Skip to main content

‘Fire and Fury’ sales top 29,000 in first weekend

Copies of the book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” by author Michael Wolff are seen at the Book Culture book store in New York, U.S. January 5, 2018. (REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton)
Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” was the top-selling book last week, NPD BookScan told The Associated Press. And its numbers are likely to grow far higher.
“Fire and Fury” sold 29,000 copies, BookScan announced Wednesday. But Wolff’s explosive tell-all about the Trump administration only came out last Friday and BookScan’s weekly sales run through Saturday.
“The first couple of days of sales figures aren’t giving us the full picture,” said Kristen McLean, the NPD Group’s book industry analyst. “Because of potential distribution issues related to the early release coupled with high demand, it may take a few weeks to see exactly where this book will land in comparison to other political best-sellers of the last few years.”
McLean noted that Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened,” which came out last September, averaged sales of more than 30,000 hardcover copies per day in its opening week. But that book “was hugely anticipated and very well stocked,” she said.
“Fire and Fury” seemed to catch everyone off guard, from the Trump administration to publisher Henry Holt and Co., which has raised an initial announced printing of 150,000 to more than 1 million. Since reports of the book’s contents emerged a week ago, retailers have struggled to keep up, with Amazon.com warning of delays of two to four weeks for delivery. BookScan, which tracks about 85 percent of the retail market, only counts an order as a sale once the book has been shipped.
The BookScan numbers also don’t include e-books. According to John Sargent, CEO of Holt parent company Macmillan, digital sales already top 250,000 copies, an extraordinary number for a nonfiction release and likely boosted by the scarcity of the hardcover edition. Audio sales exceed 100,000.
Clinton’s book, about her stunning presidential election loss in 2016 to Trump, had one of the biggest first weeks in recent history for a nonfiction book. It sold more than 300,000 copies in the combined formats of hardcover, e-book and audio, Simon & Schuster announced at the time. The debut for “Fire and Fury,” with its stories of a chaotic White House, is approaching 400,000. “Fire and Fury” will appear at No. 1 on The New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction list in the edition that runs on Jan. 21.
“Fire and Fury” was supposed to come out Tuesday but Holt moved up the release in respond to popular demand and to threats of legal action by Trump, who has denounced the book as fiction. An attorney for the president last week sent a cease-and-desist letter to Holt, asking for publication to be withheld. Sargent has issued a company memo defending the decision to publish “Fire and Fury” and a Macmillan attorney on Tuesday said the publisher planned no retraction or apology.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ukraine crisis: Exchange of hundreds of prisoners takes place

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko attends a ceremony to welcome prisoners of war (POWs), released after the exchange with pro-Russian separatists, upon their arrival at an airport in Kharkiv, Ukraine December 27, 2017. (Source: Reuters)  Ukraine and separatist rebels in the east of the country have exchanged hundreds of prisoners, in one of the biggest swaps since the conflict began in 2014. Around 230 people were sent to rebel-held areas in return for 74 prisoners who had been held by pro-Russia rebels in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, BBC reported on Wednesday. It was the first swap in 15 months. The release and exchange of prisoners was one of the points in the Minsk peace agreement, signed in 2015. The deal has stalled since and analysts say the swap does not signify wider progress. Both sides continue to hold other prisoners. The number of prisoners swapped was lower than initially announced after dozens of people who were meant to be returned to rebel-held terr...
Post a Comment
Read more

As many as 12 killed in New York’s deadliest fire in decades

More than 160 firefighters helped bring the blaze under control. (Source: Fire Department New York/Twitter) A massive fire ignited accidentally by a three-year-old boy swept through a five-story apartment building in New York, killing at least 12 people including a toddler and injuring four others in the deadliest blaze to hit the city in decades. The fire broke out around 6:50 pm (local time) yesterday on the first floor of the Prospect Avenue apartment in the Bronx borough of the city and spread quickly, officials said, adding that the cause of the blaze is under investigation. “We found that this fire started in a kitchen on the first floor,” fire commissioner Daniel Nigro said. “It started from a young boy, three and a half years old, playing with the burners on the stove. The fire got started, the mother was not aware of it – she was alerted by the young man screaming.” The boy’s mother fled with her two children, leaving the door to the apartment open – allowing t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Over 1 lakh illegal immigrants arrested in US in 2017

On January 25, Trump issued an executive order to set forth the Administration’s immigration enforcement and removal priorities. (Representational Image) The US authorities have arrested 143,470 illegal immigrants this year, according to a latest report. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in its annual report that it has made 143,470 administrative arrests in fiscal year 2017, increasing 30 per cent Year-on-Year, Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday. An administrative arrest is the arrest of an alien for a civil violation of the immigration laws, which is subsequently adjudicated by an immigration judge or through other administrative processes. Of the total arrests, 110,568 occurred after January 20, which is a 42 per cent increase over the same time period last year, according to the report. US President Donald Trump took the oath of office on January 20 this year. On January 25, Trump issued an executive order to set forth the Administration’s immigrat...
Post a Comment
Read more