Look at that: The tell-all book from former White House press secretary Scott McClellan is flying off the shelves, ranking number one on Amazon.com and spurring his publisher to double the print run to 130,000 copies. Sales are no doubt helped by the fact that the dishy memoir is a well-timed and fairly complete betrayal of his old Texas buddy George W. Bush, instead of a self-serving and half-hearted repudiation of the administration like the book put out by former CIA director George Tenet. But McClellan hardly took home Tenet's $4 million advance. Nor did he garner a $1.5 million advance, like Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Heck, doughy little McClellan couldn't even get "mid-to-high six figures" like Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke. It turns out the Bush mouthpiece took in less than $100,000 up-front on his book deal, according to Salon — about $75,000, said an AP source. It turns out his wonky publisher PublicAffairs didn't think he would deliver the goods. Writes Salon blogger and fellow PublicAffairs author Osha Gray Davidson:

Former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan has a new book about how George Bush's White House is full of liars and cads. Have you heard? Oh, also the President was totally a cokehead, maybe. He can't remember. But probably. People continue to weigh in! Matt Cooper (a reporter involved, you may remember, in the Plamegate thing) feels sorry for Scott McClellan, because when Karl Rove lied to Scotty and then Scotty repeated that patently obvious lie to the press (he's not very smart), all of his credibility disappeared. Cooper also thinks the book would be better if McClellan had QUIT IN DISGUST after the Plame affair instead of hanging around until they found a more well-liked replacement. MEANWHILE, Radar insinuates that McClellan stuck around to have man-sex with male hooker Jeff Gannon. (Attached, a now sad clip of Bush insisting that some day he and Scotty will be sitting on rocking chairs or something, when they're old, drinking space-lemonade, and Bush will still say "job well done.")

Anything up with Leigh Haber that we should know about? The Rodale editor and NY Post friend, who published Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, "will be 'working from home' till the end of her contract and is to have no contact with anyone at Rodale," a tipster informs us. Maybe things aren't going so well? Tell us what's going on! (Haber ran into our publisher at the Waverly Inn once, re: this post. It didn't go so well.) Update: "As we understand it, she was *not* happy about having Karen Rinaldi as her new boss (rather than her pal Steve Murphy) and refused to do much of anything when Karen signed on. She didn't go to [Book Expo], and cleared out her office this morning. No one is to speak to her about her projects, and her assistant and the editor under her now report to Karen."

The blow-dried, plastic smile-bearing Fox 5 reporter asks Jared Crystal what happened. Jared, the very cultural opposite of the reporter in his ponytail and "Republicans For Voldemort" T-shirt, explains that he was simply sitting in his car, reading 1984—an ordinary night—when a tree limb came crashing down! A scary situation! The reporter grimaces at the disheveled man with the disastrous car. "Reading 1984, and look what it got you!" the reporter says. "Next time read something more easy and calm!" Jared graciously blames Arbor Day, rather than punching the reporter in the face. Click to watch the underlying tension of the media's culture war in action.

Doree Shafrir has a bone to pick with Newsweek. The former Gawker editor recently scored a book deal from her blog of mom emails, and now Newsweek is asking whether she or any other blogger can even write books, much less sell them. "Many bloggers just repackage what they've already done," the magazine said, citing Gawker's book as an example. But the Gawker book did not contain any content from the site at all, so it can hardly be called "repackaged." And there are all kinds of other problems with Newsweek's blogger book slam:

Joseph O'Neill's much-talked-about new novel is called Netherland and is partially about the game of cricket. It's been getting great reviews, except in England and the L.A. Times! (Fierce literary critic James Wood called it "one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read," in the New Yorker.) However, we found the following passage—about a trip on the London Eye—a trifle confusing. Perhaps you can help make heads or tails of it:

"Thomas Beatie, the world's first pregnant man, will write a memoir about his experience." [Us]

Are some people just naturally assholes, or do they work really hard at it? Or are they so clueless that it automatically makes them assholes? What if you're looking for a "chubby" female "writer" who can make "$," via Craigslist, to co-author a new fitness book? "The authors will track their process and share their thoughts through journals and blogs."

Lord knows I can't do math or read Venn diagrams, or interpret any graphs at all. If my life depended on that, I'd probably be dead. But commenter MisterHippity made another version of this diagram, about books by bloggers, and the people who read them. Is it more accurate? You tell me!

From the Skwib, a graph called "The Economies of Despair." Lesson learned? The people who read books intersect only vaguely with people who read blogs, or people who buy books written by bloggers.

