NEW YORK -- It was derided as a cheap publishing stunt, a book that major publishers wouldn't touch and booksellers vowed to ignore. But four weeks after its release, "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer," a book penned by O.J. Simpson and co-writer Pablo Fenjves, is a fixture on bestseller lists.
The book, which was wrested away from Simpson by the family of Ron Goldman in a Bankruptcy Court proceeding and published last month, has sold 68,000 copies, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70% of U.S. book sales. Beaufort Books President Eric Kampmann, who published the title, suggests that the actual sales figure may be a lot higher, more in the range of 100,000 to 120,000 copies, based on his firm's internal data.
But if sales figures have momentarily stilled skeptics, questions continue to hover over the book, which offers a "hypothetical confessional" by the former football star as to how he might have carried out the 1994 killings of Goldman and his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. The Goldman family, which said it published the book to satisfy a Bankruptcy Court's order, has pledged that "a portion" of the proceeds will be donated to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice, a nonprofit organization that aims to "empower, inspire, motivate, and assist people who are victims of crime," according to a note on the book's last page. Yet the family does not know precisely how much of the proceeds will be made available or when, and the website for the foundation does not yet offer information about grants that may be available in the future.
Asked how much of the proceeds would be given to the foundation, Kim Goldman said in an interview: "I wish I could tell you. We have no idea, as candid and frank as I can be . . . I don't even know what my family and I earn [from the book] at the end of the day. And I'm not blowing off the question, I just don't know and I don't want to misrepresent."
Goldman said she wasn't surprised by the book's early sales, because "people have a morbid curiosity" about Simpson, who was acquitted in 1995 of the twin killings but later found liable for wrongful death in civil court. Others in the publishing world, however, said they were caught off guard by the early sales.
"It turned out to be the kind of book where people respond to a lot of media attention, and then it sells, until interest wanes," said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver. Kampmann added "there really wasn't a groundswell of revulsion we might have expected."
