Sometimes No Advance Payment Communicates More Than a Large One:
The Case of Bill Bradley
In 1969, John Lindsay lost the Republican primary in his bid for mayoral re-election. His senior aides asked me to team up with William Josephson to find out why. The result of our voter study factored heavily into Lindsay’s winning campaign strategy on the Liberal Party line against both Republican and Democratic nominees. Josephson, a New York lawyer, had been the first General Counsel of the Peace Corps and active in Democratic politics ever since. So influential was our analysis of voters, that when I entered Harvard Law School in 1970, Josephson and I formed a political consulting company to sell similar voter studies to other political figures.
Josephson introduced me to Bill Bradley in 1971. Bradley was still playing basketball for the New York Knicks but was looking ahead to public office. He hired Josephson and me to study the voters of his home state of Missouri. When he retired from the Knicks, he decided not to run for the position of Missouri State Treasurer.
In 1974, Bradley focused instead on his basketball memoir, Life on the Run. I had just joined Mort Janklow’s law firm. Although we had limited book experience, I felt confident in pitching Bradley to let me handle his book. He let me know, politely, that he needed a seasoned player, not a rookie, and hired the veteran lawyer-agent Paul Gitlin. Gitlin represented the novelists Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace and the estates of Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, and Raymond Chandler among others. Upon its publication, critics called Life on the Run one of the best sports books ever written by an athlete.
Bradley recognized the value of our Missouri voter study. He also realized that running for high office was no more difficult than running for a local one. The efforts for all electoral efforts were enormous and the risks of failure were high. In 1977, Bradley launched a campaign for the 1978 Senate race in New Jersey. I volunteered to collaborate on a similar voter study of New Jersey and contributed to his strategy sessions throughout the campaign. On election night, I arranged a telephone call between Bradley and my mentor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom I had aided in the Nixon White House and assisted in his 1976 Senate race in New York. I had introduced the two at a dinner some months before. Bradley had the presence of mind during that call to ask for Moynihan’s support in joining the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Moynihan congratulated him, then said to me, “Well, it looks like you have two Senators now.”
Thereafter, I spoke frequently with Bradley about politics. Every year or so, I urged him to write a book while in the Senate. Since he wrote all his own material, those appeals went nowhere; he simply had no time—and was humble enough not to commit to a contract for a book he could not deliver.
Early in 1996, Bradley invited me to Washington. He told me that he would not run for re-election in 1996; he would run instead for President of the United States in 2000. Working in secret for a long time, he had nearly finished the memoir of his Senate years, three six-year terms in office. No one had read it. Paul Gitlin had convinced Knopf to offer Bradley a $400,000 advance for it based on the performance of Life on the Run and Bradley’s national visibility.
What should he do? The advance presented a political problem. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, had backed away from a $4,500,000 advance from HarperCollins, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Gingrich’s political rivals questioned the integrity of the Speaker’s accepting a large advance from a company with significant business issues before the Federal Government.
Accepting any advance from Knopf would only be counterproductive; the media would scrutinize the deal as they had Gingrich’s. If, during a press conference about his political plans, Bradley confirmed a dollar amount, his book deal would upstage coverage of his likely bid for the Presidency. If there were no advance, his candidacy would get first billing.
The lack of an advance presented a publishing challenge. The size of an advance typically signals the level of the publisher’s commitment to a book because publishers must invest more in marketing and promotion, to sell enough copies to recoup such an advance. Today if there is no advance, an agent can gauge a publisher’s enthusiasm by securing contractual marketing guarantees of, for example, placement in airport stores or development of book-related iPhone apps.
We did not know what Knopf really thought of the manuscript. I got Bradley’s permission to approach Knopf directly—not through Gitlin—and secure a contractual commitment for “lead treatment” of the book, meaning that Knopf would devote a marketing budget to Bradley commensurate with authors who had received a substantial six-figure advance
Bradley held a press conference to announce, “Politics was broken,” and that he would not seek re-election to the Senate. He also announced that he would be publishing a book on his views. How big an advance had he received? “One dollar,” he replied. News of the conference mentioned the book’s topic, not money.
Knopf fulfilled its promises with co-op advertising and a strong public relations campaign, and Bradley secured placement on 20/20. The high profile launch of Time Present, Time Past assured a New York Times bestseller and significant sales. Ultimately, Bradley earned in royalties an amount comparable to the foregone advance.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Bradley wrote, “I thank my agents: Paul Gitlin, who kept getting deals too generous for me to accept, and Art Klebanoff, who knew why I wouldn’t accept them.” Of course, a prominent client’s thanking me for talking him out of money up front did not necessary win me new clients.
It certainly did not win over Paul Gitlin. He and I had met with Bradley and shaken hands that we would split the commission on the project. Before I arrived, Gitlin stood to collect a full commission on $400,000 of guarantees. After my work, he would get only 50% of a contingent commission. When the book started to earn money, Gitlin reneged and offered me a flat $5,000, a small fraction of what I could earn under our agreement. I could have fought him, but not without putting Bradley in an uncomfortable position. And so I accepted Gitlin’s offer.
In 1997, Bradley made me his sole agent. My first assignment was to leverage a 10,000-word text with photographs into the New York Times bestseller Values of the Game. Bradley became a Managing Director at media investment company Allen & Company in 2001 and invested in my e-book company RosettaBooks, founded the same year.
More recently, I represented Bradley’s The New American Story, another New York Times bestseller, and am preparing to place his new book, a real game-changer for the 2012 political season.
Sometimes taking the long view pays dividends.
