Their Talk Fills the Aisles, Too : Radio: Now that the promotional storm for books by Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern has abated, who will win the sales war?

If you’re tired of hearing Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh boast endlessly about their success while peddling their best-selling books, you’re apparently not alone.

Believe it or not, even Limbaugh and Stern have grown tired of hearing themselves talk--at least anywhere but behind the microphone of their syndicated radio shows.

“Rush is press weary,” Kit Carson, whom Limbaugh calls his “chief of staff,” explained this week in turning down an interview request regarding his second book, “See, I Told You So,” which hit bookstores Thursday. “He’s punch drunk as far as interviews go.”

Stern also rejected an interview. “I don’t think anybody could have done any better book promotion than I did,” he said on his program this week. “What more can one person do?”

Stern spent last month awhirl in a promotional blitz. During the month of October, a day didn’t go by without some television, magazine or newspaper coverage nationally of Stern and his best-selling book, “Private Parts,” according to officials at KLSX-FM (97.1), the station that broadcasts Stern’s bawdy show in Southern California. He made more than a dozen television appearances and held forth in even more newspaper and magazine interviews, including the cover of Time magazine, which he shared with Limbaugh.

Limbaugh said all the publicity he has received in the last year since the success of his first book, “The Way Things Ought to Be,” led him to impose a ban this week on talking to the press.

The ban conveniently went into effect after his Playboy interview hit the stands this week and after the taping of Friday’s installment of “20/20,” in which he was interviewed by Barbara Walters.

His new book has already broken American publishing records with a first printing of 2 million copies and an advance sale of 500,000 copies, according to his editor, Judith Regan, vice president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Regan also edited Stern’s “Private Parts.”

So, after all is hyped and done, a burning question persists: Who will win the book wars?

*

Stern, the self-proclaimed “king of all media,” or Limbaugh, the self-proclaimed “epitome of morality and virtue”? The raunchy personality “crucified by the FCC” for on-air segments such as “Butt Bongo” and “Lesbian Dial-a-Date,” or the political pundit and pompous originator of such concepts as “feminazis” and “ditto heads”?

If you ask Regan which book will draw the most buyers, you’ll get a politic response, not surprisingly, since she edited both books and considers the two “genius communicators.”

“I hope they’re both No. 1,” Regan said. “No. 1 or No. 2, who cares? They’re both incredibly successful phenomena. The book thing for both of them has been extremely good for their careers. . . . But it’s crazy to compare them. It’s apples and oranges. Rush is like Ronald Reagan and Howard Stern is like Elvis.”

“Private Parts” hit the bookstores last month and is now in its eighth printing, with 1,050,000 copies in print. For three weeks it has been No. 1 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, with many bookstores selling out almost as fast as the new copies come in. It was hailed as the fastest-rising book in Simon & Schuster’s history, prompting David Letterman to quip, “They must be so proud.”

The record first printing for “See, I Told You So,” which Regan describes as “a serious but interesting and entertaining conservative manifesto,” indicates that the publisher is expecting a higher demand than for Stern’s book--which perhaps isn’t surprising since Limbaugh is heard on 632 stations to Stern’s 15, and Limbaugh has already sold 3 million copies of his first book. “The Way Things Ought to Be” came out in September, 1992, and was at the top of most bestseller lists for nearly a year.

Despite the high expectations, however, Limbaugh’s second book was off to a lackluster start Thursday, creating less of a stir than Stern’s book did on its first day, judging by a brief survey of Southern California bookstores.

*

“There hasn’t been a rush. We’ve sold about a dozen,” said Robert Flores, manager of Waldenbooks in West Los Angeles’ Westside Pavilion. “Stern’s has been selling great. He did much better on the first day out. We sold out our first shipment within about two days or so. It’ll probably be about a week or so before we sell out on Limbaugh’s book.”

Bookstores in Orange County reported better sales but said the first-day reaction to Limbaugh’s book still paled in comparison to Stern’s.

“It’s been doing rather well. We sold 39 copies between 10 (a.m.) and 4 (p.m.),” said assistant manager Carol Trimeloni of Super Crown Books in Irvine. “That’s real good considering that it just became available. . . . Our sales right now aren’t as great as Howard Stern’s were the very first day, but it’s picking up, and I expect it to be almost as big a seller.”

Still, Limbaugh predicts “huge profits” from his book and told callers to his show Thursday not to be intimidated by “liberals who work in bookstores.”

“Be confident,” Limbaugh told a caller who said he’d been harassed by a bookstore clerk. “Smile, don’t get mad. . . . Buy two. Get aggressive with them. Don’t let them talk you out of it.”

(A clerk at a Studio City bookstore who asked not to be identified said that her store had sold eight copies of Limbaugh’s book Thursday, in contrast to selling out Stern’s book the first day. “The sales have not been overwhelming,” she said. “We’re all thrilled.”)

Although he rarely chooses to comment on Stern, Limbaugh was quoted in Time magazine as saying he was against the federal government fining radio stations for indecent speech, as the Federal Communications Commission has done repeatedly with Stern’s broadcasts. But, he added, “I didn’t say I think what he’s doing is right or good.”

Stern has been less charitable about Limbaugh.

“I heard Rush’s new book reads like a textbook,” Stern said on his morning show this week. “I don’t think you’re going to sell many of those. Rush Limbaugh had a No. 1 bestseller for a bunch of reasons: His show is on in 600 markets . . . and he’s on middays. If I went on midday, I would beat (him) into the ground, that . . . big, fat junk heap.”

Limbaugh, who is heard locally on KFI-AM (640), has a daily estimated audience of 20 million nationwide; Stern has about 4 million. In the Los Angeles-area market, the two compete against each other between 9 and 10 a.m. and into part of the next hour. Between 9 and 10, Limbaugh was No. 1 in the most recent Arbitron ratings survey, with an average audience of 223,300 listeners, while Stern was third with 150,400.