Los Angeles-based New Millennium Press is expected to announce the deal to publish Blair's story, detailing his life and how he single-handedly tarnished the reputation of the newspaper.
The book is to be called 'Burning Down My Master's House: My Life and The New York Times', and will be available in spring 2004, according to a report in the New York Post.
This is not the first time New Millennium has signed a book deal with a controversial author. The company published former talkshow host Bill Maher's 'When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden', which became a bestseller. Maher was forced to resign from ABC after comments he made that were taken to praise the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center.
The publisher is run by husband and wife team Michael Viner and Deborah Raffin. Earlier in their careers, they produced celebrity scandal books at the now-defunct Dove Entertainment.
The deal is likely to be unpopular at The New York Times and among Blair's former colleague's affected by his actions.
Executive editor Howard Raines and his managing editor Gerald Boyd both resigned from the paper following the "Writergate scandal". The paper itself is still taking steps to repair its reputation four months after Blair resigned.
The NY Times announced yesterday that its managing editor Allan M Siegal is to take on the additional role of standards editor, to oversee the title's content. He will be the "main internal sounding board for staff members who have complaints or doubts about the paper's content", according to executive editor Bill Keller, who replaced Raines.
During his four-year tenure at the paper, Blair wrote more than 670 stories for The New York Times, all of which had to be re-examined after he quit on May 1.
His bogus reporting methods were uncovered after he plagiarised a story about a soldier killed in Iraq from another paper, and falsely claimed to have visited the home of the soldier's family while never leaving New York.
Blair also filed a number of phony reports about the Washington sniper case last year. As with many other reports that Blair filed from around the US, the Washington and Iraq soldier stories were actually filed from his New York apartment using a laptop computer and a mobile phone.
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