Home
Like any publisher, Random House chief, Harold Evans, has had his hits and misses: Marlon Brando's autobiography was a $5 million debacle, but Colin Powell's memoir and the novel Primary Colors were enormous successes. Still, paying $2.5 million for Dick Morris' campaign tome has put Evans on the spot -- especially since he secretly cut the deal while Morris was still on the job as President Clinton's chief campaign strategist, seven months before Morris was brought down by an affair with a prostitute.
Since Morris never fully addresses the scandal, hardly anyone in the book industry thinks that Behind the Oval Office will make money. ''There's no way in the world that book will earn out,'' says a rival publisher. Indeed, it would have to sell half a million copies, and that's almost unheard-of for an inside-the-Beltway account. No one will feel sorry for the smug, unrepentant Morris if the book flops. But whether Evans, a former newspaper editor -- and husband of New Yorker editor Tina Brown -- will feel the heat from such a major money loser is another story.
The general feeling is that he won't: Money is rarely the deciding factor with Si Newhouse, the press-shy head of the privately held Advance Publications, which owns Random House. ''It depends entirely on what Si Newhouse thinks of Harry, not on what the balance sheet says,'' says the head of a competing house. ''And obviously, Si likes Harry.'' Still, a $2.5 million advance is something even Random House can ill afford to write off. Evans struggled to get the book out in November -- possibly hoping for a sales bounce from the elections -- but couldn't do it. ''The manuscript was in,'' says a Random House insider, ''but it needed more work. They just couldn't pull it off that fast.''
The company still hopes to defeat the naysayers. The first printing of 150,000 copies was followed by a second pressrun of 25,000. And although serial rights in U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek fell through after copies of the book were leaked to the New York Daily News and The Washington Post, there have been some foreign sales. But a sampling of bookstores found that Oval Office was hardly jumping off the shelves. During its first five days out, only two copies were sold at Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C.'s premier political bookstore, and just seven at Coliseum Books in New York City. ''They'll do the best they can until the end of the month,'' predicts the head of another publishing house. ''And then they'll see it was a loser, and it'll be, 'Dick who?'''
You Might Also Like
- Book Review BEHIND THE OVAL OFFICE | Dana Kennedy
- Book News BEST & WORST 1997/BOOKS | Alexandra Jacobs
