Make-a-Buck Cynicism Knows No Bounds
April 29, 2011
Of course, that’s not news in regard to book publishing today. With fewer people reading, thus fewer people buying books, print publishers are fighting for their lives. The visual image is replacing the written word as the primary unit of communication. No sense bemoaning that: it’s an evolutionary fact. Gutenberg started a revolution in 1450 with the invention of the printing press, and the written word will have had a 700-year run by the time it’s done and dusted a couple of generations from now.
As it sinks, it’s no wonder that its purveyors will do anything to try to keep afloat. As a psychiatrist once told me, “a drowning man has no morals.”
Thus, the imminent appearance of the ghostwritten “Bristol Palin memoir.”
The only thing that surprises me is that it will be published by William Morrow.
Granted, William Morrow is now just one more imprint of Harper Collins, the Rupert Murdoch-owned octopus that has published two ghostwritten “memoirs” by Bristol’s mom.
But here’s a short “inside publishing” story: in spring of 2009, when I was first considering writing a book about Sarah Palin, I met with William Morrow’s editor-in-chief. He told me he thought Sarah was an idiot, and disdainfully said he could never edit a book written about her, because she was simply not worth writing about.
I hope he has a capable assistant with a broader view assigned to edit Bristol’s ghostwriter, Nancy French, who previously wrote a book of her own called Red State of Mind: How a Catfish Queen Reject Became a Liberty Belle.
Just when you think you’ve seen the bottom of the cesspool you find that you’re still on the surface.
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39 Responses to “Make-a-Buck Cynicism Knows No Bounds”
So, Sister Sarah has another book coming out in June… I just don’t know what to say, or should I say, what more could she possibly have to say or who is left that is willing to pay for more word salad?
Amazon –
The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words – edited and with a foreward by Matt Lewis
Many a pundit has tried to define Sarah Palin, but this is one woman who chooses not to wear labels imposed by others but instead to define herself by her own words and actions. Today she is one of the most sought after speakers and commentators and is poised to help to frame the issues in the 2010 election and beyond. The Quotable Rogue encapsulates Palin’s thoughts on such salient issues as health care, taxes, and government spending, the right to life, climate change, what it means for a politician to serve the people, and more.
“We need to spend more time lifting up America instead of apologizing for the greatest country on earth.”
“How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?”
“My dad always says, ‘Don’t retreat, just reload.’ Don’t let anybody tell you to sit down and shut up.”
I can’t figure out the target audience for this book. There can’t possibly be more than a couple thousand people who would actually buy it: a handful of white women and the few remaining Palinbots. I guess mega churches may purchase a bunch and pass them out to their youth in the hopes of illustrating why abstinence is a good thing..something tells me that’s not going to work.
The grifters queens are going to do a book tour together complete with competing kid-promps? Yippeeee!!!!
So, they are releasing a book of quotes–which were all coined by her former and current speechwriters? Right? Do you think those speechwriters get a cut of the royalties?
20 years old, with nothing more to her credit than getting “knocked up” and she has a memoir. (And a PR company funded by her mother’s rubes and a turn at badly pretending to dance for $300,000 plus a year and…It’s endless.)
Ah take heart Mr. McGinnis. I was reading recently (I believe part of the story was told, interestingly, on Andrew Sullivan’s blog) about the new face of publishing. It seems you don’t need those big houses that throw the next Steinbeck, the next Vonnegut on to the slush pile and scarf up the next tawdry Palinesque waste of tree pulp that’s not worth the ink. One very successful writer went the self publishing route and discovered she could go through the self marketing tools on Amazon and make a fortune selling to Kindle for about $1-$2 a pop. Thousands a month. Another actually refused an offer from the likes of a Harper Collins because they discovered that desk top publishing paid more with the new computer “publishers in a kit”.
When a formerly reputable publishing house is so desperate that they are serving as marketing employees for the Palin family business – Babies “R” Us – then…
Fascinating though that it takes a Palin to highlight the end of something once deemed worthy. Association with the Palins is becoming a measuring stick to judge tawdry and desperate.
We do live in a country where Snooki gets a book deal AND more than 30k to speak at Rutgers, Levi gets a book deal to fabricate his messed up adolescence, and Bristol gets a book deal to further illustrate her as a Sarah mini me. But it is a free country and ANYONE can “write”, publish, and create an epic fail.
