Books About Enron to Debut as Interest Ebbs

Publishers are undaunted by lukewarm interest in the first wave of books chronicling the failure of Enron Corp. and are heavily promoting two more destined for bookstores -- one on Tuesday, the other in October.

Literary agents say they face a challenge of captivating readers.

“There is much bigger, badder news going on in the world today, which I would say doesn’t make Enron a diminutive story, but it’s not as hugely important and captivating a story as it was,” said literary agent Richard Pine, president of Arthur Pine Associates Inc., who has represented authors of business books.

Doubleday’s “Power Failure,” written by Texas Monthly editor Mimi Swartz with former Enron executive Sherron S. Watkins contributing, got good reviews. But its March release coincided with the war in Iraq, adding another hurdle to competition from four Enron titles released since June 2002.

The rush of titles poses a challenge even if consumers are buying books, said Rick Wolf, vice president and executive editor at Warner Books, who passed on Enron proposals last year when he realized several were in the pipeline.

“Once you start carving up the pie, you carve up your audience,” he said.

Due out Tuesday is HarperCollins’ “24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies That Destroyed Faith in Corporate America,” written by Journal reporters Rebecca Smith and John Emshwiller.

On Oct. 16 Penguin Putnam will release “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” by Fortune Magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.

“We’re confident we’ve got the best of the bunch,” said Will Weisser, Penguin Putnam’s marketing director. “We like to use the analogy of Watergate,” he said. “There have been 30 to 40 books on it over the years, but the one that survived is ‘All the President’s Men.’ ”

But success on the scale of 1991’s tale of the leveraged buyout of RJR/Nabisco, “Barbarians at the Gate,” which sold more than 300,000 copies, may come only to those who wait, said Frank Weimann, founder of the Literary Group International.

“Proliferation of the news stories is what really killed these books. Some of the books were actually pretty good,” Weimann said. “It’s like writing an O.J. [Simpson] book right now. People say, ‘Who cares?’ ”