Murphy’s memoir on steady slide

NO SALE - Early reviews and sales figures indicate U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy's memoir, for which he received a $100,000 advance, is a bust.

Critical reviews and sales tracking figures from Amazon.com have not been kind to U.S. Representative Patrick Murphy’s nearly two-month old memoir, Taking the Hill.

Murphy’s tale of growing up in Northeast Philadelphia, serving as an army lawyer in Iraq, his campaign and subsequent election to Congress, earned the freshman Pennsylvania Democrat a staggering and controversial $100,000 advance for his first-ever book.  Most Congressional memoirs earn only a fraction of that amount.

To date, only two published reviews have been made about the book, and neither was kind.  Philadelphia Magazine called Murphy’s book “banal” and “self-congratulatory,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer said of the Buck’s County Democrat’s early political success, “he should have quit while he was ahead.”

“Instead,” they wrote, “he went on…to write his memoir,” panning the book’s “sketchy anecdotes,” “hackneyed prose and the irrelevant detail.”

One of the harshest reviews of Murphy’s book was offered at Military.com, which claims to be “the largest military and veteran membership organization” in the United States, with a stated 10 million members.

In his review, Tom Miller, a former Army officer, Vietnam Veteran and published author, wrote “exaggeration is typical of Murphy's narrative,” saying the title of the book must refer to Murphy’s election to Congress, “since Army lawyers don't take hills.”

“Of all Murphy's fanciful statements, none rankles more than his clumsy attempt to compare his uphill congressional campaign with the fight faced by the 82nd Airborne in Normandy and at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944,” he wrote.  “Such is the conceit of modern politicians.”

POOR SALES
While Amazon.com provides sales rankings for books, it is a complicated and proprietary algorithm.  Numerous articles have been written about how to convert that ranking into sales figures, and even though there is no consensus on how Amazon.com’s ranking reflects actual sales, there is near universal agreement on its benchmarks.

After nearly two months on the shelves, Murphy’s book is far from selling the 50,000 copies its needs to turn a profit.  On March 10, 2008, Taking the Hill received an Amazon.com sales ranking of 28,444, selling at an estimated pace of between one and 10 copies a week.  By yesterday, it fell to 156,689, indicating total projected sales of under 200 copies.

The rankings are volatile and can change suddenly.  But even if Murphy returns to his March 10 rating, and sells ten copies every week, he would have to maintain that pace for more almost a decade simply to earn back his agent’s initial $100,000 investment.

AT ODDS WITH OBAMA?
Murphy was an early and strong supporter of Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential candidacy, and was named co-chair of Obama’s campaign in Pennsylvania.  On Monday, Murphy combined that effort with another sales pitch for his book, appearing at St. Joseph’s University Book Store in Philadelphia to sign copies of his memoir and promote Obama’s candidacy in Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary.

But on one issue at least, Obama and Murphy disagree.  After radio shock-jock Don Imus made disparaging, racially-tinged comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, Obama called for Imus to be fired, and vowed he would never again appear on the show.

“I would also say that there's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group,” Obama told ABC News one year ago.  "I have no intention of returning (as an Imus guest)."

Murphy appears to have a kinder view of Imus.

According to Murphy’s book promotion schedule, which is run by his re-election campaign, the freshman Democrat was a guest on Imus’s show February 20, 2008.  According to that same schedule, he appeared for one minute.