Never judge a book by its coverage in the press

Wednesday, 19th August 2009

The Costello Memoirs is a publishing success story and represents a true conservative manifesto, says Tom Switzer

‘Peter Costello is swanning around flogging a new version of his memoirs,’ complained a letter to The Age last week. ‘As the last version was remaindered in record time due to severe lack of interest, what are the odds on this one?’

I’ve long thought that The Age’s opinion page was so dripping wet one could not even turn it. (Costello himself is the only conservative to appear in what is known as ‘The Guardian of the Yarra’, and his column appears only fortnightly.) But as mono-cultural and dull as The Age’s commentary sections are, its letters page is even worse: it not only stifles dissenting right-of-centre viewpoints; it is also intellectually dishonest. There is, for instance, the world of difference between remaindering and discounting practices. As Louise Adler, the chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing, points out, discounting is the clearest indicator that a book is a winner; whereas it is a breach of the standard publishing contract to remainder a title within a year of publication.

The aforementioned letter accompanied a Tanberg cartoon of Costello struggling to write an inscription for a couple of potential book buyers. One asks: ‘Any sign of writer’s block?’ To which the other person replies: ‘Wishful thinking.’ Never mind that the Member for Higgins’s memoirs were an untold publishing success story. I say untold, because the conventional wisdom in the press is that, unlike political books written by Labor politicians, The Costello Memoirs failed miserably. Within days of its first publication 11 months ago, even sober journalists such as the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair and my colleague Christian Kerr peddled the line that the book’s sales were dreadful.

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