Talking with a friend in publishing this week reminded me that now is the perfect time to launch a year-end, inaugural award for books. Not for good books, but rather those tomes that reflect badly on publishing.
It seems to me that apart from business considerations – profit – the agenda behind book publishing should be to edify our fellow man. To that end, the Writer’s Bloc is announcing the very first “Straight to Video” awards for books that are simply bad, for various reasons.
And believe me when I say the competition is so fierce, whole lives could be dedicated to the task of reviewing all the bad books out there. Some are poorly written, poorly conceived, poorly executed or simply harmful to our systems (see Keith Richards’ new biography, “Life,” in which the hedonism is so thick, it’s difficult to push on after page 10).
However, after much reflection and a huge helping of blatant subjective analysis, I announce that there is a tie for 2010: “Decision Points,” ostensibly “by” George W. Bush, and … anything with Sarah Palin’s name on it.
Does this surprise you? I was confident that it would. The first annual “Straight to Video” awards given to a pair of conservative icons?
Let me explain.
First, the determination was made based on the levels of hubris and bad taste. It is quite ironic that much of this decision is based on the fact that both “authors” are personally working America’s capitalist system the way one can assume it was intended. They are simply producing products that consumers will buy.
Yet, therein lies the rub. All Americans with a serviceable IQ must know that neither Bush nor Palin are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Bush made some coin during his two terms as president, and Palin has been cashing monster checks since shortly after McCain took a dive in the 2008 presidential election. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine the former governor of Alaska and marketing machine sitting in a backroom somewhere after a speech, pounding a calculator amid stacks of cash, while wearing a green visor.
And that’s the point. The smarminess of it all has garnered these two Republican sentinels a “Straight to Video” award for their books.
Crown, the publisher of Bush’s memoir, reports that as of Nov. 9, a hefty 1.75 million copies of “Decision Points” had been sold. No doubt the pseudo-conservative former prez secured a huge advance, and those sales number should enable Crown to place a candy cane on the desk of each employee this Christmas.
Bush, after cuddling with the Saudis and presiding over record spending deficits, rode off into the sunset in January 2009, and landed in a tony Dallas suburb. He will spend a great deal of time now shaping his presidential library.
In the end, Bush 43 proved no more adept at understanding the plight of real Americans than his father did – and that’s saying something.
Look, capitalism is awesome, and we should embrace it. In this case, however, it seems in poor taste to release a presidential memoir – at Christmas, when so many are struggling – by a man who has been insulated from poverty all his life.
Now to Palin. Like the Kennedy assassination, most of us remember where we were when it was announced that John “Say it ain’t so, Joe” McCain had selected a little-known governor of a state awfully close to Russia. What McCain did was launch a media start the likes of which this wonderful old country has rarely seen.
Palin (like Bush) is much smarter than the critics allege, and she is putting those brains to good use by milking the American people for personal gain. Put aside for the moment the question of whether Bush and Palin are true conservatives – she never misses an opportunity to publicly endorse Sen. McCain.
The First Annual “Straight to Video” awards for these authors are based purely on my assessment that greed seems to have taken over.
When Palin’s “Going Rogue” rocketed up the bestseller lists, it was a foregone conclusion that publisher HarperCollins would demand another blockbuster the next year (“Going Rogue” released Nov. 17, 2009). That’s what publishers do when a book hits big. If the author only had ambition to do one book in his or her lifetime, well, move over, author. We the Publisher are flying in a team of writers and editors who will spend a few minutes with you and by golly, in a few months we’ll have another bestseller!
It’s the way publishing works.
And so Harper released “America by Heart” on Nov. 23 of this year, a bit over a year after “Rogue” (no doubt the extra six days were spent feverishly polishing the manuscript to ensure the best product possible).
Unless I miss my guess, Shakespeare-Palin will release another homey volume on or about Nov. 26, 2011. Let me suggest the title, “Rogue 2: Money Never Sleeps.”
The idea that these two Republican powerbrokers would release new book “product” at Christmas and feel good about economically stressed Americans plunking down $30 for information we already largely know seems … unseemly.
That’s why these awards have been foisted on our surprise picks of Bush and Palin. They are working the capitalist system in the way it was intended, no doubt; their books sell in the millions.
But the “Straight to Video” awards are not based on sales success. They are based on the proposition that working the political system for personal gain is immoral and should be reserved for the Harry Reids of the world.
One can hope that as Palin advises the next reality-show relative on the best way to enrich the family, she’ll give pause to the struggling Americans out there she claims to represent. Ditto for the guy whose name is on “Decision Points.”
