Risky Business

Despite Simon & Schuster’s (reported) 200,000 print run for DisneyWar, most recent business narratives have floundered in the marketplace — drowned out by similar titles, or hampered by their subjects’ overexposure in the MSM. So, with Kurt Eichenwald’s upcoming Enron saga Conspiracy of Fools, Random House’s Broadway Books has decided to try something a little different: “marketing the book to the Grisham crowd by positioning it as a ‘true-crime thriller,’ rather than a business book.”

The Wall Street Journal (sub. req’d) reports:

The name Enron doesn’t appear anywhere on the book jacket, and although the book is nonfiction, Mr. Eichenwald was edited by Broadway editor Stacy Creamer, who has edited best-selling mystery authors including Patricia Cornwell and Dean Koontz, in addition to nonfiction titles.

The company has ordered an ambitious 127,500 copies of the book, and engineered a prerelease publicity barrage, including a “desk drop” of 1,000 copies sent to Fortune 1,000 CFOs and CEOs. In total, Broadway has released 10,000 early copies of the book, the largest prerelease print run of any Random House book since “The Da Vinci Code.”

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