Move Over, Madonna--Clinton’s Arrived : Publishing: Suddenly, politics is selling as it has never sold before. Booksellers are eager to prolong the fascination with Campaign ’92.

Is Bill Clinton better than “Sex”? The answer may be coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Flushed with the success of Madonna’s breathless pose--which topped most best-seller lists--the folks at Warner Books are rushing 100,000 copies of a photo-documentary about Clinton into bookstores before Christmas. It is, they admit, a different kind of stocking stuffer.

“Our advance orders for the Clinton book (“Clinton: Portrait of Victory”) have been phenomenal and, after Madonna, booksellers trust us when we say something is hot,” says Warner publicist Ellen Herrick. “We tell them this whole election was hot.”

Hot, as in rising hardcover sales and juicy paperback bonanzas for the sluggish publishing industry. As was not the case in past campaigns, when readers grew weary of Beltway punditry, books this year by Clinton, Vice President-elect Al Gore and Ross Perot caught fire in the malls of America.

Driven by record voter turnout, they continue to sell after the election, confounding many experts.

“Your conventional wisdom is that sales for campaign books go limp after a few weeks, if they do that well at all,” says one literary agent. “But readers seem excited this year, so all that stuff could mean nothing.”

The message is not lost on publishers, who are quick to sniff a trend. Over the next few months, dozens of election-related books will flood into bookstores, capitalizing on what the industry expects to be a continuing fascination with Campaign ’92.

But as with anything else in publishing, the rejection factor could be high, and hotshot executives who talk a good game now could wake up the morning after with a bad hangover and empty pockets.

It’s happened before. After the 1988 and 1984 elections, instant books by Newsweek reporters sank like stones, and campaign histories by writers like Jack Germond and Jules Witcover also failed to rack up huge sales. The lesson, say some insiders, is that readers who have been saturated with an election don’t want to rehash it in book form several months after the fact.

“We try to steer clear of those instant populist books of the moment,” says Stuart Applebaum, publicity director for Bantam Books. “Times have changed in publishing, and when you do these kind of projects, you’re in ferocious competition with other aspects of the mass media, especially daily newscasts on television and the news weeklies. It’s a pretty tough go.”

Despite these danger signs, many publishers are cheered by the success of political books this year--and hope to strike while the fire’s still hot.

No one could have guessed, for example, that Gore’s environmental treatise, “Earth in the Balance,” would have spent 22 weeks on the bestseller lists. Interest in the book soared after Clinton tapped the Tennessee senator to be his running mate, and Dutton Books is rushing out a paperback version for $13 that should hit bookstores by Jan. 4, before Inauguration Day.

“When I was back in college, I wouldn’t have even looked at a title like this,” says publicist Jennifer Romanello. “But my younger brother is already reading the book. It sunk into people’s consciousness and became a campaign issue, so we’ve had a great response from booksellers ordering it.”

The only problem, she concedes, is that Gore’s status as vice president-elect makes it harder to generate conventional publicity.

“We can’t exactly take this guy on the road for a TV interview in St. Louis,” says Romanello. “But maybe we’ll get him to do some radio.”

If this was the Year of the Woman, some publishers hope it will also be the year of the Woman Book Buyer. Two titles are due on Hillary Clinton, including an instant book by former New York Times reporter Judith Warner from New American Library. In September, Warner Books will publish a biography by the Washington Post’s Donnie Radcliffe.

Meanwhile, banking on Carol Moseley Braun’s stunning success in the Illinois Democratic primary last spring, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich signed up the candidate to write her autobiography. Voicing cautious optimism, the company expects her book to perform differently than conventional campaign memoirs.

“A lot of earlier books, like the memoirs of Ed Meese and Michael Deaver, didn’t do so great because they all told the same story, over and over,” says Claire Wachtel, who is editing Braun’s book, due out next fall. “But I think this one could be different, because it’s a story about the first black woman senator. She’s a role model for lots of readers.”

Other political celebrities are not so easy to gauge. Would a book by Clinton strategist James Carville make money or wind up on the remainder tables, as other campaign war stories have? What about the lineup of departing Bush Administration officials, like James A. Baker III or Richard Darman?

