Bookplanet: how to sell a book before it gets published

Book tops charts before it's published
Influential bloggers, promotional video make 'Patriot' a hit – by Joe Garofoli

Several bloggers have cranked out books, but a first-time San Francisco publisher, with assistance from liberal bloggers, helped push one from obscurity to the No. 1 spot on Amazon's best-seller charts in a day -- even before advance copies were printed.

Written by lawyer-turned-blogger Glenn Greenwald, the rise of "How Would a Patriot Act: Defending America from a President Run Amok" is a San Francisco-forged tale of new media leading the old, in which a video created to accompany the book was out before the bound copies, and the video's circulation turned out to be more valuable than kudos from book critics. (See the video.)

There's been no advertising for "How Would a Patriot Act." Didn't need any. It was more important to get love from a handful of key bloggers, who plugged the 144-page book on their sites, leading to a virtually overnight advance sales bump this week -- and a second printing of 20,000 copies. "Patriot" remained at the peak of the Amazon charts for days.

Amazon.com spokesman Sean Sundwall said the only similar ad-less rise from obscurity he could recall was "The Alphabet of Manliness," an outgrowth of humor site www.maddox.xmission.com . It hit No. 1 in March, three months before its release, on the strength of an e-mail sent to 140,000 of the site's readers.

"Patriot" parachuted to 293rd place by week's end after hitting No. 1. Nonetheless, the book's publisher, the San Francisco wireless, long distance and credit card company and liberal benefactor Working Assets, plans to continue its fledgling program of picking sharp bloggers to write politically pointed books.

"Patriot" is an offspring of Bay Area political activism and technology culture, and the rush to get it into print has a distinct purpose: to foster national debate about the Bush administration's approach to post-Sept. 11 civil liberties, in particular the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.

The book's rise without any mainstream media coverage has given liberal political leaders hope that they have discovered a way to compete with conservative media outlets that they estimate reach 30 million to 40 million people a week. That's at least three times the reach of progressive outlets such as the Air America radio network and liberal bloggers, said Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network, a liberal think tank focused on new technology.

Rosenberg hopes it's the start of a liberal counterbalance to major conservative book clubs, whose combined membership of 100,000 regularly pushes books up the charts through presale orders. Still, he said, progressives have a long way to go before they can compete with nationally syndicated radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, the right-of-center bent at Fox News and commentator Michelle Malkin, whose blog is consistently among the top-ranked by Technorati.com, which monitors the blogosphere.

That "Patriot" is coming out next week in a 15th century medium is a calculated decision. Politically, said author Greenwald, it is easier to make a strong, cohesive argument in a book rather than in a three-paragraph burst on a blog. Plus, say marketers connected with the project, having a bound volume with your name on it makes it easier to build credibility with TV reporters and other "mainstream media" types still suspicious of bloggers.

But Working Assets is finding a niche in what others find suspicious.

The company, which has donated $50 million to liberal causes since it was founded in 1985, in January hired Jennifer Nix to find the hottest, most politically relevant bloggers and try to get them exposure in mainstream media outlets.

Nix, a former National Public Radio producer and Daily Variety reporter, helped edit the 2004 quickie book by UC Berkeley linguistics Professor George Lakoff, "Don't Think of an Elephant!," billed as a guide for progressives, which became a national best-seller, and helped publisher Chelsea Green acquire "Crashing the Gate," a recent book co-written by the nation's top political blogger, Berkeley's Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a.k.a Daily Kos.

Greenwald, 39, stood out among the bloggers she found, said Nix, who lives in Sausalito. He's measured and is not a name-caller. He uses long -- especially for the blog world -- legal arguments. He isn't an inveterate Bush-basher or a partisan. He isn't even a voter, at least not in presidential elections.

"Maybe I voted in some local elections," Greenwald said from Brazil, where he spends much of the year with his partner, David, who is Brazilian.

Greenwald is a New York constitutional lawyer who had a post-Sept. 11 political awakening. He agreed with the president's actions in attacking Afghanistan immediately after the terrorist attacks. But soon after, he thought the Bush administration was eroding constitutional liberties in the interest of protecting Americans from terrorism.

"It's fear-mongering," Greenwald said.

He bristles at being called a "liberal" just because he disagrees with Bush on this issue. As he responded on his blog to conservative critics in February who called him a sellout who was "dancing to the tune of the Daily Kos audience":

"Is there anything more antithetical to that ethos than the rabid, power-hungry appetites of Bush followers? There is not an iota of distrust of the Federal Government among them. Quite the contrary. Whereas distrust of the government was quite recently a hallmark of conservatism, expressing distrust of George Bush and the expansive governmental powers he is pursuing subjects one to accusations of being a leftist, subversive loon."

Greenwald has long been a fan of blogs -- both left and right. In October 2005, he began writing his own, calling it Unclaimed Territory, www.glenngreenwald.blogspot.com . But while most other blogs languish in obscurity, Greenwald's caught fire relatively quickly as larger blogs discovered him.

"He stood out because he made astute, accurate comments based on factual arguments," said John Amato, whose 2-year-old liberal CrooksandLiars.com is one of the Internet's 20 most popular blogs, according to Technorati.com. Amato began linking to Greenwald this year and invited him to write guest posts.

Soon mainstream outlets began to take notice, as Greenwald was either quoted or interviewed or his analyses were cited by C-Span, Air America and several newspapers about the National Security Agency's spying program. Sen Russ Feingold, D-Wis., cited his blog during a Senate hearing about censuring Bush.

In mid-February, Nix asked Greenwald if he'd like to write a book. In early March, he signed the deal. She offered him two publication dates: May or September. He chose May, meaning he had six weeks to write the book, to be followed by two weeks of editing.

"In terms of political events, September is a world away," Greenwald recalled telling Nix. "I couldn't wait that long. There is a crisis in our country, in that the president of the United States not just broke the law but continues to break the law."

More than 200 readers volunteered to help him with research; he chose five. Over the next six weeks, he wrote 225 pages. Only about 10 percent of the content was culled from the blog, he estimated.

"What translates well is (bloggers') passion," said Safir Ahmed, a Noe Valley resident who was the editor on both Moulitsas' book and Greenwald's. "These are guys who are on fire. They're not playing a role. They so passionately believe in an issue that they're taking their time to blog about it."

Editing a quickie book, especially one written by a blogger, is an evolving art. There is less emphasis on writerly touches and more on creating a powerful argument. The hardest part of Ahmed's work was done while outlining the book through a dozen hours of prewriting conversation. After Greenwald finished writing, he and Nix holed up in Ahmed's apartment for the final line-by-line edit. It took two weeks of 20-hour days.

When it was ready, Nix e-mailed the book to seven influential bloggers -- just asking them to check it out and, if they thought it was worthy, to mention it on their blogs.

"I was thinking maybe it could go up to No. 500 on Amazon," Nix said with a laugh.

Within a month, Working Assets President Michael Kieschnick expects to give another book contract to another blogger. "There's a market for new voices who are not part of the political elite," he said.

While Kieschnick awaits the hardbound books to hit shelves, the video for "How Would a Patriot Act" created by New York artist David Olson is already buzzing about the Internet. For a few months, Olson said, he had "been playing around with" a pastiche of images -- from a 1946 scholastic film to still photos to news clips -- revolving around domestic spying. When his old high school pal Nix told him about the book, he mixed in an interview snippet of Greenwald, set it to an electronica beat, and fired the 8 1/2-minute video off into cyberspace.

"The funny thing is that you have all these new technologies behind this," Olson said, and people end up reading the book "on an old technology piece of paper."

(E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com)