Andrew Morton

Monica Lewinsky has reportedly sold her tell-all “revenge” autobiography, which is thought to center heavily on the scandal with then-President Bill Clinton and how the resulting fallout has affected her life, to an unnamed publisher for a previously rumored $12M pay day. If you kind-of sort-of think you remember hearing a story like this over a decade ago, you are correct! Lewinsky previously collaborated with Andrew Morton in 1999. The new book is allegedly a “reboot” of the same old stuff.

It's hard to imagine any title launching today without a Facebook page, Twitter campaign, author blogs, online assets and video, and all other manner of digital marketing. But it wasn't so long ago—2008—that one of the year's biggest releases launched without any of that.

If you look at “Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography” as an equation—say, America’s most controversial A-lister + one of the world’s most titillating celebrity biographers + a secretive, litigious religion (+ as a bonus, a Writers Guild strike that has much of the entertainment biz on its heels)—you might guess that a publisher needs simply to sit back and let the money roll in. But that’s just never the case, is it? Yes, the book’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is reveling in the eye of what we’ll call a perfect storm of self-perpetuating buzz with the Andrew Morton-penned celeb-bio. Yes, prelaunch reports