From two presidential conventions to the (possible) release of a Michael Moore movie, the next few months will bring plenty of events with loud political resonance. But as the summer approaches, three publishers are throwing their chips down on an unlikely card: a government report on the September 11 attacks.
An eclectic mix of houses—Norton, St. Martin's and Public Affairs—are hoping the official release of the National Commission on Terrorist Acts (aka the 9-11 commission) report on July 26 , combined with the heat its investigation has generated so far, will create the foundation for a bestseller. But despite the low cost associated with the public domain material and a positive track record for similar books, challenges lurk everywhere, from the report's free availability on the Web to its potentially bureaucratic prose to the reliance on a government timetable.
"There's a considerable amount of risk," said Sean Desmond, editor of the St. Martin's edition. "It's a difficult sales call. 'How much will the book cost?' 'I don't know.' 'When's it going to come out? I can't tell you.' "
Three-Card Monte
Because of the risk involved, each house is putting its own spin on the publication, in what has become a kind of lab experiment on how to take the same raw material and craft a better book than the competition.
For Public Affairs, that means a trade paperback with an introduction by New York Times editor Craig Whitney, and text compiled by Newsweek editor Steven Strasser, who's known for his ability to pull large amounts of documentation into a coherent narrative. The house made a key tradeoff so that the book, titled The 9/11 Investigations, could hit the market first. Instead of waiting for the final report in July, it's offering a combination of many of the sub-committee reports and excerpts from the House-Senate joint inquiry report, including testimony from Richard Clarke, George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice. Despite the house's six-figure success with The Starr Report, it's printing a modest 40,000 copies that go on sale June 15.
Norton has made the opposite gamble on its edition, which will have a first printing of 500,000. The publisher beat out Public Affairs and other houses to win the blessing of the commission and release the official report, which is expected to contain a narrative about what went wrong before 9/11 and recommendations on how to improve security. The publisher is betting that the commission's imprimatur will outweigh the lack of editing and additional commentary as well as the late-July release.
The Thomas Dunne imprint of St. Martin's, while not the report's official publisher, is waiting for the commission's final release—and the reaction to it. That means the house will publish about a week after the report appears. The house will attempt to top Norton with as many as 100 pages of New York Times analysis, most of which will come from the coverage several days after its release. Dunne is also undercutting Norton on the price—by charging $6 or $7 for its mass market edition, compared to Norton's $10 trade paperback.
Covering the Board
The chains are reported to be taking a strong position on all three books. SMP has also received a positive response to its mass market edition from airport outlets. The wild card remains the price clubs, whose support is often necessary for selling large quantities, although they don't often carry paperbacks.
Some independents are also skeptical. Karl Killian of Brazos Bookstore in Houston took the minimum number of the Norton book and hasn't placed orders on the other two, out of concern that a high level of distraction from other news and the bureaucratic nature of the investigation could tarnish their appeal. Killian rejected easy comparisons to such bestselling government reports as The Pentagon Papers, because that collection of leaked documents related to the Vietnam War "was contraband. There was a sense of being in on something that you might not have known otherwise. A commission report is not that way."
Still, the commercial performance of government reports since the 1964 Warren Commission investigation of the assassination of JFK reveal a strange paradox: Each title has been released to a readership with vastly greater access to the original source material, and yet nearly each title has sold more copies than the previous one. When the only way to obtain the Warren report was in book form, the editions from Doubleday and McGraw-Hill sold only about 65,00 copies combined in the first year, while Bantam's edition made PW's bestseller list for only a few weeks. Two decades later, in 1987, Times Books sold out its 600,000-copy print run of TheTower Report on the Iran-contra hearings. A decade after that, the three editions of The Starr Report, which was also available on the Web, broke the one-million—copy mark. Whatever has changed in the last 40 years—the increase in news coverage, or an exponential increase in conspiracy theorists—it has apparently only helped these books.
One thing that has certainly changed—likely for the better—is the process by which a house obtains the material. When Times Books produced the Tower report, the house's Peter Osnos (now of Public Affairs) stood on line outside the Government Printing Office to get a copy for reproduction. He won't need to pull any concert-ticket ploys this time around—all of the reports are easily downloadable from the Web.
