Negative reviews don't deter sales of Clinton's book

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Bill Clinton's weighty memoir hit the streets yesterday to good sales, bad reviews and speculation that he will dominate the political news for the next several weeks.

"I'm glad it's finally happening," Mr. Clinton told a crowd of cheering book-buyers outside the Barnes & Noble in New York's Rockefeller Center. "I've been living with this for two years."

Despite being panned by the New York Times as "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull," the 957-page tome already is ringing up big sales.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, which paid the former president a reported $10 million in advance, has printed 1.5 million copies with advance orders already topping 2 million.

The media barrage -- which began Sunday night with an hourlong interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" -- rolled on yesterday with interviews broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic. It will continue in the coming months with book signings across the country, including at least one at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Northwest Washington and another on July 7 at the Barnes & Noble at 12th and E streets NW.

The Associated Press reported that 15.8 million viewers watched Mr. Clinton's interview on "60 Minutes" on Sunday. That was more than 2 million more viewers than his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, got in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters to promote her book "Living History" last year.

Still, Mrs. Clinton's interview reportedly beat Mr. Clinton's in most key demographics, including the important target group of women 18 to 49 years old.

In a possible swipe at his old nemeses on Capitol Hill, Mr. Clinton decided against a book signing at the Trover bookstore on Pennsylvania Avenue SE, a favorite of lawmakers and Hill staffers.

Copies of the four-inch thick book, "My Life," filled a window at Trover and were stacked like a waist-high igloo at the counter. The clerk said copies were "moving quickly," but in 30 minutes of brisk business yesterday afternoon, only one customer purchased the book.

Elizabeth Hunter, 54, of Suitland, Md., who is a library technician at the Library of Congress, flipped through the book but passed on buying it. She said she would buy it, but wanted to find a better deal than the 20 percent discount offered by Trover.