WASHINGTON – Writing by committee invites literary disaster, particularly when the text is a government report. It is all but expected to be dense, turgid, unreadable – and unread.

Yet the final report of the 9/11 commission is not just a best seller. It was nominated last week for a National Book Award.

The report begins with a gripping, minute-by-minute account of the events of September 11, 2001. It chronicles the rise of Al Qaeda and the “failure of imagination” by an American government that did not foresee or prevent the terrorist attacks. And it makes far-reaching policy recommendations, now the subject of congressional debate.

Unlike most commission reports, which start gathering dust the day they roll off government printing presses, the commission’s report has sold more than 1.5 million copies.

“I’m not surprised that it has sold so many copies,” the commission’s executive director, said Philip Zelikow.

“The pleasant surprise is that so many of the copies have been read. Anyone who reads the report finds it an empowering experience, because it equips them to understand and to participate in a discussion going on all across America.”

The commission reviewed 2.5 million pages of documents, listened to more than 1,000 hours of audiotapes, interviewed more than 1,200 people in 10 countries, held 19 days of hearings, and took public testimony from 160 witnesses.

Yet there is no single author to credit with distilling the material into 567 readable pages. Portions of its text passed through the word processors of about 90 people.

While no one individual held the pen, several figures played key roles, people involved with the report’s production said.

The final product resulted from a “collaboration among people who were called ‘the front office,'” said the commission’s former deputy for communications, Alvin Felzenberg.

That front office, he said, was led by Mr. Zelikow and Mr. Zelikow’s deputy Christopher Kojm.

The executive director, a historian at the University of Virginia, directs the nation’s biggest institute on the history of the presidency, the Miller Center of Public Affairs. He has also served in the Navy and at the State Department and the National Security Council.

Mr. Kojm, a former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence policy and coordination in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, had also worked for the former deputy chairman of the committee, Lee Hamilton, when the latter was a Democratic congressman from Indiana.

They were helped by the commission counsel, Daniel Marcus, a Washington attorney who served as a senior counsel in the White House counsel’s office under President Clinton.

A critical behind-the-scenes contributor was a historian at Harvard University, Ernest May, who has written several books on the Cold War and intelligence matters, including one with Mr. Zelikow, “The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

A historian who believes books should be written for the public rather than for fellow historians, Mr. May gave advice accordingly. His secret for writing readable history, Mr. May said in an interview: “Simple, declarative sentences.” He said historians often let facts “get in the way” of the good story – physically in the way.

Mr. May repeatedly sent back drafts to the staff researchers, asking that they move into footnotes any detailed information that interrupted “the flow” of the narrative. The book ended up with 116 pages of single-spaced, small-type footnotes.

“These primary editors shaped chapter drafts submitted by nine research teams, and changes recommended by the commissioners. Each chapter was handed back and forth three or four times,” Mr. Zelikow said. One commissioner, Bob Kerrey, the president of the New School University and former Democratic senator from Nebraska, also helped set the language of some sections, Mr. Zelikow said, calling him a “gifted writer.”

Mr. Zelikow emphasized that the “hardest and most important work” was done at the staff level. For example, he said, those chapters that significantly involved New York City were written primarily by a New Yorker, the lawyer Sam Caspersen, and a former attorney general of New Jersey, John Farmer.

It helped that several of us were lawyers and we know how to write succinctly and not waste words. It could have easily been a 2,000 page book,” Mr. Caspersen said. “The facts speak for themselves.”

From the very beginning, Mr. Zelikow also said, the commission’s chairman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, Thomas Kean, pushed the staff and commission to do their work in such a way that it would be understood by the public, not just by the policymaking elite.

That meant that as much of the commission’s work as possible would be conducted in the public view, through open-door hearings and 17 interim staff reports, on different subjects that were addressed more fully in the final report.

Ultimately, that also meant the report would go through a mainstream publisher – the commission settled on W.W. Norton – to mainstream bookstores, not a government printing office.

“Tom Kean and I discussed it at the end of January 2003, in our very first meeting, that the report would be in the form of a book, in every bookstore in America, and it would be accessible to any American who was willing to learn,” Mr. Zelikow recalled.

For that reason, the price was set at a low $10, and the report remains in the public domain, so that other publishers can, and have, come out with their own editions. The designated publisher, Norton, agreed to an unusual arrangement: It would print the first 600,000 copies at its expense – which was quite sizable, particularly because of the very quick turnaround time – but there would be no royalties.

If the book can be said to have a single “voice,” it is that of the commission’s vice-chairman, Mr. Hamilton, according to Mr. Zelikow. While Mr. Hamilton did not write the report, the authors mimicked his “distinctly direct and concise writing style,” Mr. Zelikow said.

“His style is direct almost to the point of being flat and almost blunt. I like that. It’s a good style,” the executive director said.

That the book is a success says more about its readers than its authors, Mr. Zelikow said.

“It shows you can write up to people,” he said. “A lot of Americans are smarter than people think they are. You can write something lengthy, precise, and even nuanced without relying on caricature and melodrama, and people will still read it if you take the trouble to write it well.”