Political presses

John Howard on the publicity trail. Photo: Getty Political memoirs have been hot property this year, none more so than John Howard's, writes Catherine Keenan. IT IS NOT surprising that 2010 has been big for political books. More has happened than in any previous year: the knifing of a first-term prime minister, the election of our first female prime minister, a radical unsettling of the two-party hold on governance. These things have happened so fast it seems only logical that people would want to read books to explain them. ''The book offers really an opportunity for more reflection and more thought,'' HarperCollins publishing director Shona Martyn says. Advertisement: Story continues below Penguin Books publishing director Bob Sessions says he's noticed a significant increase in the number of political books published this year. ''I think it's only natural, as the parties get, in people's minds, closer together, and we end up with more complicated political situations, and people get cut off in their prime and vie for leadership in a rather obvious public way.'' This has also been the year of the huge advance for political memoirs:4.6 million ($A7.1 million) for Tony Blair, $US7 million ($A7 million) for George Bush, and $400,000 for John Howard. All three books have been bestsellers. Since the success of Bill Clinton's My Life in 2004, the sky has been wide open for political memoirs. Seven out of the 10 top-selling political books in Australia this year fell into that category. Head and shoulders above all others is Howard's Lazarus Rising. It has sold 38,000 copies since the beginning of last month, and Martyn expects it to reach 50,000 this week. HarperCollins has 100,000 copies in print. It's a remarkable result, given that one of publishing's mantras is that books from the right of politics don't sell (the only other top-10 book from the right - arguably - is Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs). Martyn says sales of Howard's book have been helped significantly by the author's strong six-week publicity campaign. ''We're seeing him get Rosetta Stone Chinese really big sales in discount department stores like Big W, as well as in the independent bookshops,'' Martyn says. Other political memoirs that have done well are mostly from overseas. Tony Blair's A Journey and Nelson Mandela's Conversations with Myself were second and third respectively, though selling less than a third of Howard's book. Nearly three years after publication, Barack Obama's two memoirs still outsold Jacqueline Kent's updated biography of our new Prime Minister, The Making of Julia Gillard. When it comes to politics, it seems we mostly want to hear from the politicians themselves. We want the personal voice that a biographer cannot bring (Allen and Unwin is hoping to break that rule next year, with Christine Wallace's biography of Gillard). Aside from memoirs, however, analytical books about the political landscape have sold in relatively small numbers. Straight political books rarely sell huge amounts, and the big publishing houses mostly shy away from them. Random House's only strictly political works this year were the Blair and Bush books; Harper Collins had Howard. The biggest-selling non-memoir of the year was from the small Melbourne press, Black Inc. David Marr's Quarterly Essay on Kevin Rudd, Power Trip, was a brilliantly timed portrait of the then prime minister that seemed to seal his fate. It sold just shy of 10,000 copies, significantly above the only other two analytical books to make it into the top 10: Simon Benson's Betrayal, about the shenanigans of the New South Wales Labor Party, and Barrie Cassidy's The Party Thieves, about shenanigans at a federal level. Louise Adler, at Melbourne University Press, has published many of this year's political books, including Cassidy's. ''It's driven by the tastes of the publisher, and politics is a particular passion of mine,'' she says. As a smaller house, MUP can also respond faster to the changing political climate.

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