March 23, 2004-Out of the White House for more than three years, Bill Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, still generate great bookbuzz. Every time a book comes out about the Clintons, says attorney Robert Barnett, who handles the couple's literary endeavors, "however unresearched, clip-jobbed or inaccurate it may be, it sells."

Such national interest will come in handy when the former president publishes his memoirs, perhaps in the next few months.

People just keep tapping out tomes. Some, such as last year's "The Clinton Wars" by Sidney Blumenthal, favor the Clintons; others, like this year's "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House" by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. with Mark Davis, vilify them. There is even a sci-fi novel, "The X President," about a bionically enhanced Clinton who, still alive in 2055, sets out to relive history. All in all, there have been nearly 100 books about the Clintons placed on bookstore shelves since January 2000.

And many of them sell.

"There's still an interest in the Clintons," says Marji Ross, head of Regnery Publishing. "Madame Hillary" has been the company's big book for 2004. "Not only is it selling well at retail," Ross says, "but it's been a big success for the Conservative Book Club."

In the years A.B. -- After Bill -- Regnery has published several anti-Clinton books.

"Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security," by Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson, "did extremely well," Ross says. "It was our biggest book of last year."

"Dereliction" has sold more than 150,000 copies, Ross says, "and it is still selling."

Regnery also published "Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years" by Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review.

To date, the top-selling book about the Clintons was by the former first lady herself. Hillary Clinton received an $8 million advance for her reminiscences, "Living History," published by Simon & Schuster. The book has sold more than 2.8 million copies worldwide.

The biggest Clinton book on the horizon is the former president's memoirs.

Bill Clinton reportedly received a $10 million-or-so advance for his autobiography, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf. Though a pub date has not been scheduled, Barnett says he still expects the book to appear sometime in the middle of this year. It is already listed on Amazon.com with the working title of "The Clinton Memoirs." Yesterday it was ranked 2,183,923.

"I'm sure it will sell very well," Barbara Meade of Politics & Prose says of the former president's book. "I think he's much more of a complex person than Hillary is. There will be a lot of interest in what he tells and in what he doesn't tell." Meade says her store ordered 12 dozen of Hillary's book and will order even more of Bill's.

Over at Regnery Press, Ross is hoping the publication of the ex-president's memoirs will even have a trickle-down effect on her company's sales. "I also plan to do another round of publicity on Rich Lowry and his book," she says. She expects Clinton to write accounts of events that do not jibe with Lowry's accounts. "We'll compare and contrast. There are two versions of what happened."

Book promotion has become so super-segmented that there is even a Washington public affairs firm, Shirley & Banister, that specializes in getting authors onto conservative talk-radio programs.

To Craig Shirley, "good news is good news and bad news is good news." Myrna Blyth, for instance, is a Shirley & Banister production. Editor of Ladies' Home Journal for more than 20 years, Blyth is the author of "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America." St. Martin's Press published the book and is doing some of the promotion, but Shirley & Banister is responsible for ginning up enthusiasm among right-leaning opinion makers -- primarily on the radio.

On the book's "laydown" date -- the first day of national bookstore sales -- Shirley and his colleagues, Diana Banister and Kevin McVicker, are having coffee at a conference table in their Old Town Alexandria office as they discuss their Blyth strategy. The men wear dress shirts and ties, Banister a black dress.

In another room, a staffer tries to monitor Blyth's morning appearance on Martha Zoller's radio show in Gainesville, Ga. Blyth is scheduled to tape an interview for National Public Radio's "On the Media" program in the afternoon. In the next few days, she is slated to be a guest on more than a half-dozen TV shows and to be interviewed by right-leaning radio hosts Chuck Harder, Laura Ingraham and Ken Hamblin as well as some middle-of-the-roaders, such as Diane Rehm.

Diana Banister says, "We have made inroads in some areas, especially talk radio." The company also places clients on conservative TV shows and tries to interest Web sites such as the Drudge Report.

"Shirley & Banister are experts at navigating the talk-radio backwaters," Drudge says in an e-mail. "They have the media map: the studio hotlines; the hard-to-get phone numbers of those producers in Idaho. And it does make a difference."

Drudge adds, "They cannot perform miracles. They can line up every 50,000-watt station in the nation from Albuquerque to Louisville for an author, and if the project does not deliver the goods or if the author cannot do good radio and perform in bites between commercials, Shirley & Banister are not much help."

In Blyth's case, the company was hired by St. Martin's Press to get conservative talk radio shows yakking. Shirley & Banister stay in touch with 2,700 talk shows and other radio programs across the country. "A majority are conservative," Banister says.

Shirley & Banister are tapped in to the American right, says Gregg Sullivan, publicity manager at St. Martin's Press. "They're a good tool."

The PR firm, which takes some credit for the success of a couple of Ann Coulter's best-selling books, relishes controversy. For instance, when Coulter was hawking "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right," she drew comparisons between Katie Couric and Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress.

Shirley & Banister lobbied to get Coulter onto the "Today" show. On camera, Couric asked her about it.

Coulter explained that she had actually referred to Couric as "the affable Eva Braun of early morning TV."

"Thanks," Couric said, "that makes me feel so much better."

Writers write their own dust-jacket blurbs sometimes. It's a messy little practice that literary folks don't really want to talk about because it makes the writer and the blurber look stupid.

Gene Weingarten, a columnist at The Washington Post Magazine, doesn't mind looking stupid. In fact, he has written a book -- with literature professor Gina Barreca -- called "I'm With Stupid."

"At one point, we tried to get a blurb from someone or other," Weingarten says, "and we were sent to this person's agent, who said, 'Why don't you write one up and if we like it, we'll put his name on it.' "

Weingarten refused. "I was appalled," he says.

"The practice of soliciting blurbs is widespread," says Paul Bogaards of Alfred A. Knopf.

And the practice of asking an author to write blurbs that appear on his own books under the names of other writers? It happens. "It's not uncommon," Bogaards says. "but the practice is somewhat reprehensible."

The history of blurbing goes back a ways.

The word "blurb" is believed to have been coined by Gelett Burgess. In an entertaining essay, "Blurbs and Pufferies," Annie Proulx writes that Burgess was "an American humorist and illustrator now remembered for his fey sprites, 'The Brownies,' and for his verse on the purple cow."

In 1907, Burgess told the American Booksellers Association that the word, as a verb, means "to make a sound like a publisher." He also said that "a blurb is a check drawn on fame, and is seldom honored."

It's said that Sherwood Anderson offered to speak highly of a book by William Faulkner if he didn't have to read it.

Friends write blurbs for friends. Dazzling, defunct Spy magazine ran a regular feature, Logrolling in Our Time, that pointed out the back-scratching practice. It's no surprise that in the promotional material for Dennis Lehane (author of "Mystic River"), novelist James W. Hall says, "I'm betting Lehane is going to be a name to reckon with in years to come." And, in turn, Lehane says that Hall's latest novel, "Off the Chart," is "startlingly explosive."

The London Telegraph recently reported that people write blurbs for books they haven't read. British romantic novelist Isabel Wolff, for instance, told the newspaper that she had given positive blurbs to "unreadable" books several times. She said she thought that having her name on the cover of someone else's book was good advertising.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16526-2004Mar22.html