Pulp Nonfiction

Michael Viner is at it again. Mainstream New York book editors turned up their noses at a memoir by disgraced former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, but Viner, the film and music producer-turned-publisher, snapped it up last year days after his Beverly Hills-based publishing company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Out last month, “Burning Down My Masters’ House: My Life at the New York Times” (New Millennium Entertainment) is the latest sensational effort from Viner, whose previous imprint, Dove Entertainment Inc., issued a string of bestsellers on high-visibility scandals involving O.J. Simpson and Erik and Lyle Menendez. We talked books with an unapologetic literary showman.

Why would you put Jayson Blair in print when so many other publishers took a pass?

I felt like what Jayson had to say was important. He was, if you would, the canary in the coal mine. A lot of things in his career, serious mistakes he had made, changed publishing forever and the book would be one more chapter. The book has changed policy at the New York Times, and other papers usually follow the New York Times’ lead.

Isn’t that book title, “Burning Down My Masters’ House,” a play on the race issue?

I think at one level, but it’s [also] setting down his own house. It’s referring to his own house, his own ethnicity. I think he’s embarrassed as a black man, as well as a man, for what he’d done. But his master’s house, I think, refers to his family as well as his boss.

How could you vet a book by a confessed fabricator?

We used a series of different people to vet the book. Legal as well as other people, including two people within the New York Times organization. I won’t go into it any more than that.

You have said that you paid Blair an advance of $150,000. Can this really be money well-spent?

[A little more than a week after its debut, the book had sold less than 1,500 copies, according to a mid-March report from Nielsen BookScan, a publishing sales tracker.]

It is not something we’ll lose money on. It’s just a question of how much we’ll make. Jayson has had more press and more reviews than we’ve ever had. The Washington Post was a wonderful review. Variety was a very good, intelligent review. Publishers Weekly was a very important review. To be in those journals, well received was a wonderful thing. There have also been kill pieces.

Critics are shocked, shocked that Blair is making the public-relations rounds as a book author. Your response?

They weren’t outraged by Rick Bragg [a former New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter]. Or Newt Gingrich or all those other people who resigned for doing wrong things. Basically, if people weren’t given a second chance and jobs after they’d done wrong things, there would be no Fox News. I believe that everybody deserves a second chance. There was a different standard applied to Jayson than others.

What criteria do you use to evaluate a project?

I have to think it’s commercial. We can’t afford to promote a book and put as much money behind it as Simon & Schuster or Knopf or any of the others. We have to find a book that’s promotable and that we believe in.

You seem to specialize in the lurid memoir. . .

The fact is that we do fewer and fewer of them. Our high-profile books are about 10% of our list, but they are the ones that you write about.

Is there any point where you draw the line?

We just turned down a book from Aaron Tonken, the guy who did all the charity embezzlement money. We started fact-checking it and it wasn’t reliable enough. That’s exactly where you say, “Life is too short.” We have been offered 11 or 12 books on Scott Peterson and four or five on Kobe Bryant. Those are the kinds of books we don’t want to publish. You can only go so far in the wife-killing and raping genres.

What’s in the pipeline right now?

We have a new book with Bill Maher. The last one is still selling well. Richard Hack’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover is coming out next month and is brilliant. It’s the best book we’ve ever published. We have a book with [private investigator] Anthony Pellicano that’s going to raise some eyebrows. It’s a fine book. It’s a roman a clef and it says how Hollywood works on a certain level.

Do you read for your own pleasure?

We recorded [Larry McMurtry’s] “Lonesome Dove,” so I’m partial to that. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a great book. For escapism, Robert Parker is a perfect constructionist, not a wasted word. Right now I’m reading John Le Carre. He’s a master at what he does. Madeleine Albright’s book was a terrific, unexpected book. But I like the classics much more than contemporary books.