Osama bin Laden Poses Threat to Oprah

From Witsend Daily – The reign of the Queen of Book Endorsements may soon be usurped by the King of Terror, Osama bin Laden The al Qaeda leader's recent endorsement of William Blum’s “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” helped catapult the book from the 209,000th spot on Amazon.com’s sales list to Number 30 in less than 24 hours. In an audiotape released last Thursday, bin Laden said an al Qaeda group was preparing more attacks on the United States and also told Americans, “It is useful for you to read the book ‘The Rogue State.’”

“Rogue State” also took over the No. 1 spot on the Witsend Here Creative Outpost import list, knocking off “America” which moved to No. 2 (see ad). Gale Simpkins, sales manager at the Creative Outpost, was not at all surprised by the news. “The book is a scathing critique of U.S. Foreign Policy, and that’s what’s popular nowadays, especially outside of the United States. If candidates in other countries can run a successful political campaign based on an anti-American platform, it was only a matter of time before the book industry caught up to this growing fad.”

In book-publishing circles, it is a known fact that Oprah Winfrey possesses the Midas Touch- every book she endorses turns to gold for the book’s author and publisher. Less Brockman, a literary agent in Witsend, said, “Osama’s popularity has shifted the tactics in the book publishing industry's ‘War on Marketing.’ The competition for Oprah’s endorsement came down to who could write and publish the most depressing, true-to-life book involving a protagonist victimized by a seemingly endless series of mental and physical abuses. The Oprah formula for success is codependent upon human misery."

“And now bin Laden, the incarnation of terror, has reared his head in the marketing mix, and the formula has shifted to an anti-American foreign policy model,” said Brockman. “The big challenge now is to see who can write the most searing attack on U.S. foreign policy without ending up in Guantanamo Bay or a Pakistani cave. Bin Laden has changed the rules of engagement in the publishing world’s ‘War on Marketing.’ All of the traditional rules of war have changed in the post-9/11 era, and we are now faced with guerilla warfare. Celebrity endorsements are no longer predictable, and we never know when an audiotape will pop up, endorse a book, and knock other books from the best sellers’ list.”

Some analysts in the book industry are not too concerned about bin Laden’s threat to Oprah’s power. They’ve dismissed his recent impact on book sales as a “novelty,” comparing the surge of sales to those of Hitler’s “Mein Kempf” when it was first published. Oprah’s people are not taking Osama’s threat to her throne lightly, however, and have already deployed a legal team to Pakistan with the hope of finding bin Laden and buying out his endorsement rights. Art Radley, Witsend’s residential conspiracy theorist, went as far to say, “The whole thing smacks of conspiracy. The Bush administration is desperate. They fabricated the whole audiotape bit to keep us scared, and the endorsement was icing on the cake of fear. C’mon, if there’s anyone in the world who could find Osama bin Laden, it’s Oprah.”