Simon Spotlight to Publish Jose Canseco's Vindicated

By Dermot McEvoy -- Publishers Weekly, 1/22/2008 7:58:00 AM

Simon Spotlight has announced it will publish Jose Canseco’s Vindicated, the follow-up steroid memoir to Juiced. Publication date will be March 31, 2008. The first printing will be 150,000-copies.

This follows Berkley/Penguin’s decision last week not to publish Vindicated. At that time Berkley cited the withdrawal of veteran sportswriter Don Yaeger as co-writer for the project as its reason for dropping the book. Yaeger claimed there was “no meat on the bones,” referring to lack of new evidence in the new book from Canseco regarding the use of steroids in baseball. Pablo F. Fenjves, who was the ghostwriter for O.J. Simpson If I Did It, replaced Yaeger.

“Since Juiced was published four years ago,” said Jennifer Bergstrom, v-p/publisher of Simon Spotlight Entertainment, “the issue of steroids in baseball has only gotten bigger. Vindicated is a compulsively readable book that should act as a call to action for Major League Baseball.”

“Believe it or not,” added Canseco, “Juiced just scratched the surface of the steroid issue for me. I still have a lot more to say to help save the game I love.”

Bergstrom negotiated the deal, which includes world rights, with Bret Saxon of TMP.