He told me: "You, my friend, are living in another age, when publishing was a vocation for 'gentlemen.' Publishing is a business, and its editors go where the bucks are, not where the literary quality resides. Once this essential point is grasped, all else falls into place."

That makes sense to me. After all, sex sells, and given my own professional dealings with the publisher of Sentinel Books, Adrian Zackheim, who also heads Penguin's business book portfolio, he appears to need the money.

THE PUBLISHING WORLD'S UNDERBELLY—Two years ago Zackheim asked me to consider writing a biography of Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs. I accepted his offer only to wait four months for the contract and an advance, a situation he blamed on "getting lost in the bureaucracy." It was more probably due to the fact that my check was drawn on the first business day of a new fiscal quarter.

When the book took longer than expected to research—in no small part because of the contractual delay—Zackheim took the rare step of unilaterally canceling my contract and asked for the return of the advance payment.

This is the sea we are swimming in, one in which publishing belongs together with the lowest instincts of our culture. Edward Klein has become a word whore operating out of a corporate brothel. I doubt that his work will ever again be taken seriously. Klein told Salon magazine: "What I do for a living is write popular nonfiction, and the more popular it is, the more books I sell and the more money I make."

As for the publishing of poorly sourced, poorly written, and richly marketed drive-by biography, the market is voting, and our fellow citizens have been showing some admirable judgment. The Klein book quickly made the second spot on both the New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller lists but hasn't shown legs and quickly disappeared from the top of those charts.

The Truth About Hillary is more "the Truth About Low-minded Book Publishing." Penguin, which launched Sentinel, seems to have made a Faustian bargain, and may be laughing all the way to the bank. Yet there are other possible truths for the book's falseness that media reporters have failed to take into account. Penguin's Putnam imprint publishes Tom Clancy, who, as Linton Weeks of the Washington Post has detailed, in fact no longer writes his own books but hires other people to write them.

Since the Klein book suffers from so many omissions, falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims, calling it The Truth About Hillary is quite Orwellian. But Hillary herself has said that we need to keep our sense of humor in these Orwellian times.

One possible reason for Klein's hack job is that it's not unusual to see a conservative press such as Sentinel contract with authors to conduct supposedly independent research while, in truth, the conclusion to bash the subject was decided at the beginning of the project.

As the American Prospect has reported, in 1997 Alfred Regnery, the head of the Washington-based Regnery Publishing, approached veteran crime reporter Dan Moldea about writing a book on the Vince Foster case. Foster, as you'll recall, was the Clinton administration official who was a tragic suicide. The right-wing pundits tried to suggest that Hillary was somehow involved in his death, and that the cause of death might have been murder. Regnery says Moldea hoped that his contacts within the law enforcement community would shed new light on the case. But Moldea came to the same conclusions as all the official inquiries did. "There were some mistakes, some omissions," says Moldea. "But this was a dead-bang, bona fide suicide."

When Moldea turned in A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, the editors at Regnery "were less than thrilled. There were some real battles that went on between us, between me and the staff," he says. "It got so bad that I was almost hoping that they would reject the book, because I knew that they were just going to seal it and it would never see the light of day." Luckily, Moldea prevailed.

Of course, Hillary-bashing books are nothing new; they have been coming out ever since she became First Lady and rarely show balance. Such titles include Hillary's Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists by Richard Poe; She Took A Village by Alan Gottlieb—the title a play on her best-selling book on parenting, It Takes A Village; Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Barbara Olson; The Case Against Hillary Clinton by Peggy Noonan; and Big Sister Is Watching You: Hillary Clinton and the White House Feminists Who Now Control America—And Tell the President What to Do by Texe W. Marrs.

Knopf has the great investigative reporter Carl Bernstein under contract for a Hillary biography. And in October, Regan Books is bringing out two more additions to the Hillaryography totals: The Case for Hillary by Susan Estrich—Michael Dukakis's former campaign manager—and Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race by Dick Morris.