, across the river in Boston, won the rights to release the literary companion to Zoland's current hit, the long-awaited collection of Nabokov's p ms, short story fragments, letters and journal entries on butterflies. Seven years in the making, Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, due out in April, was edited by Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd and lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle and translated from the Russian by Nabokov's son, Dmitri Nabokov.
"Everything Nabokov wrote about butterflies is in the book," said Beacon executive editor Deanne Urmy. "It's a huge book, 800 pages with two signatures of butterfly illustrations drawn in Nabokov's own hand. To me, its publication is an event, like the publication of Martha Graham's Notebooks or E.O. Wilson's Ants. They show the inner -working of a great artist's mind."
A first serial featuring the book's "Father's Butterflies," a 40-page alternative ending Dmitri has written to his father's The Gift, will be a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly in April. An excerpt from the book will also appear in American Scholar, and British rights have been sold to Penguin U.K.
In addition to a 12,500-copy projected first printing for the $45 trade edition, Beacon is planning a limited $150 slipcased edition that will be signed by all three collaborators. A tour is just starting to take shape, and includes a reading by Dmitri Nabokov at, appropriately enough, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
And while it might seem that Zoland's book has been out too long to net any significant new attention, the smart folks at Doubleday are now set to offer Nabokov's Blues and Nabokov's Butterflies as a dual Reader's Club Subscription selection in July. Just call it the butterfly effect. --Judith Rosen
Call for Information
Issue: April 10
Feature: Summer Reading
Send info to: Judy Quinn
Deadline: No later than Mar. 6
NEEDED: Hot marketing programs for books being released during the summer (May-August) season. We're interested in innovative plans around a "big book" laydown date as well as programs to introduce new authors or break out relatively unknown ones. We're also looking for tie-in programs to summer season events (Korean War anniversary, summer movies, etc). Show us the fall season isn't the only time for serious attention to books! Make your case to Judy Quinn at jquinn@cahners.com or via fax at 212-463-6631.
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