Clinton Memoir Poised to Fly Off Shelves

June 21, 2004 -- Media hype, good or bad, is nothing new to former President Bill Clinton, but with Tuesday's release of his 900-page memoir he's being asked for the first time to show a financial return for all his famous gravitas. No one involved with the book is too worried.

Political nonfiction has littered best-seller lists this year, and the literary world is expecting Clinton's memoir, My Life, to jump to the head of that class soon after it hits bookshelves.

Traditionally, political memoirs have been nonstarters in the world of best-seller lists as politicians often find their literary following limited to historians, wonks and political junkies.

But if former first lady Hillary Clinton's Living History is any indication, the reading public remains eager for dirt on the inner-workings of all things Clinton. Hillary's book, which currently has nearly 1.8 million copies in print, is the best-selling political book ever, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Borders, one of the nation's three biggest retail book sellers, sold 25,000 copies of Living History in the first 24 hours of its release last June. The company is anticipating even bigger first-day numbers from My Life, and it's expected the president will quickly become the best-selling author in his own home.

"It's going to be huge," said Jenie Dahlman of Borders. "It will be much bigger than Hillary, but probably smaller than Harry Potter. It will definitely be the book of the summer and probably the book of the fall, too."

The book's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., is betting on a windfall to the tune of 1.5 million first prints of the book, an enormous vote of confidence for any new title, particularly a political book.

"That's a huge number," said Dahlman, who estimated that an initial printing of 100,000 to 200,000 would normally be considered large for a political nonfiction book.

If sales of the behemoth memoir take off as anticipated, at $35 apiece it shouldn't take too long for Knopf to recoup the up-front costs of such a large initial press run and an advance that reportedly paid Clinton in excess of $10 million.