Is it simply coincidence, or is there some reason so many books lately have been coming out in pairs? What explains this phenomenon: two books on the same subject, competing like long-lost fraternal twins for a book buyer`s attention? Here are recent high-profile examples:
– ”The Autobiography of Roy Cohn,” by Sidney Zion (Lyle Stuart), and
”Citizen Cohn,” by Nicholas von Hoffman (Doubleday).
– ”Who Killed CBS?” by Peter Boyer (Random House), and ”Prime Times, Bad Times,” by Ed Joyce (Doubleday).
– ”House of Dreams,” by Marie Brenner (Random House), and ”The Binghams of Louisville,” by David Chandler (Macmillan).
Soon we`ll have ”Almost Golden,” by Gwenda Blair (Simon & Schuster), and ”Golden Girl,” by Alanna Nash (Dutton), about the late anchor Jessica Savitch. (In 1983, Savitch and a male companion made a wrong turn out of a restaurant parking lot and plunged to their deaths in an abandoned canal.)
To Michael Korda, editor in chief at Simon & Schuster, when two books on one subject appear at about the same time, ”It`s just one of the laws of life.”
He explained: ”When one person is thinking something, then others are thinking the same thing. If it seems like it`s happening more frequently, that`s just the way coincidence works. It happens. I can`t see a pattern.”
But Herman Gollub, editor in chief at Doubleday and also editor of
”Prime Times, Bad Times,” said, ”It`s the first time it`s ever happened to me in 30 years.”
Gollub believes that more than coincidence is at work in the profusion of competing books. He suggests that publishers may be a more interested in current events.
”I`m not sure there`s any cosmic conclusion to be drawn. But we`ve always been on top of things,” he said, citing the best-selling pair of Shana Alexander`s ”Nutcracker” (Doubleday) and Jonathan Coleman`s ”At Mother`s Request” (Atheneum). (The books detail the 1978 murder of a Utah
multimillionaire whose daughter ordered her 17-year-old son to kill his grandfather.)
For whatever reasons, the spate of dual books has consequences for everyone involved in publishing, from the author to the publisher`s sales force and beyond.
Publishers may push up deadlines to get a book into stores first, once they know a competing book may beat it. Competitors may do the same thing, meaning that twin books will arrive in stores almost simultaneously.
”It`s better to come out at the same time,” Gollub said, ”than to let another come out first.”
Sometimes, though, this cannot be prevented.
”There are probably three or four writers doing books on `The Preppie Murder Case,` ” said Korda, referring to the headline-grabbing slaying of Jennifer Levin at the hands of Robert Chambers in New York City.
”The book has to deliver, and you have to have the ability to sit back and sweat it out in the conviction that yours is the best book. That`s the only sensible way to deal with the problem.”
How does the publisher`s publicity machine insure that its author, not another, gets press features and TV interviews, seen as critical to a book`s success?
”You have to take an aggressive stand and get out there early,” said Jacqueline Deval, Doubleday`s publicity director.
In the case of ”Citizen Cohn,” she said, ”We got in early with bookings and set our schedule as early as we could.” ”Citizen Cohn” has been on the best-seller lists for weeks. Its twin hasn`t.
Emily Boxer, book editor of NBC`s ”Today” show, scheduled Von Hoffman for an interview but not Sidney Zion. She called Von Hoffman, a former ”60 Minutes” contributor, ”a known quantity and a good journalist,” whose appearance undoubtedly would enliven ”Today.”
So where does this leave authors who find out that their baby, their dream, their book may end up as part of a matching set?
Not happy.
”That`s the only book I`ve ever written,” said Peter Boyer, a reporter for the New York Times, who authored ”Who Killed CBS?”
”It took a lot of time, anguish and personal resources to write the damn thing, and then to have it even considered in the context of somebody else`s book seems somehow unfair.
”On the other hand, it turns out that when there are two books on the same subject, it increases overall attention.”
Nash, whose book on Savitch will follow Blair`s this summer, at first had a similar reaction when she found someone else was interviewing the same people she was:
”It was horrible. It`s hard enough to write a biography, and then you have to feel somebody breathing down your neck.
But, like Boyer, Nash sees synergy in two books on the same subject:
”This story is so bizarre that if just one author had written a book, people wouldn`t have believed it. With two, you bolster each other.”
