The ironies of the publishing business can be rich.
Consider this: a couple of years ago, Tina Brown, the blonde, British, iconic media figure known for paying high fees to writers for colorful, opinionated magazine articles, received from Doubleday a rumored $2-million advance to write a colorful, opinionated book about the late Princess Diana, a blonde, British icon who many (including Brown) contend was created by the media, which naturally included Brown herself. At the time, some said it was a brilliant match-up: while there had been and would be many, many other books about the doomed princess of Wales, there seemed to be nobody better for the job than Brown. I think some wags at the time even dubbed the project Blonde on Blonde.
Cut to summer 2007. Brown's The Diana Chronicles is set to be released in June, accompanied by an excerpt in none other than Vanity Fair, the magazine that Brown edited from 1984 to 1992. (It will also be excerpted in the British press.) One of the strong themes in the book is the media and how it worked with and against Diana. In fact, much of the "new material" in the book—and some of the most interesting—includes miniprofiles of the Di-centric journos (the Daily Mail's Richard Kay, for example, and Diana's handpicked Boswell, Andrew Morton) and their relationships with the princess and with each other. Brown herself is a character in the book, having supped with as well as written critically about her subject. Oh, and speaking of media, Doubleday is trying hard to control the media coverage of this book; the house—and surely Brown herself—is too smart to risk a backlash by formally embargoing The Diana Chronicles, although it is asking critics to hold reviews until pub date; on the other hand, no one knows better than Brown, whose magazines routinely bought first serial excerpts and demanded that no other outlets be allowed prepub access, how useful semi-embargoes, and their inevitable leaks, can be. (As I write, there have been two major stories about the book this week, one in the Daily Mail that misrepresented some of the content and another in the Wall Street Journal.) Why expect anything less from someone who was once the poster child for the word "buzz"?
Still, as we all know, buzz does not necessarily a bestseller make—and Brown is not quite the media figure she used to be. According to a B&N staffer quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Diana books are "trending downwards." Still, there are at least a half-dozen new Di-tles coming this summer, timed to the 10th anniversary of the princess's death. Will Tina Brown's special perspective make hers a breakout?
At the London Book Fair, I put this question to a group of British book editors. They suggested that if Brown managed to attract both the diehard Diana-phile willing to skim through some of Brown's inside-baseball explanations and the Vanity Fair—type reader who would not normally buy something so downmarket as, say, a butler's tell-all, the book will, indeed, succeed.
And wouldn't that be just perfect: a book about a princess hounded by the press makes a star, again, of the writer who was once the Queen of Buzz.
Maybe somebody should write a book about that.
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