After shattering U.S. sales records with President Clinton's My Life, Knopf is out to repeat the feat with the book's Spanish-language version. Mi vida, scheduled for publication August 10, is getting an unprecedented 100,000-hardcover copy first printing and an advertising and promotional campaign that echoes the blitz that has helped send My Life shooting off store shelves. "The president will be as committed to the Spanish-language publication as he has been to the English-language version," Knopf's publicity director Paul Bogaards tells Críticas.

At this point the plan is light on details, but Bogaards says the strategy will include media and bookstore appearances specifically in support of the Spanish-language version. "What people are always looking for is access to the author," he says. "There will be access to the author."

Carlos Azula, Random House's director of foreign-language sales, says about half of that 100,000-copy first printing has already been spoken for and orders are coming in at a rate he has never seen before. He added that the book will be available throughout the country, not just in areas with a large Hispanic population.

There will be plenty of co-op dollars put to use to help those tens of thousands of copies sell through. "We're going full out with a promotion," Azula says. "The book is going to have front-of-store display everywhere. It's going to be easy to find."

Those big expectations are based in part on history, actually. Historia viva (Living History), last year's memoir from New York senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton, which Planeta published in hardcover, has sold 30,000 copies so far. "That's the best we've ever done with any title," says Marla Norman, Planeta's U.S. sales director. "That's a record breaker."

The two books have more in common than the authors' last name. They have the same translator, Claudia Casanova and a similar release schedule—the original in June, followed by the Spanish in August.

Still, the goal is undeniably ambitious—to sell more than three times what Historia viva sold in Spanish. The publisher is giving Mi vida the same $35 price (minus liberal discounting at most outlets) that the English version carried, even though the finished product weighs in at a hefty 1,156 pages, up from the 957-page English-language version. It simply takes more words to say the same thing in Spanish.

The logistics of getting Bill Clinton's memoir out in Spanish just seven weeks after its English publication were complicated by the original's tight time frame. The translator didn't have a long prepublication period in which to work. Casanova devoted herself to Mi vida full-time for about four weeks, taking it section by section as the English version was completed, says Anne Messitte, vp and publisher of Anchor and Vintage/Vintage Español.

"The strategy in publishing this memoir around the world has been to present as close to a simultaneous worldwide publication as possible," Messitte says. "We want as many readers to be able to read this important book as possible, and to do so at the time that there's great attention on President Clinton and his writing, and while the book is a prominent best seller."