text: Former President Bill Clinton is said to be aiming for an advance between $12 million to $15 million for the memoir of his White House years, according to a source close to the Clinton camp.
  That would be a record for a nonfiction book advance.
  Sources close to Clinton expect the much-delayed meeting with publishers to get under way "in the next month or so."
  Once that happens, the conclusion of the auction process is expected to come quickly – perhaps in the weeks after the publishing industry gets back into full force after Labor Day.
  Simon & Schuster, Random House Inc., Walt Disney's Hyperion, AOL Time Warner's book divisions and Penguin Putnam are expected to make bids.
  Despite a rumor that the deal was all but wrapped up, Clinton was telling people this week that he has not yet put the project on the front burner.
  "I am not devoting as much time to it as I should be," the globetrotting Clinton told a source at a social function a few days after he moved into his new offices in Harlem.
  While Clinton's aides say he is shooting high, publishing executives seem divided on whether he will get the top dollar.
  But most seem to now think he will top wife Hillary's $8 million deal with Simon & Schuster's Scribner imprint.
  That would defy a publishing trend of recent years in which books by a first lady outsell the books by the presidential spouse. One top publishing executive said that $12 million figure – if it is for world rights – "is not far-fetched."
  Clinton's longtime supporter and benefactor, Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein, is not expected to help boost the price – even though he went to the mat to try and get a book by Hillary Rodham Clinton into Miramax's publishing house.
  Officials at Random House, Time Warner Trade Publishing, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Putnam and Hyperion all declined to speak on the record for what is shaping up as the biggest auction of the year in publishing.
  Robert Barnett, Clinton's attorney in the negotiations, was not commenting on the dollar amount the ex-president might be seeking.