Good news for fabricating memoirist James Frey and his once-embattled publisher: His first novel, Bright Shiny Morning, just debuted at number 9 on the Times bestseller list, with 14,000 copies sold. "We hear HarperCollins is pleased," reports the Observer's Leon Neyfakh. Among the many, many people not sharing the publisher's glee are certain proud citizens of Los Angeles, who have begun to notice false statements in the book about their city and its history. "New York reviewers adore the book because they think it nails L.A.," wrote LA Observed. But get this: It doesn't! The book is filled with awful, awful LIES!

Now that James Frey is shilling his new novel, a screenwriter who walked the picket line during last fall's strike wrote in to share his experience with Frey, who "showed up to carry a sign and (I suspect) generally be seen. A female writer saw him and truly didn't recognize him at all. Here was the exchange that happened..."

Is it any coincidence that the most annoying person on the train this morning—a grown woman wearing pigtails, noisily making out with her boyfriend—was also brandishing a Kindle (Amazon's $400 "electronic reader")?

The Post's Keith Kelly reports on how the literati at Random House are reacting to their new, German technocrat overlord: with abject terror. "People are panicking and saying it couldn't be worse... On the face of it, it looks like the guy is a complete production bean counter. It doesn't look hopeful that he'll share the romantic idea of literature and publishing." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal elicited this tart quote from Bertelsmann CEO Hartmut Ostrowski on the departure of the previous Random House chief, Peter Olson, who recently recovered from a rough bout with pneumonia: "He wanted a new life, and we agreed." Cold.

In the wake of former entertainment industry exec Terrance Dean's gay-blind-item-filled book Hiding In Hip Hop, the hip hop community was split. Some reacted by saying, essentially, "Ew. That is so gay." But others basically yawned, and pointed out that of course there have always been gays in hip hop. Have you looked at some of these album covers lately?

Last week, we showed you "Wizard of Ass," the book trailer (the latest dubious trend in book promotion!) for Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new book, Snuff. It was a parody of bad 70s porn, because his book is about an aging porn star ending her career with a bang—a gangbang! Now we've discovered that the book, out today, has two more trailers, "The Twilight Bone" and "Chitty Chitty Gang Bang." OK, Chuck: one jokey porn short film to promote your book is clever, whatever. But three? Click to judge the camera angles of the SFW "Twilight Bone" for yourself.

Meet Markus Dohle, the new CEO of Random House. His previous job was retooling Bertelsmann AG's printing plants to repair mobile phones, generate billing statements and warehouse pills. In case that's not unglamorous enough on its own, note that Dohle is following in the footsteps of Peter Olson, who while considered a tough-talking bean counter was also a former lawyer and banker fluent in three languages, not to mention a voracious reader. Dohle seems to want to move beyond the rarefied club of literary publishing into more practical, money-making endeavors; according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke news of his appointment this morning citing anonymous sources, he is interested in expanding education services, among other things. Having turned Bertelsmann's publishing division into a "growth engine" and with no obvious emotional attachment to high-minded writing per se, Dohle should be the ruthless numbers man Olson always fancied himself but could never actually become. [WSJ]

"The future is never a straight, linear extrapolation from the present," says the pitch copy for Richard Watson's book Future Files. Which is why the futurist is selling his book with this timeline of "extinctions" from 1901 to the distant future. For example, did you know that coins will be irrelevant in 2034? And milkmen didn't become insignificant until 2006? There's plenty to mock on this list, but enough sensible predictions to inspire a few sidebars in Wired. Full-size graph below.

Craig Davidson is a Canadian novelist. He got all bulked up on steroids because, well, the character for the novel he was writing took steroids, he explains in The Guardian. "My character goes down dark roads. For the sake of the book, I thought I'd travel those roads with him. He begins to work out obsessively. I began to work out obsessively... He takes steroids. I took steroids." Method writing at work! It turns out that gearing up, however, is not so simple. It made his life an utter, living hell. By the fourth day: "I appeared to have breasts. Pendulous, malformed breasts." Other bad things happened. To his testicles. To his... prostate.

Here are the details on the upcoming book by zeitgeist-seizer Malcolm Gladwell, America's Favorite Wacky-Haired Pop Scientician: it will be called Outliers and it's about people who are better than you. Why they're better than you, how they're better than you, and what circumstances led them to being so extraordinary. "Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band." There will be visits to eccentric geniuses doing eccentric things and lots of anecdotes about the peculiarities of the famously successful. It will end up on the desk of every goddamn corporate exec in the nation. We won't read it but we'll complain about it relentlessly. [Kottke] UPDATE: Gladwell's thesis, revealed below!