Take It to the Bank

Hey Ellen,

Bill and Hillary apparently won’t have to pass the hat around for their legal fees anymore. The former president, ready to launch his memoirs in June, and his First Lady, already pushing the paperback version of hers, are cashing in on publishing’s latest wave of celebrity books. 

Knopf, the tony Random House imprint headed by Sonny Mehta, has said it paid Bill upfront more than $10 million for world rights to his soon-to-be-published book. Insiders put the figure at $12 million. But that will be just the beginning of what the former President can make with this book project. 

Knopf is planning a hefty first print run of 1.5 million copies, Mehta announced this week. With that number of books circulating, plus serial rights, it shouldn’t be long before Bill makes up his advance and starts drawing additional royalties at about $4 a book, minus his agent’s fee. He’ll also reap profits on the audio version, which he himself is recording.  

In June, Bill presents his memoirs, which he has entitled “My Life,” for the first time, before a largely sympathetic audience — Book Expo, an annual gathering of independent booksellers. It’s the same place (and the same month) Hillary chose to launch her book, “Living History.”

I remember my amazement at the booksellers’ enthusiasm for the senator: Some of her staunchest supporters actually stood on their chairs to cheer her on. And they delivered: More than one million copies of “Living History” were sold in one month.

Of course, Hillary not only had a more interesting title than Bill, but also a built-in audience — all of us who wanted to hear her side of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Long ago paying back her advance to Simon & Schuster (her book reportedly generated $2 million in foreign rights alone), she has been reaping royalties on both the hardcover sales and audio revenues.

Her sales have been phenomenal: worldwide, 2.8 million copies of the hardcover are in print, about half of that number in the North American market. Now add to the sales from the newly-released paperback, out with a first-run printing of 525,000, and you come to a tally far beyond the original $8 million advance.
 
Who says book writing doesn’t pay off? 

Hi Margo,

Ka-ching, ka-ching. The final figure the Clintons will rake in is even greater than you think: Where most writers pay dearly for the agent who carries their water, Bill and Hillary both have a friend in Robert Barnett, a D.C. lawyer who charges by the hour rather than taking the standard 15 percent. But before you grab the phone to call him, that’s $750 per hour, slightly above minimum wage. For Hillary, using Barnett added more than $1 million to her coin purse (as you know, in Washington, a million just isn’t a million any more). Barnett charged her a paltry $50,000 fee, a fraction of the seven figures a typical agent would have collected just for her advance alone.  

Will the former pres earn back his incredible (and officially unreported) advance? Slam dunk, to use that now familiar inside-the-beltway phrase. 

“The way a deal works, there are all types of money flows — foreign rights, enormous first serial, audio,” Barnett said about Bill’s book when I called him at his 220-lawyer firm. Of the 1.5 million print run, Barnett notes that Knopf is being ambitious but not unrealistic. The huge sales for Hillary’s book and the current momentum behind a book by another Barnett client, Bob Woodward, suggest that “My Life” will have mighty long legs. And, of course, it will be supported by what Barnett calls “the mother and father of all book tours.”   

Speaking of his agenting activities, Barnett put it this way: “I don’t make sense for the first-time author from Vermont.” No kidding. He is, however, a good fit for the author of a foreordained megaseller, and that’s why his agenting chores have grown to consume about 10 percent of his law practice. That’s right, it isn’t just the Clintons and Woodward who are getting this sweet deal: Barnett’s list of 180 authors reads like a who’s who of Washington’s political and media elite. 

If I’m uneasy about the chumminess of it all, he doesn’t mind. “You can be bothered all you want,” he said, but that doesn’t translate into any legal or ethical issues for celebrities who cash in big-time on their superior networking. In sum, Barnett is a better deal than Costco for the bigwigs, including Karen Hughes and Cokie Roberts, two authors who are also riding the current bestseller list. Of those who fussed over Hillary Clinton’s $8 mil advance, saying she should give it back and just take the royalties, he said, “The flap was a joke, because the people who made the flap didn’t know that we submitted the matter to the ethics committee.”   

And, of course, the ultimate joke is that Hillary’s book long ago sold through its advance. By now she’s just sitting back and watching those royalty checks flow in.

Barnett got into the book business through the back door in 1984 via Geraldine Ferraro’s debate team, for which he played the role of then Vice-President Bush (he was also Clinton’s practice partner for the 1992 debates). When Ferraro received a seven-figure advance to write a book after the election, he made a common-sense offer: Let me handle the agent chores and I’ll save you some money.  

He subsequently went to the woodshed with David Stockman, interviewing to represent the former Reagan budget director in his book deal. (He plays both sides of the fence, in other words.) Rolling forward to the present, he just sold Bob Dole’s book about World War II. He also took care of Tim Russert, who has a book coming in May. Others who seek his counsel: Ari Fleischer, Mary Matalin, James Carville, and even Donna Brazille, the Democratic operative whose rags-to-riches story will bear the intriguing title, “Cooking with Grease.”

Besides the war on terror and an evenly divided electorate, Barnett says that this year’s “unprecedented” wave of important political books can be chalked up to the fact that book publishers are more nimble than they used to be. “The gestation time has gone from six months to six weeks,” he said — but only, of course, for books that are worth the extra expense. This is how the rich get richer, Margo…


Hey Ellen,

Whew. With Barnett, I think you may have found the missing link that connects the dots in this new wave of celebrity books flooding the market! This time ’round the celebrities are not from Hollywood, but from Washington. Next up is former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson’s “The Politics of Truth,” in which Wilson is said to finger the person he thinks leaked the identity of his wife, Valerie, as an undercover officer to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. And just before the fall elections, brace yourself for gossipmeister Kitty Kelley’s biography of the Bush family.

But, of course, it must be pointed out that, like other recent slam dunks, these high-priced celebrity books — whether the celebrity is from Hollywood or Washington — don’t ALWAYS work out for the publisher. 

Random House never made back the $8 million advance it shelled out to the Pope for his memoirs. And what about Ronald Reagan’s post-White House book? Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda told Brian Lamb of C-SPAN that the book ended up selling only 15-20,000 copies. Considering the fact that S & S paid Reagan an $8.5 million advance for a two-book deal, it’s no wonder Korda called it “the biggest flop in publishing history.”

But Bill Clinton himself knows something about disastrous books: The sales for his last effort, published during his presidency in 1996, were lower than the Democratic vote in Kennebunkport. But the title sums up perfectly what publishers are thinking now: The book was called “Between Hope and History.”