RANT
OR RAVE
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
Grunwald’s
The New New
Deal came out
August 14.
list. Slate’s David Weigel, who recently
compared Klein’s bigger sales with Maraniss’, concluded that the “number of
people who want their bitter views of
Obama reinforced vastly outpaces the
number who like Obama and want to understand him better.”
While Maraniss acknowledges that he
has an ego like any writer, he says he’s not
bothered by sales that are slower than
Klein’s and other recent conservative
books on the president, like David Limbaugh’s The Great Destroyer, which came
out the same month as Maraniss’ and has
racked up over three times as many sales,
according to Nielsen BookScan.
He points out that his Clinton biography is still read by those trying to understand the former president. “I’m trying
to write for history,” Maraniss says. “I’m
not trying to write for the moment.”
HOW TO SELL A MILLION
Time senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald hopes to influence the
current election year conversation on
Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, providing more information about a piece of
legislation derided by Republicans, barely discussed by Democrats this election
year, and largely framed by the media as
a boondoggle.
Of course, Grunwald would like to
sell books, too, but tells Huffington
that he doesn’t expect an overnight hit
with a stimulus book, The New New
Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in
the Obama Era. Grunwald joked that
he could have written a more inflammatory and sensational book called
Porkulus, but that would only serve
certain readers’ negative views on
the government.