Biggest Bombs

Here is a sampling of The Publisher’s Weekly annual autopsy of the previous year’s biggest non-fiction publishing disasters. With very few exceptions, movie stars were anathema.

Roseanne Arnold’s “My Lives” (“although people like her show, they may be sick of her personally,” said one trade buyer); William Shatner’s “Star Trek Movie Memories”; Burt Reynolds’ “My Life” (“One of the disasters of all time … “); Lauren Bacall’s “Now”; Berry Gordy’s “To Be Loved”; and Marlon Brando’s “Songs My Mother Told Me” (“There was a lot of interest in Brando, but to really sell it he would have had to do the stomp through America.”)