Perfect Timing Elevates Clarke’s Book to the Top

At the Athena Book Store in Kalamazoo, Mich., owner George Hebben ordered six copies of Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies” because, he said, he had an inkling they would sell.

“That’s a lot of books for us,” he said. “This is not ‘The South Beach Diet.’ ” Now, he said, he has 10 requests for “Against All Enemies” on back order, and turns away customers daily.

The book, by the former counterterrorism chief for presidents Bush and Clinton, is hardly a light read. There are discussions of executive orders (by number), unpronounceable acronyms for government agencies and bureaucratic language about “option drafts” and “military snatch teams.”

So why has it shot up on the bestseller list -- Simon & Schuster says it is in its eighth printing, with 650,000 books in print -- when most Washington policy tomes, including many on terrorism, sit gathering dust on bookshelves?

“It was chemistry,” said Peter Osnos, president of Public Affairs Books, a nonfiction publisher. “It came at precisely the right moment.”

Indeed, the timing of the book’s release could not have been better. Clarke’s publisher, a division of Simon & Schuster, booked him on CBS’ “60 Minutes” the day before it was released and followed that with appearances on other high-profile shows. Three days after his “60 Minutes” appearance, when Clarke testified before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a storm hit bookstores throughout the country.

“The first day of the hearings I sold all I had left,” Hebben said. “It was the hearings.”

By all accounts, Clarke’s inside account of the war on terrorism in the Clinton and Bush administrations is a bestseller nationwide. Barnes & Noble says the book is No. 1 at all 647 of its bookstores. Borders reports that in its first week on sale, it outpaced “The Price of Loyalty” by Ron Suskind, a look at the Bush White House from the perspective of former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill. It also, in its first week, sold more than half of what Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoirs did in the same period -- and “Living History” was a runaway bestseller.

Some credit the White House and its Republican allies for increasing Clarke’s notoriety, and sales, by accusing him of exaggeration and attempting to release previously classified testimony in hopes of finding a case of perjury against him.

“The White House helped sell it,” said Phillipa Brophy, president of Sterling Lord Literistic, a New York literary agency.

And so did anti-Bush sentiment, already fueled by O’Neill’s claims about Bush’s vacant stares during meetings, and by arms inspector David Kay about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

“At the moment, overwhelmingly, books are either for George W. Bush or against George W. Bush,” said Stephen Hess, who studies the presidency at the centrist Brookings Institution.

Citing liberals Molly Ivins, Michael Moore and Al Franken, and conservative counterparts Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, Hess described a Washington culture in which the shouting on cable networks has been transferred to book publishing.

South Dakota Democratic Sen. “Tom Daschle wrote a wonderful book on Congress [“Like No Other Time”] and nobody bought it,” Hess said. “It says something about how hardened the arteries have become politically. There’s no room in the middle for people who don’t shout.”

However loud his impact, Clarke was not a shouter, but a new breed of celebrity author: the until-now-insider expert who turned against his sponsors. Now, a tsunami of coordinated publicity is being readied for other policy books to be published this year.

One is “The Politics of Truth,” by Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador whose wife’s role as a CIA operative was disclosed by columnist Robert Novak. Wilson believes her identity was leaked by administration officials in retaliation for his criticisms of the Iraq war.

Audrey Wolf, Wilson’s Washington agent, said there would be a national “lay down” -- a blanket one-day release intended to deter leaks -- on April 30, followed by appearances by the former diplomat on NBC’s “Dateline” that evening, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” the following Sunday, on NBC’s “Today” show Monday morning and on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Monday evening. Already, Wolf said, she is besieged by production companies “panting over movie rights.”

Publicists now talk of targeting the audience, and of tethering authors to the news, so their writing seems as topical as an Internet news flash. “The old cookie-cutter approach had less to do with news of the day, and more to do with placing authors on shows with large ratings,” said Cathy Saypol, a New York publicist who specializes in policy books. “A really good publicity campaign matches the subject with a realistic and appropriate potential audience -- not just any audience with a television set.”

As a result, Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising for Barnes & Noble, said in a statement, “All the current affairs books are doing better.... We anticipate the trend to continue.”

To be sure, not everyone in the country is poring over all 304 pages of “Against All Enemies.” At Prairie Books in Hastings, Neb., a farming community of about 24,000, owner Jane Tushaus said her two bestsellers are “The Purpose-Driven Life,” an inspirational book by Rick Warren, pastor of a Southern Baptist mega-church in Lake Forest, Calif., and “The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands,” by radio therapist Laura Schlessinger.

In the last 10 days, Tushaus said, she has sold perhaps six copies of Clarke’s book. One, she said, went to a woman who told her, “If you’re a Democrat in Hastings, you kind of keep it quiet.”