If you haven’t heard about Dennis Kucinich‘s The Courage to Survive, you’re not alone: As Howard Kurtz reported in the Washington Post last weekend, only 500 of the 20,000 copies printed have sold over the last two months. Michael Viner, who published the presidential candidate’s memoir through Phoenix Books, says that he spent “more than $100,000” on promotion, but with minimal involvement from the author himself, those efforts have been mostly for naught: “It’s like we made a campaign contribution… He left us holding a very large bag.”
You’d think that a presidential campaign offers a perfect opportunity to get out and sell your book in front of readers, even with federal laws that make certain types of media appearances a bit difficult to set up, but the problem doesn’t seem—at least not at first—to be Kucincich’s inability to promote himself. Better than that: It’s a contract dispute with Viner.* “While declining to discuss the details,” Kurtz reports, “[Kucinich] says several people advised him against signing the deal offered by Phoenix.” But don’t go casting good guys and bad guys just yet; among the objections one adviser raised was to a standard first-look clause for Kucinich’s next book. (It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe the candidate had too much advice going into negotiations.)
Meanwhile, Kurtz adds, “Viner says Kucinich submitted a cover designed by his wife, Elizabeth, with a tabloid typeface that he did not deem of publishable quality.” It’s unclear from the phrasing, but I think he might be referring to the cover that actually went to market, as seen above—which has bigger problems than the typeface, although that doesn’t help much. As book marketing expert Bella Stander observes, “I can’t tell what the book’s about,” and Gore Vidal‘s comparison of Kucinich’s prose to Theodore Dreiser‘s wasn’t exactly the hottest blurb of 2007, either. The sad thing is, it didn’t have to be this way. Obama, McCain, and Huckabee had decent publishing experiences in the last year or so, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Regnery did reasonably well with Mitt Romney’s Turnaround—I’m basing that specifically on Regnery’s consistently strong relationship with its customer base. (I’m setting aside, for the moment, what some Regnery authors think of that relationship, to focus on the sales.) Whatever the limitations of his political appeal, Kucinich is the candidate for voters who believe as he does, and a consistently committed relationship between a dedicated publisher and an organized author, both of them focused on delivering the right content to the right audience, should have been able to take advantage of that. Instead, both sides are left with a cautionary tale for future political candidates who plan on using books to extend their personal brands. At least in Phoenix’s case, this is probably exactly the sort of thing the new ownership is dedicated to making sure never happens again.
*Since Kurtz is mostly a TV and politics guy, I’m not surprised that he doesn’t pick up this particular angle, but readers familiar with the publishing industry undoubtedly saw it coming, right after they finished shaking their heads at the Kucinich/Viner pairing; it’s like Ralph Nader signing up for Celebrity Apprentice. As I say, though, this situation doesn’t fulfill preconceptions about the publisher quite so easily.