Trump exposé takes just one day to top sales chart

NEW YORK — Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s explosive tell-all about the Trump administration, was the top-selling book in the United States last week, sales tracker NPD BookScan said, and its numbers are likely to grow far higher.

Fire and Fury sold 29,000 copies, BookScan said on Wednesday. But the book 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 bestsellers 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 print run of 150,000 to more than one 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 per cent 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.