I was finished when I discovered EVERY SINGLE actor these days is putting out cookbooks.
Honestly, there are soooo many coming of age stories that actually depict a human who has lived an incredibly trying experience and overcome tremendous challenges. Levi and Bristol are typical dumb teenagers without specific goals. Just being in the spotlight means nothing. There’s no tragedy in their lives and there certainly is nothing worth 250 pages of ghost written bs. Both have family drama. Both are living pretty dang freely, traveling without much care. Are their books going to be sob stories painting them as victims? Because neither Levi nor Bristol is a victim in THAT sense. Levi was dumped by his HS school girlfriend. Bristol was outed during a Pres campaign (even though it wouldve been outed no matter who did the outing)Cry me a river. When you’re closer to suicide due to intense trauma or have experienced something NO ONE has, then I may consider supporting a memoir penned by you.
I thought you might enjoy my snarky spoof of Bristol Palin’s book. http://goo.gl/UQeKb Personally I think this cover so much more honest than the original, don’t you?
What a waste of trees.
Your “inside publishing story” is consistent with my longstanding thought that Rupert decided to fund SP for her post-election energizing-the-base services, and his way of doing so was to tell Morrow to “just do it” — even if they didn’t want to. I didn’t think her book would sell (except to be bought up by right wing groups who would give it away at church camps, etc.), but it did.
Don’t you think this book deal was also negotiated (at a way higher-up level than Bristol and an acquisition editor) as a way to transfer some money to the Palin team?
Actor Viggo Mortensen (Aragon – LOTR) has his own self-publishing imprint. Don’t remember the name of it, but begins with a “P” I believe.
There are a number of self-publish businesses out there from what I understand.
That family has been in grifter mode for a VERY long time, long before she was known even statewide. This is just a continuation of that.
None of them is actually WRITING the books, they aren’t intelligent enough to do so. Nor do they have a work ethic that is conducive to producing anything of value. And yes, that certainly does include Levi…
Bottom of the cesspool, an even better word picture than bottom of the barrel.
You know the one thing that bothers me about the Palin freak show? Whatever happens to Sarah and her doppelganger I could care less about.
But someday, the littlest victims of this sordid story will be big enough to read. By the time they’re old enough to be aware hopefully the Palins will have been sent back into the trashy place that John McCain should never have plucked them from…but they’ll become aware. Trig will have challenges but he will move at his own pace in a world where he will be able to sense that something’s wrong, that his family is a joke. And Tripp will be old enough to surf the articles telling how his mother and grandmother basically making a career from telling the world he was an “abstinence failure” and reading how they profited from acting like it was some big tragedy that he was conceived even as they grinned and collect checks and stuck him in front of cameras and between book covers.
And it’s going to hurt. I feel badly for the little dumplings. None of this was ever their fault.
Is this true that Sarah has another book? I’d like to laugh at all this but I find it absolutely disgusting.
And I’m becoming depressed and cynical about the state of our culture.
Why are there so many ignorant people? They can’t see what a complete fraud Sarah is?? What is wrong with them and why are there so many?
And how do you get a ghostwriter?! I know people whose life stories are much more interesting then Bristol Palins and they have no opportunity to have a book. What has Bristol accomplished in her life? Nothing as far as I can see. And Sarah is all about Sarah. There are gifted people, talented people, humanitarians who deserve to have books written for them and they get nothing. But Sarah, who is a sick and selfish liar, a poison in our country who adds nothing positive, is having another book written for her?? The title of this blog post says it all.
I’m speechless.
What’s worse is how many of these “books” get purchased by so many people just to see what the latest Palin spin is… And, the Palin’s laugh all the way to the bank. They know that if they write a book, people will read it as long as they are still a headline; the audience is both pro and anti-Palin. I think I remember when she wrote Going Rogue that there was something out there that said she had a three book contract. Does this mean this is the third and last?
How about sex & money?
I’ve invested a lot of time watching and waiting for Sarah Palin and her clan to be exposed for the frauds that they are, much to the disgust of my children. I similarly invested a lot of time in the OJ Simpson trial only to be frustrated in the end. I’m hoping this Palin book bombs which would discourage a second Bristol Palin book six months later. My daughter is off to UC San Diego next year and she doesn’t know who Bristol Palin is. The teen and twentysomething age group has no clue who Bristol is and if they do, they find her very boring. Planning a pregnancy in high school as Bristol did is quite the trend these days and Bristol is not at all unique in having done that. Ho hum.
