Bill Clinton's My Life is number 1 on Amazon right now and doing just fine. The Wharton School looks at the marketing plan behind it, getting all racy calling Clinton the "Laydown King" in its intro:
- Laydown denotes nothing salacious. In the world of publishing, the laydown date is a book's official release day. The laydown date is the focal point upon which a publisher brings to bear all the marketing prowess it can muster in an attempt to create a blockbuster. It's the day that is announced by a publisher ahead of time to generate pre-publication buzz. It's the day that bookstores across the country, in lockstep, put a new title on display and the day that online booksellers start shipping pre-ordered copies to customers. It's the day when the publisher tries to book the author on national television programs, to have him interviewed by the news media, and to have him appear in bookstores to autograph copies. It's the day, or close to the day, for a publisher to arrange the publication of an exclusive excerpt from the book in a major magazine.
If J.K. Rowling is the reigning Laydown Queen of fiction - with first-day sales in 2003 of five million copies of her most recent Harry Potter novel - Clinton became Laydown King of non-fiction when his autobiography, My Life, set a one-day sales record of more than 400,000 copies on June 22. That figure, which represents U.S. sales only, is reportedly double the opening-day number sold by the previous record holder, Living History, by Sen. Hillary Clinton.
And you know that beating Hilary was a great motivator for him: "We'll see who wears the pants around here!"
- Faculty members in Wharton's marketing department and people in publishing say Knopf Publishing Group, which paid the former president a reported $10 million advance to produce My Life, did all the right things in setting the stage to make the book a mega-blockbuster. They say executives at Knopf actually did nothing special and broke no new marketing ground in launching their marketing blitz. Rather, their success has come from using tried and true marketing tactics - but using them to full effect.
In addition to making the most of the laydown date, these experts say, Knopf benefited from at least three other factors. The first is that the company published the book in an election year, one in which the electorate appears unusually divided (witness the considerable buzz surrounding Michael Moore's anti-President Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11.) A second reason is the controversial nature of Clinton's two terms in office due to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment. A third factor propelling the book to such success is that Knopf has made the most of the best salesman that My Life could possibly have - Clinton himself.
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