What a lucky coincidence that just as many of us were boarding planes for L.A. to attend the 2008 BEA, excerpts of What Happened, Scott McClellan's apparently scathing attack on his former boss were somehow—I'm shocked, shocked!—leaked all over the press. Scheduled for publication on June 2, this embargoed tome about the Bush administration— well, okay, there was one sort-of leak last fall—is Topic A in the papers, the TV news and, of course, the blogosphere. For book folk, there was an added advantage: should no forthcoming fall title emerge as “the book of the fair,” at least we had something juicy to talk about.
And the book, apparently, is juicy: unbridled, full of rage and righteousness, proof positive, as one TV pundit put it, that the guy you should worry about is the quiet one on the far side of the room with the receding hairline. Why would McClellan do it? the talking heads asked about one of the most loyal of the Bush loyalists for many years. “He must have done it for the money,” one independent publisher opined to me in L.A. “Do you think they paid him extra to get extra-nasty?” another chimed in, offending even cynical me. While McClellan was surely paid an advance for the book—nobody at Public Affairs is talking hard numbers, of course—I'm wondering just how much the up-front money really did figure in. Public Affairs, after all, is a serious nonfiction publisher, known neither for its blockbusters nor the habit of throwing big dollars around. Surely, McClellan could have gotten more money in advance from HarperCollins, or Free Press, or Random House, the “traditional” publishers of this kind of book. With Public Affairs, the onus is on him, less than on his publishing “partner,” to make sure the book sells; royalties are the only way he'll make the big bucks.
This, after all, is iteration 1.0 of the model that such publishers as Vanguard, Berrett-Koehler and, soon, Bob Miller's studio at HarperCollins, are bringing to the next level: call it minimize publisher's risk, maximize author's incentive, aka the wave of the publishing future. It all sounds rather promising, especially if part of the publisher's obligation, big advance or no, is to take an active role in the book's publicity and promotion and distribution, skills most authors just don't have. But Scott McClellan is different from the usual ink-stained wretch—he's a longtime press secretary with access to journalists everywhere, and he knows how to play the media.
As of this writing, he has clearly been doing better at press control than he did when he was in his official job, on the other side. As I write this, four days before the book's official pub date, What Happened is the wall-to-wall story in every news outlet and has reached the #1 spot on Amazon. Bestseller status (at relatively low cost, financially anyway) has been assured. Clearly, McClellan learned something in his years with the Bush White House. He may have been left out of the loop on the CIA-operative-name-leaking scandal, but he surely wasn't going to let his own story get away from him.
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