Politicians’ book deals: Add Cuomo to the problems list
Some politicians’ books sell. Others flop — predictably — yet won a tidy advance from their publisher.
Take the case of New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo. He negotiated a $4 million advance for his second book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid19 Pandemic,” with Crown. The deal was built partly on his public popularity for his daily briefings and nightly newsletters that offered directness, guts, a bit of hope. Yet “his record was questionable and unfinished when the book appeared,” writes Alex Shephard in The New Republic.
Cuomo now faces calls for impeachment. He’s accused of underreporting the COVID19 death toll in nursing homes while he was working on the book, and having government aides work on this personal project. (He’s also accused by several women of sexual harassment.)
Shephard asks why publishers pay handsomely for such “contrived bits of marketing” when the public shows little interest in them. (He also cites books by Hillary Clinton and Virginia’s Tim Kaine; Jeb Bush; and last year’s Democratic candidates — vs., say, Barack Obama’s.)
Cuomo’s $4 million, he writes, is “astonishingly high” and would have required sales “in the very high six figures” or higher. “American Crisis” has sold fewer than 50,000 copies, a sales “disaster.” His first book — a “hopelessly dull,” 550-page memoir called “All Things Possible” — sold about 3,000 hardcovers and 13 audiobooks. The advance: $700,000, from HarperCollins.
“Given the serious inequities in publishing — low advances paid to many authors, low salaries for many workers, a lack of diversity at every level — the high advances paid to bland books that rarely sell is particularly galling,” Shephard says.
Meantime, the PRO Act, now in the U.S. Senate, would give more collective-bargaining power to freelance writers and authors. The act, which would amend the National Labor Relations Act, has passed in the House and is backed by the Authors Guild, Publishers Weekly says. ... McGraw-Hill, an education publisher, is charging freelancers a 2.2% administrative fee each time they submit an invoice. (In These Times via Publishers Weekly)
Natalie Diaz, a graduate of ODU’s creative writing program, is one of the judges in poetry for the 2021 National Book Awards. Diaz’s poetry collections: “When My Brother Was an Aztec” and “Postcolonial Love Poem.” She also edited the 2017 edition of “Best New Poets” (U.Va. Press).
Awards: The PEN/ Faulkner award for fiction to Deesha Philyaw for “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.” The story collection recently won the Story Prize and was a 2020 National Book Award finalist. ... Sweden’s Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, a top award for young people’s lit, to JeanClaude Mourlevat, author of “Winter Song” and others. The jury called him “a brilliant renewer of fairy tale traditions, open to both hardship and beauty.”
New and recent
“Speak, Okinawa,” by Elizabeth Miki Brina (Knopf,
304 pp.). Brina weaves her heritage — her mother, an Okinawan immigrant, married a man whose roots included Jamestown — with that of Okinawa, colonized by both China and Japan, and now the site of a large and unpopular U.S. military presence. “I had not learned this history, my mother’s history, my history, until I was thirty-four years old. Which is to say I grew up not knowing my mother or myself.” (Shelf Awareness)
Also: Hunter Biden’s
“Beautiful Things,” a memoir of addiction ... Sharon Stone’s ”The Beauty of Living Twice,” a memoir including the massive stroke she suffered in 2001.