Final_Judgment

A Note from the Publisher . . .*
"When Final Judgment was temporarily out of print,
second-hand book dealers were selling copies over the
Internet for as much as $185 each. And this is a book that
certain people refuse to acknowledge even exists!"
Few people know it, but it takes as few as 40,000 copies to be sold for a
book to reach the New York Times best-seller list. What far fewer people
know—but book dealers can attest to it—is that there have actually even
been books listed by the Times as "best sellers" even though the books have
not yet actually been printed! Advance orders from book
dealers—presumably—make this unusual phenomenon possible.
Whatever the case, there's much more to the story behind the story of
"best-sellers" than meets the eye. And it's a story that most of the major
names in the publishing industry probably would prefer left untold.
Nonetheless, a number of books dealing with the JFK assassination
have reached the Times' list. Interestingly enough, though, Mark Lane's
ground-breaking international best-seller, Rush to Judgment—which did
reach the Times list—was never once reviewed by the Times, which tells us
that it is the source of "all the news that's fit to print," until long after the
book had become an international cause celebre.
In more recent years, particularly in the wake of the release of Oliver
Stone's Hollywood blockbuster, JFK, several more volumes did reach the
Times' best-seller list. Final Judgment was not one of those volumes. This
despite the fact that nearly 8,000 copies of Final Judgment were sold within
two weeks of the book's release in January of 1994—this as a response to a
single advertisement in a relatively small national weekly newspaper.
Since then, no more than 300 copies of the book were purchased in
bulk by dealers. All other sales were to individual buyers. In one instance,
however, an enthusiastic reader purchased 100 additional copies after his
favorable reception of the first two copies he ordered. Now, as a result of
direct mail promotions, many thousands more copies of Final Judgment are
being sold across the country with more than 40,000 copies in circulation.
When the book was temporarily out of print—in the fall of 2003—there
was so much demand that second-hand copies were being sold by used book
dealers over the Internet for as much—at one point—as $185 a copy.
Clearly, there's obviously a little bit of interest in a book that some people
don't even want to admit exists!
That Final Judgment has already sold so exceedingly well is quite
remarkable, considering the general lack of publicity that the book has
received. One much-touted JFK assassination work, The Plot to Kill the
President, by former House Assassinations Committee director G. Robert
Blakey, received widespread national promotion when it was released by a
New York Times book publishing affiliate in 1981. Yet, Blakey's book,
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*Authored by the American Free Press, publisher of the soft cover edition