Monday, June 06, 2005
HOW BOOKS GET SOLD
If you walk around any Barnes & Noble or other large bookseller right about now, there's a good chance you will notice prominent stacks of a thick hardcover with an eye-catching jacket and the title ''Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.'' The book, written by a former Clinton administration official, David J. Rothkopf, and published by PublicAffairs, is based on interviews with foreign policy insiders like Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, and offers itself as a definitive study of the council, sometimes called the most powerful group of people in the history of the world.
Like many other customers, you might have thought the book was on display simply because the booksellers believed it was important, particularly relevant now and would practically sell itself.
This is also what Peter Osnos, the chief executive of PublicAffairs, would like to think. But he has been in the publishing business long enough to know that it's never that simple. In order to ensure the book was on display on the front tables, his company had to pay a total of about $11,000 to the large bookstore chains. Last fall the company also paid what Osnos called ''a significant amount of money'' for prominent placement of a new boxed edition of Lou Cannon's two-volume biography of Ronald Reagan, after the former president died in June.
''Had we not done that,'' Osnos said recently, ''there's no guarantee where the book would be. It could have been in the back somewhere.''
Full story at the New York Times, which unfortunately requires registration...
