Death by brain tumor is a lousy way to get book publicity opportunities.

Death by brain tumor is a lousy way to get book publicity opportunities. But it is one way to do it.

You may have heard by now that the first print run for Senator Ted Kennedy's posthumous memoir is -- are you sitting down? -- 1.5 million copies. That's not a typo. Hachette Book Group actually is printing 1.5 million copies of a memoir.

I found that memoir in the news three times this morning without even trying -- once in the newspaper I was reading with my coffee (the Boston Herald), once in the online version of the Washington Post, and once on MediaBistro. If I'd spent 3 minutes proactively looking for mentions of True Compass, I would probably have found 20 of them.

And do you want to hear the strangest prediction? I'll bet those 1.5 million copies of Ted's memoir will sell. They'll sell not only because of all the book promotion the memoir will receive, but they will sell because of the respect we have for the senator. They will sell because of the grief we feel because of his passing. Finally, they will sell because who in the world doesn't want to know what Ted Kennedy has to say about JFK's assassination, and how it really felt to lose two brothers to those maniacs?

Ted.

There's really only one topic in the media this morning -- in Massachusetts, anyway, and probably in all of the United States.

Ted has found peace.

The world (and, naturally, the media) has stopped to mourn and pay its respects to the man and the senator (and, of course, the Kennedy family member).

There's no good news here. There's no good news for Ted, Ted's family, Ted's friends, and Ted's constituents. There's not even any good news for Ted's political opponents. There's no good news for President Obama and his family (who were supposed to be on vacation this week -- oh, well).

And there's certainly no good news for book publicists, or for authors or publishers who are orchestrating book promotion campaigns right now.

When time freezes, the media revolves around one thing and one thing only. Today, and for the rest of this week (at the very minimum), it will be our loss of Senator Edward Kennedy.