Who will buy this book? Probably the same deluded tea baggers who bought the Sarah Palin books. They must have Palin book buying fatigue by now since they bought multiple copies and pushed the extra copies at friends and relative. Do the DWTS voting cheaters have it in themselves to use their social security checks to prop up another Palin screed?
Imagine if her book of quotes were ACTUAL quotes from Sarah. “Word Salad Odyssey-The Quotable Rogue.” That would be worth buying.
One is already published:
Palinisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin by Jacob Weisberg
To quote Jacob Weisberg: “Palinisms occur when Palin expresses one of these views in her idiosyncratically involuted syntax (“It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia”); when she expresses two or more of them in combination (“God’s will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that”); or when she says anything at all in her imitable my sentence went on the Tilt-a-Whirl and got nauseous way (“And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign, the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for John McCain”).”
Palin’s speech pattern is a nightmare. One of my favorite articles is from Vanity Fair:
Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/palin-speech-edit-200907
There is no flippin’ way this woman graduated with a degree in Communication Studies!
After I read your book, Joe, someone can just shoot me. I read and re-read mostly classics these days. If established publishers are going to continue on this path to printing nothing but vanity projects, they’ll fall sooner rather than later.
I will never forget when Bristol was being interviewed during DWTS, she kept repeating “I really want to write a book”. It was so grotesquely obvious she was begging for an offer. After all, her Mom just had to have a few conversations with a ghost writer and voila! Easy cash.
Speaking of e-publishing, this is actually a publishing question for Joe. I know your book is coming out on Kindle, but is there a chance it will be published in a format that will work on the Barnes & Noble Nook? I am considering purchasing a Nook, rather than the Kindle, as the Nook seems to have a bit more flexibility (library use).
Anyone can publish. Right now I know someone on Kindle. There were people coming in from London to wine and dine her who want to do a T.V. series on her stories.
She began writing as therapy, then to a blog and then to Kindle. She was wined and dined by some producers who want to do a series on T.V. (English). She doesn’t know if she wants a series for various personal reasons which I can well understand. So she is mulling that one over. For her lifestyle, while she is broke , the situation has nothing to do with money. I told her to get a good lawyer first and foremost.
I swim and exercise with a psychiatrist and his wife, and last week or so he has written a slim book on exercise and how it affects the mind. I assume he will sell a few hundred books and that will be that. He had something to say, so he said it.
Do know dozens of people who are published, both self published and with publishers of note. I don’t think any one of them has made much in the way of money. Some want to hit it big and haven’t. A few write well, have gotten good reviews but are not all that famous. Some make a modest living. Others simply want to be authors to say they have a book out there. A lot of it is ego.
I write only for my own amusement, but don’t give a hoot about being published.
Bristol and Sarah. Money. All it is about is lucre. More publicity, more money.
Good job Nomad!
Hubs used to work for a Big Name Publisher; they literally had dozens of “minor” imprints (little-bitty “specialized” publishing houses). If there is a buck to be made, there is an imprint that will publish it – in a limited release. If it goes well, they’ll print a second run… if not, it’ll get shut-down.
Never underestimate the power of the Palin’s to separate a fool from their money… and a media outlet to profit from it.
Someone should simultaneously publish a book containing quotes from the biggest lies (of which there are many, many) and incredibly stupid/incoherent word salads to which SP has relentlessly subjected the public over the past few years. It would also be a fabulous example of how someone who lacks intellectual curiosity and, obviously, is sorely deficient in analytical skill sets simply parrots the same tired lines over and over and over while, seemingly, assuming that thinking folks are actually buying her b.s.
I was going to ask the same thing. I have a color nook that I love. Last night I looked and only two of Joe’s books were available in the nook shop. I was disappointed and was going to email B & N today to see why.
Lest we forget another classic response to a reporter regarding the wild ride saga:
Reporter: So did your water break?
Palin: Well, if you must know more of those type of details, but, um …
Reporter: Well, your dad said that and I saw him say it so that’s why I asked.
Palin: Well that was again if, if I must get personal, technical about this at the same time, um, it was one, it was a sign that I knew, um, could lead to uh, labour being uh kind of kicked in there was any kind of, um, amniotic leaking, amniotic fluid leaking, so when, when that happened we decided OK let’s call her.
