Under the header “First Lady Gets Small Book Advance” Political Wire informs me that, “According to the New York Post, First Lady Laura Bush received an advance of just $1.6 million for her book deal announced yesterday — far less than the $8 million Hillary Clinton received for her memoir, Living History.”
First, as someone who writes for a living, I weep at these ridiculously outsized advances for celebrity books of little content.
Second, the Bush-Clinton comparison is a little silly. Hillary Clinton was not only running for the Senate but the publisher reasonably hoped she’d dish on the Monica Lewinski scandal. Nobody expects anything particularly juicy to come from Laura Bush’s account of her time in the White House.
