This Weekend Advisor column in the Wall Street Journal ($) advises us that the market for books on the Enron scandal has not been all that great. The best book on the subject to date — Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (Portfolio 2003) — has sold only 75,000 hardback copies, which is not a great showing considering the $1.4 million advance paid to the authors. Heck, that number indicates that only a small portion of the lawyers involved in the Enron case have bought the book.
At any rate, publishers — who never want to give up on an opportunity to hammer the Capitalist Roaders — have concluded that the lackluster sales in regard to Enron books is because of reader fatigue. That is, the Enron story has been around for so long that casual readers have become bored by it all and have moved on to other matters. That’s probably correct, although many of the previous media accounts of Enron have followed such a familiar script and lacked any real insight that even avid business scandal readers have become bored by it all.
Thus, Random House’s Broadway Books is going to try a new tactic in regard to the newest book on the Enron saga. On March 14, Broadway is releasing the long-awaited (at least by folks involved in the case) book on the Enron scandal by NY Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who has covered the Enron scandal from Day One. In so doing, the publisher hopes to break through the fog of Enron books by marketing Conspiracy of Fools to the John Grisham-novel crowd as a “true-crime thriller” rather than a business book. The name “Enron” appears no where on the book jacket and, although the book is nonfiction, the publishers hired well-known mystery novel editor Stacy Creamer to edit the book.
So, while publishers and other mainstream media types attempt to tell the Enron story in fashionable manner, the truly compelling human stories continue to be largely ignored — the sad case of Jamie Olis, the federal government blithely depriving thousands of innocent people their jobs by pursuing a dubious prosecution that put Arthur Andersen out of business, the “Justice” Department sledgehammering businesspeople into pleading guilty to questionable criminal charges out of fear of receiving of what amounts to a life sentence if they risk asserting their Constitutional right to a trial, or how the traditional form of corporate governance contributed to Enron’s collapse. Analysis of these more interesting, but admittedly harder, issues has been largely left to the world of blogs.
Nevertheless, Broadway is certainly bullish on the new book’s prospects. It has ordered 127,500 copies of the book and engineered a pre-release publicity campaign, which includes a desk drop of 1,000 copies to prominent CFOs and CEOs. Broadway’s release of 10,000 early copies of the book is the largest prerelease print of any Random House book since The Da Vinci Code.
By the way, Mr. Eichenwald’s last true-crime book — The Informant — is currently being made into a movie in which Matt Damon will play the mole who uncovers a price-fixing scheme at Archer-Daniels-Midland.
H’mm, Matt Damon as Andy Fastow? What do you think?