P.M. finds book publicity not all his way

Press, 9 April 1981, Page 1

P.M. finds book publicity not all his way

Nelson reporter While the Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) was flying to Nelson at daybreak yesterday to launch his new book, “My Way,” awakening booksellers and publishers who were to have breakfast with him at the Hotel Rutherford were chuckling over a “Rowling” fait accompli.

At 5.30 that morning, representatives of A.N.Z. Books-were slipping posters and pamphlets under the doors of delegates to the Booksellers’ Association’s diamond jubilee conference.

The posters showed the dust jacket of .“Rowling — the Man and the

Myth,” a biography of the Leader of the Opposition written by a Canterbury political scientist, John Henderson, who is director of Labour’s Research Unit. No hint of the biography, and certainly no leak of the manner in which it was to get its first publicity, had been heard until, yesterday morning. Mr Ross Miller, a representative of AJ4.Z. Books, said the biography had been kept “closely under wraps for five months.” Mr Muldoon arrived at the Hotel Rutherford to find the walls of the main foyer on the second floor, and leading into the conference room, coveted in

“Rowling” posters. He left the hotel with one of. them after refusing to be photographed with it. By the time he left, the posters in the foyer had disappeared. But, Mr Muldoon is not one to. lie on the canvas after the first flurry of blows. In a short and amusing address' to the booksellers he referred to the Rowling biography as a book all about “Bill Andersen, the F.0.L., and the school of hard knocks. It will be called, ‘No Way’,” he said. The leader of the Social Credit league did not get a chance .to duck, either. “Mr Beetham,” said Mr

Muldoon, “is writing a book about, tooth fairies, witchcraft, and hobgoblins. It will be called ‘Which Way’ or ‘A State of Confusion’,” he said. “I recommend my book.” Mr Rowling, questioned in Wellington about his biography, got in a telling jab. “I have never seriously considered writing a book myself. I do not consider myself to be a writer and I. am not sufficiently egocentric to want to make myself the topic of my own admiration like the authors of some political books,” he said.

The book covers Mr .Rowling’s life until the present.