(the ‘her’ she’s referring to is the doctor guiding her ‘pregnancy’ who I believe is a GP and not an OB/GYN.)
I went through the self publishing route via lulu.com because the corporate publishing industry only wanted sure things and whatever fit into their narrow view of what was a fantasy novel. I was also able to make Kindle editions available too. ‘Not making a fortune yet and may never do so, but I do get a little ‘grocery money’ every month, so it helps. More power to those taking power into their own hands, especially since the corporate publishers are so crassly chasing the easy buck instead of fostering real talent.
O_W, when I get overwhelmed by today’s current events and want to read an essay or two, I turn to the Biscuitbarrel Collection’s Washington Area Studies Dept., full of books (many purchased for 99 cents) about the ides of previous administrations. It becomes downright comforting to read about John Sununu, say, or Marjorie Williams’ interview with Richard Darman (now known in Washington as Richard Who?), Mark Hertsgaard’s On Bended Knee, about how the press bowed down before Reagan, or even something about Watergate, just to know that we survived past crises, just as we’ll survive $P.
As the song goes, faith has brought us safe this far, and faith will lead us home.
You are a kind person to think of the little ones…the adults in their lives don’t seem to be doing that..
Joe answered someone else’s question on this topic on April 26th?/27th? via a tweet… here you go…
joemcginniss @BobFelton THE ROGUE will be available as a Nook and will be up on the B & N site for pre-order 60 days before on-sale. Thanks for asking.
Great news!!! Thanks.
Whatever Bristol Palin has to say in her book cannot/should not be taken seriously.
I believe it was during her first interview when asked about teenage abstinence, Bristol (was shockingly honest) replied that it was simply unrealistic because teenagers are going to have sex one way or the other — so to lower teen pregnancies would be better served by teaching them about birth control methods [& using condoms to prevent STD]. Unfortunately that was Bristol’s first and last time she was forthcoming on that subject or any other for that matter. I say unfortunately because Bristol is in a unique situation where she could really be influential as a positive role model for young people, but has chosen instead to promote “abstinence only,” knowing that abstinence is nothing more than a myth. She blew it.
What is worse is that Bristol not only did a 180, she posed for a magazine wearing expensive evening gowns while holding Tripp as if to say being a single mom is glamorous — you know, appearances are everything. Bristol also claimed she was working full-time and going to school which is more than difficult to believe since she was traveling a lot at the time. Furthermore she made it a point to say she was practicing abstinence while reportedly living with some guy who, if I re_member correctly, was Levi’s friend.
Apparently the apple does not fall far from the tree: Bristol, like her mom, is a walking contradiction and a hypocrite … by choice.
Perhaps if Bristol’s memoirs included the aforementioned she would be taken seriously and her book would fly off the shelves. However, the likelihood of that is next to nil. Maybe one day … but by then it will probably be too late.
Bristol had her chance, but unfortunately she blew it.
Heres the new Bristol Palin the author pallin around with that awful liberal elite media her mom hates so much:
http://www.zimbio.com/Bristol+Palin+Molly+McCann/pictures/pro
I guess this isthe same Molly McCann that is Sarah’s sister? She’s a journalist?
He face is new but her body doesn’t match. Maybe she will have the body done next. The face on these ppictures don’t even look like Bristol Palin.
Everyone face changes, and early plastic surgery is a terrible mistake. She made money so she used it on Liposuction, injections, a new chin. She looks far from the fresh looking, somewhat pretty girl she was at the RNC.
But is is her life to live as she chooses. Bristol doesn’t understand a lot of things yet, and to write a book at her stage in life, when she isn’t all that bright to start with is ludicrous.
Like everything in Palinland the time for raking in the sheckles is now, so rake away and live with your lies and hypocrasy for the rest of your life.
The apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.
I wrote a textbook with a colleague. We originally had a contract with a major publishing house, but a new editor decided our book was too small a market. So we self-published through an online printer. We’ve sold maybe 5-600 books, mostly as pdf downloads directly to students. The students love it- our downloaded book is only $10 (proceeds to a fund we set up for education) and it would have been well over $100 if we’d stayed with the publisher. Plus, we can upload edited versions whenever we feel like it.
Thank you so much for the information, Knishette!
Love it. So instead of 250,000 Bristol has made a least a half million. How about…I’m not afraid to grift through life. Outrageous.