Sales of Woodward Book Underwhelming

Posted on August 18, 2005

The New York Times reports that all the publicity about Deep Throat revealing his secret identity has really hurt sales of Bob Woodward's new book, The Secret Man, which gives the inside story of Deep Throat and his role in Watergate. The book has hit The New York Times bestseller list and has sale numbers most authors would be thrilled with. But optimistic insiders apparently were expecting sales numbers approaching Da Vinci Code levels.

At Politics and Prose, a well-known independent bookstore in Washington, sales were "not very good, compared to expectations," said Mark LaFramboise, who ordered 400 copies of the book for the store. As of last week, Politics and Prose had sold "60-something," he said. "I expected it to be a blockbuster," he said. "I was wrong."

By most measures, the performance of The Secret Man would be an unquestioned success. The book, Mr. Woodward's account of his relationship with the source who helped him and Carl Bernstein break open the Watergate scandal in the early 1970's, has sold 61,000 copies in its first five weeks on sale, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales in bookstores and other outlets that usually account for about 70 percent of a new book's sales.

But compared with sales of Mr. Woodward's recent books, The Secret Man is a laggard. Plan of Attack, about the Bush administration's preparations for the war in Iraq, sold 183,000 copies the week it went on sale in April 2004, according to BookScan, and it sold about six times as many copies in its first five weeks as The Secret Man did. Mr. Woodward said yesterday that while he always wanted his books to sell as many copies as possible, he focused more on the content of a book than its sales.

"Obviously the publishers, because of historical curiosity or the significance of it, I think expected more," Mr. Woodward said. "It obviously was not as much as some of my other books, but I don't know how much a writer can get involved in trying to second-guess that."

It will do better in paperback, no doubt.

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