Thanks to a new partnership between Politico and Random House, followers of the 2012 election will be able to read inside accounts of the campaigns as they unfold rather than months after the excitement has died down.
Politico and Random House are planning to publish four e-books about the election, the first of which will go on sale before Christmas. The books will each range between 20,000 and 30,000 words, and are being penned by Mike Allen, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, and Evan Thomas, a political reporter who has written for Newsweek and Time.
Rather than waiting until the election cycle is finished to write a full recap, Politico and Random House are betting that they can pull together definitive — if partially incomplete —real-time accounts, says The New York Times. “Our audience, their preference would certainly be not to wait until the end of the election, and we’re going to test how viable this is,” Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, told the Times.
The e-books will help Politico compete with other planned accounts of the 2012 election, including a book that’s in the works from bestselling Game Change authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. “It’s an effort to get ahead of anybody who’s waiting until the end of the campaign to write a book. Certainly Game Change falls into that category,” said VandeHei.
Random House executive editor Jon Meacham, who is editing the e-books, also hopes that the series will “encourage people to think of book publishers in a more periodical way.”
