Local bookstore on waitlist for Fire and Fury firestorm
Kayli Vandermeer has been fielding daily requests for the book that has thrown the White House into disarray and has continued to generate Twitter fits from the commander-in-chief.
The manager of Books & Company said she, like many in her position across Canada, did not expect much interest in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, a salacious tell-all by American journalist Michael Wolff. The Canadian distributor, Raincoast Books, had offered little in the way of advanced warning.
“Usually if it’s something they expect to be popular, we’ll get some pre-publication news or promo or something like that. We didn’t get anything,” Vandermeer said.
“We only put our first order in on the 4th which is when the firestorm started. We didn’t even have it on our radar until we started hearing about it on the news.”
A trickle of requests turned to a flood. In the end, the independent bookstore put in a total order close to 100, 40 of which have already been spoken for.
Despite the demand, readers looking to get an inside peek of the Trump White House will have to wait a bit longer. Vandermeer estimated it would be four to six weeks before they received copies of the instant bestseller.
Interest in the book reached a fever pitch after Donald Trump launched a defensive volley of tweets in response to concerns raised about his mental stability in the book. Quotes from the tweets such as “my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” have since become fodder for late-night comedy hosts. The book also resulted in a seemingly per- manent rift between Trump and one of his key advisors, Steve Bannon, who founded the far-right Breitbart News. Bannon has since resigned from his post at Breitbart as a result of the controversy.
Wolff’s publishers sped up the release of Fire and Fury after Trump threatened to sue the publisher. Hard copy sales of the book topped 29,000 after its first weekend, while e-book sales topped 250,000. In Canada, online retailers such as Amazon have told readers to expect orders to arrive in onetwo months.
The book has drawn criticism from some journalists, who have taken issue with the lack of specificity surrounding events described in the book. Some have claimed that the author relied too much on the perspective of Bannon.
For her part, Vandermeer said the unusual pre-sales surrounding this work of political non-fiction has been matched only by fantasy titles such as Harry Potter.
“I would imagine this is probably going to be on par for the next Game of Thrones book whenever that comes out.”