As a Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi batted a thousand in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971.
As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson case.
So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit.
But if he thought that, he would have been mistaken: his latest, a polemic with the provocative title “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” has risen to best-seller status with nary a peep from the usual outlets that help sell books: cable television and book reviews in major daily newspapers.
Internet advertising has been abundant, but ABC Radio refused to accept an advertisement for the book during the Don Imus show, said Roger Cooper, the publisher of Vanguard Press, which put out the book.
ABC Radio did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Bugliosi, in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, said he had expected some resistance from the mainstream media because of the subject matter — the book lays a legal case for holding President Bush “criminally responsible” for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq — but not a virtual blackout.
His publisher and publicist said they had expected that Mr. Bugliosi’s credentials would ensure coverage — he is, after all, fairly mainstream. His last book, a 1,612-page volume on the Kennedy assassination, “Reclaiming History,” which was published last year, sought to debunk the conspiracy theorists. It is being made into a 10-hour miniseries by HBO and the actor Tom Hanks.
Mr. Bugliosi said bookers for cable television, where he has made regular appearances to promote books, have ignored his latest offering. MSNBC and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” were two outlets Mr. Bugliosi had thought would show interest, but neither did.
“They are not responding at all,” he said. “I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they’d fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left.”
A spokeswoman for Comedy Central said the staff of “The Daily Show” was on vacation and unavailable for comment. A representative for MSNBC said: “We get many pitches to interview authors and very few end up on our programs.”
The editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, said he had not read the manuscript, but he offered a reason why the media might be silent: “I think there’s a kind of Bush-bashing fatigue out there.”
“If it’s selling well,” Mr. Meacham said, “it’s another sign that the traditional channels of commerce have been blown up. If a dedicated part of the Internet community wants to move something, it doesn’t need a benediction from the mainstream media and might benefit from not having one.”
The book was published in late May by Vanguard Press, a division of the Perseus Books Group — which also owns PublicAffairs, the publisher of the recent memoir by a former White House spokesman, Scott McClellan — and has sold about 130,000 copies. On Sunday it was No. 14 on the New York Times best-seller list. (The Times published a lengthy review of Mr. Bugliosi’s Kennedy book last year by the writer Bryan Burrough of Vanity Fair; his latest book is under consideration for review, said Robert R. Harris, the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review.)
For the Bush book, the equation for success seems to be this: Mr. Bugliosi’s reputation plus talk radio plus the viral nature of the Internet.
Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publisher’s Weekly, said, “130,000 copies is an enormous number of copies of anything.”
“You should never underestimate the power of a brand name author to circumvent the normal publicity and marketing channels,” Ms. Nelson said. “Somebody was very smart to see that something subversive like this is best marketed on the anonymous and youthful medium of the Internet.”
Ms. Nelson said that if the book becomes successful, “the same people who didn’t want to give him publicity in advance would give him publicity after the fact.”
Mr. Cooper of Vanguard Press said, “We publish books on all sides of the political fence and all kinds of political thought.” The company's sibling, PublicAffairs, has also published one of President Bush’s favorite writers: Natan Sharansky, the onetime Soviet dissident whose book “The Case for Democracy” is said to have influenced Mr. Bush’s foreign policy agenda.
On Mr. Bugliosi’s book, Mr. Cooper said, “I expected there would be people who would choose not to talk about it. But I thought some would.”
Mr. Bugliosi has had more than 100 radio interviews about the book, and Vanguard was behind an aggressive Internet campaign that included ads on liberal blogs. “It’s been frustrating on one hand but exhilarating on the other,” Mr. Cooper said. “Using the Internet has been an integral fact in the success of this book. I feel terrific about the sales of this book.”
While Mr. Bugliosi’s Kennedy book got the star treatment from Hollywood in Mr. Hanks, he had to look outside the United States to find money for a film on his Bush polemic. Jim Shaban, a theater owner in Windsor, Ontario, financed a documentary on the book that is almost complete. The movie, directed by David Burke, does not yet have a distributor. But it will not carry the same name as the book. “Mad as Hell” is one name under consideration, according to Peter Miller, of the PMA Literary and Film Agency, who has represented Mr. Bugliosi for about 25 years.
“We may not be able to work with a mainstream company,” Mr. Miller said.
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