Well, it’s been four slightly battle-scarred months since The Making of Julia Gillard hit the bookshops, if that’s not too energetic a way of describing what has actually happened. Apart from the fact that someone who is currently writing a competing biography was asked, ridiculously, to review mine in The Monthly — what part of ‘conflict of interest’ did she not understand? –there has been a bit of ‘hmmph’-ing from certain journalists who also reviewed the book less than absolutely favourably. As few of their remarks had much substance (and one or two, exasperatingly, repeated a lot of the information that is presented in the book as if it was something they had found out themselves and which I had not known) I can only agree with a bookseller friend who said: ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve trespassed on their territory. You’ll get over it. Not sure they will.’
However, be that as it may — and it is — I’m happy to relate that Penguin have described sales as ‘not bad at all’. This may sound a bit unenthusiastic, but publishers are a bit like farmers: they’ll all be rooned, had a good year last year, no reason to believe this year will be any good, nowhere to go but down, etc. So a comment like that, while not quite being an invitation to break out the Bollinger, is worth more than a celebratory packet of after dinner mints. (Just quietly: Yay!)
The subject of the biography has shown some interest in how it’s selling too — possibly because fans have been sending her copies to sign. It’s odd, that. I had coffee with a lovely old former maritime union member a few weeks ago, who asked me to sign his copy, having already got the Gillard signature. (’Keep the faith, Julia Gillard’.) We practically ended up singing ‘The Internationale’ together. And one woman advertising on a lonely hearts website said she was not only interested in politics but reading The Making of Julia Gillard: I just hope she finds a bloke who’s reading it, or has read it, too.
