MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
August 14 – 21, 2008 Edition

Election-Year Books
by Conservatives Climb
to Amazon’s Top 20

NEW YORK/DALLAS/8/14/2008–While John McCain and Barack Obama battle for the presidency in the visual media, a related political front is opening up in the literary world.

With Obama’s newest book, Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise, due out September 9, three  anti-Obama books have climbed to the top 20 on Amazon’s bestseller list. 

Jerome Corsi’s blockbuster expose, The Obama Nation, debuts at #1 on the Bookscan and New York Times bestseller lists and now has been reported atop the New York Times best-seller list for Aug. 17. The anti-Obama book also ranks No. 1 among all political nonfiction books on Amazon.

Meanwhile, the most powerful woman in the history of American politics is suffering defeat at the nation’s bookstores. In her first week at market, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sold just 2,737 copies of her book KNOW YOUR POWER, according to Nielsen Bookscan.

Obama’s forthcoming Change We Can Believe In  features a foreword by the Democratic Presidential candidate and contains some of his better speeches, along with sections written by campaign members on issues such as health care, and national security. The book, which has an initial print run of 300,000 copies, is being released in September by Three Rivers Press, an imprint Crown Publishing Group (part of Random House).

Marji Ross, president and publisher of the conservative Regnery Publishing, Inc., feels there’s "pent up demand from people on the right side of the aisle who feel that the mainstream media is effusively covering Barack Obama and not critically covering him."

Three conservative titles in the top 20 on Amazon include:

The Case Against Barack Obama by David Fredosso (Regnery August 2008);  The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate, by Jerome Corsi Dick Morris’s Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us. . .and What to Do about It.

Corsi’s The Obama Nation has already climbed to a sales rank of #9, and it has been in booksellers’ hands only a little more than one week. Corsi also wrote the huge success, Unfit for Command, which attacked Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry’s war record. 

By contrast, Obama’s Change We Can Believe In, though not officially due in stores until September 9, has a pre-sales ranking of #7,233 this week. The higher the number the lower the sales of a book.

Barack’s earlier book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (November 2007) ranked 10,528 this week, again lower than the leading conservative voice of Newt Gingrich. Gingrich’s Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works (Regnery, January 2008), ranked this week at 1,255.

Obama’s new Change book will also have tough competition from Bob Woodward’s highly anticipated fourth book about the Bush administration.

Cal Morgan, a vice president and executive editor at HarperCollins who worked on Morris’ Fleeced and, at the other end of the political spectrum, on Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men, was quoted by the Associated Press this week, saying that books from both the left and right begin at the grass roots with a direct channel between the author and consumer. "They’re not mitigated by rumors or secondary comments. They’re a kind of vote the consumers cast for the author’s point of view."