Agent David McCormick is making the rounds of the publishing houses, but he's coming up empty in the deal department.
He's agreed to represent Andrew Young, former campaign staffer for the disgraced John Edwards. Mr. Young has written a memoir that purportedly details the whole tawdry business of covering up a big time politician's sexual liaison. The sweetener to the deal is a suggestion that Mr. Young might come clean about the paternity of a certain child that was said to have been fathered by Mr. Edwards.
Yet there's no interest in publishing circles. Mr. McCormick is thinking one million dollars for an advance, so juicy is the gossip within Mr. Young's pages, but there's not one single dollar on the table thus far.
On the other hand, former Vice-President Dick Cheney has been handed $2 million for his memoirs.
Granted, he'll be doing twice as much work at least, with a much longer tale to tell. It's said that he'll write about his entire career, which spans a lifetime.
What does it mean? That John Edwards and his paramour are old news and no one is going to flock to the book shops to buy a tale of sleaze and cover-up. It means that the publishing houses believe there is a large market of conservatives who buy books and will buy Mr. Cheney's memoirs in droves, if only to drive up sales figures that prove Mr. Cheney is still popular in some circles.
For one politician, it's all golden. For another, there's nothing. He's a has been, tossed onto the trash heap of history.
2 comments:
People want to read about people who are/were responsible for affecting or touching their lives in some way. Movie and music stars definitely, megalomaniacs like Cheney. But weak, inept, useless Edwards? What's he done, other than screw up his own life and hurt those closest to him?
St. Martin's Press has picked up the memoir. There's some hints that the aide who wrote the tell-all got his hands on a sex tape that proves Edwards was cheating, and the aide is supposed to reveal that he took the fall for the mistress' pregnancy but it was Edwards all along.
No word on the size of the advance, but when it's hard to sell something, it can't be worth much.
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