“There’s already been some talk that Carville and Mary Matalin (his paramour and media counterpart in the Bush campaign) might do a book together, to show what the campaign was like from their point of view,” says Peter Osnos, publisher of Times Books. “It would have to be something different, maybe off-center, which could capture readers’ imaginations.”

The problem, Osnos continues, is that millions of Americans are suffering from campaign withdrawal. They need a rest from C-SPAN call-ins and Larry King love-ins, a chance to catch their breath and get on with real life.

Sensing this, Times Books has delayed publication of a campaign history by Newsweek reporters that, in earlier years, would have been delivered to stores before Thanksgiving. The publishers hope that their book, now scheduled for next fall, will convey a sense of perspective and history it might otherwise lack.

Many other publishers, however, are rushing into the fray. Books are due out early next year on failed domestic policy in the Bush years, public recommendations to shake up government and the policy positions Clinton took as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, an advisory group that helped craft his campaign platform. Roger Clinton, the President-elect’s brother, is considering a book proposal, and some agents speculate that Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, might also be in line for a lucrative deal.

Yet nothing is guaranteed in the book biz, and success or failure frequently boils down to luck and timing. Before the Gulf War, Hyperion Books signed up Tom Rosenstiel, the Los Angeles Times’ media reporter, to do a book about 1992 campaign coverage. At the time, few expected Bush’s fortunes to plummet or the campaign to become so interesting. The company will publish “Strange Bedfellows: TV Anchors, Talk-Show Hosts and the Presidential Candidates in the Improbable Campaign of 1992” next July.

“For the first time in many years, we had an election that wasn’t just a horse race, but a debate over ideas,” says Osnos.

“The bestseller list reflected that, but the challenge now is to publish books with lasting relevance. This can’t be a quick hit like Madonna. . . . You have to think about long-term value.”

It’s a perspective that booksellers welcome. In Brentwood, for example, customers at Dutton’s Books bought a fair number of election-year titles but not a huge amount, says owner Doug Dutton. Generally, his customers are attracted to more in-depth titles, like “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s in-depth account of the 1988 race.

“For us, the quickie books sell right after an event, within a couple of days, and after that I don’t have much luck with them,” Dutton says. “Obviously, there are some exceptions, like the Ross Perot book (‘United We Stand’), but this whole year has been an anomaly for booksellers.”

In previous campaigns, Dutton notes, personal manifestoes or hard-edged tracts like 1964’s “None Dare Call It Treason” were purchased in large numbers by activists and distributed free to voters. Now, they command six-figure advances and linger for weeks on the bestseller lists.

For Sarah Simons, a buyer at Book Soup in West Hollywood, election recaps and quickie memoirs rarely find a mass audience.

“We found that the Perot book sold well initially but then slowed down tremendously after he re-entered the race,” she says.

“Looking ahead, I’d say that customers will be more interested in books that tell them what’s going to happen. They’re going to be more interested in the future of this country than what happened in an election the previous year. That can get pretty old.”

Like incumbent politicians, publishers insist they see the winds of change. But in the book world, some traditions are inviolate--like the fat book contract that awaits a departing President.

Within hours after leaving the White House, for example, former President Ronald Reagan inked a reported $5-million multi-book deal with Simon & Schuster. George Bush is likely to sign a healthy book contract as well, even though he leaves office on a downbeat note, says Bantam’s Applebaum.

Besides Bush, publicists suggest that memoirs of the outgoing Administration also are likely from Barbara Bush, Baker and Vice President Dan Quayle. Budget Director Darman is due out with a volume next year, and one expert speculates that Millie the White House spaniel-author might have another book in her as well. On the Democratic side, Zebra Books has already announced plans for a cartoon book about Socks, the Clintons’ pet cat.

Stranger things have happened, says Stephen Schragis, president of Carol Publishing. He’s amazed, for example, that the Clinton biography his firm put out a year ago has just been sold to publishers in Germany, South Korea, China and Japan.

“I never would have expected this, because I’ve lost my shirt on bad books, like everybody else in this business,” he says. “But sometimes you just get lucky. It’s a crapshoot, like politics itself.”