How Alan Greenspan Pushed Canadian Skier Off Top of Book Hill

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Alan Greenspan's ``Age of Turbulence,'' the former Fed chairman's memoir and apologia, sold 128,000 copies in its first full week, according to Nielsen BookScan.

In the process, the book grabbed the No. 1 spot among business bestsellers from Vince Poscente's ``Age of Speed,'' a motivational outpouring about our fast-paced lives by a former Olympic speed skier. (Among other things, Poscente asks the reader to mull whether he is a ``bottle rocket'' or a ``jet.'')

The two similarly titled books took different routes to the top.

Behind Greenspan -- and pushing hard after a reported advance of $8.5 million -- was the mighty Penguin Press and a powerful New York editor named Ann Godoff. The Fed's ex-maestro enjoyed a heavily orchestrated media campaign that included TV interviews and print embargoes, almost guaranteeing that the book would be a sales-galvanizing news event.

Poscente began with no advance and got the word out mainly through an e-mail blast to his own distribution list of 10,000 names. His chief asset was Ray Bard, the dynamo behind a one-man publishing operation based in Austin, Texas, called Bard Press.

Since Bard founded the press in 1996, 14 of the 26 books he has published have landed on national lists. These include ``Little Black Book of Connections'' by Jeffrey Gitomer (2006), which has sold about 110,000 copies, and Bard's top-selling title, Gitomer's ``Little Red Book of Selling,'' which has moved in excess of 500,000 copies since it was published in 2004.

Maximum Care and Feeding

Bard says his high ratio of bestsellers is attributable to the fact that he publishes only one or two books a year. That lets him give each manuscript maximum care and feeding, from the writing to aggressively promoting the book to retailers.

``The Age of Speed'' sold a modest 12,000 copies in its first two weeks (and 13,000 to date), according to BookScan, which tracks sales at about 70 percent of retail outlets. Yet Bard had pre-orders for 60,000 copies of his 70,000 first printing. Because the pre-orders are reported to those who compile bestseller lists, they helped create an ``instant bestseller.''

Bard also worked closely with the retail chain Hudson Booksellers because its locations in airports and other travel hubs make it a good platform for sales of business books. Sarah Hinckley, vice president of book buying at Hudson, uses bestseller lists to determine how many of her nearly 500 outlets will stock a title.

Promotional $5,000

Where Hinckley could confidently predict Greenspan's book would appeal to her core demographic -- one she describes as ``older, wealthy, male, well-educated'' -- Poscente's sales potential was harder to call. To help guarantee that ``The Age of Speed'' would be given some consideration at Hudson stores, Bard Press paid a promotional fee of approximately $5,000, which was used to give the book wider distribution and better placement in the stores than it might otherwise have received.

``The Age of Speed'' is not yet a top-10 bestseller at Hudson Booksellers, though it ``is a slow steady seller,'' Hinckley says. ``It's done pretty well at big business hubs, but not even a third of what the Greenspan has done. Greenspan's book is going to be absolutely huge for us.''