America By Fraud: Sarah Palin Buys Her Way On To NYT Bestseller List

Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 04:57 pm

Sarah Palin Buys Her Way to Popularity

Money may not be able to buy Sarah Palin popularity, but it has bought her the illusion of popularity. As they did with her first book “Going Rogue,” Palin’s own PAC and right wing outlets like Newsmax have been buying Palin’s latest book “America By Heart” in order to push her up the bestseller list. Palin’s #2 New York Times bestseller ranking is a fraud.

Earlier today Palin celebrated her #2 NYT bestseller ranking via Twitter of course:

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The only problem is that Sarah Palin really shouldn’t be thanking the American people. You see, as she did with “Going Rogue” Sarah Palin has had a little help in reaching near the top of the bestseller list. As Politico pointed out today, Palin has managed to boost her own sells by having SarahPAC purchase $64,000 worth of her books. Oh but the Grifter in Chief was not satisfied with taking donations from her supporters and buying books, no the true genius was the twist that Palin has been trying to sell signed copies of the books back to her followers for $100 a pop.

Palin bought books with donor money, jacked up the value of the books four fold, and then sold them back to the same people who paid for the books in the first place. $64,000 in books may not seem like much, but when you consider that she paid the wholesale not the retail price for each copy it adds up quickly. If we estimate that SarahPAC paid $ 5 per book, Palin padded her sales with an additional 13,600 books.

Newsmax is once again offering Palin’s book for free, which means that they once again have falsely inflated her sales, as they did with “Going Rogue”, by purchasing a ton of her books. This doesn’t even include of all of the conservative think tanks and book clubs that have bought copies. Of course, gaming the bestseller list is nothing new, but an attempt to game the bestseller list in order to propagate the myth of power and popularity is a uniquely Palin creation.

Others on the right learned from Palin after “Going Rogue.” Mitt Romney crafted a bestseller for himself this year by declining speaking fees, and instead requiring institutions to buy thousands of copies of his book. Notice that this is basically a right wing phenomenon. The two top selling Democratic authors, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter have never required anyone to buy their books. Carter and Obama have sold millions of books and they have never had to game the system to do it.

A more accurate measure of how Sarah Palin’s America By Heart is really selling is the Amazon.com 24 hour bestseller list. This is a list of what “Real Americans” are buying at Amazon, and Sarah Palin isn’t doing so well. America By Heart is currently 20th on the Amazon list. On the ground, the lack of excitement is visible in the decreased attendance for Palin’s book tour. Compared to the attendance on the previous, book tour, the tour for “America By Heart” is a nonevent.

Sarah Palin’s # 2 bestseller ranking is a legitimate as Bristol Palin’s vote totals on Dancing with the Stars. This is yet another fraud being perpetrated by The Great Pretender in an attempt to fool the American people into believing that she should be viewed on par with Barack Obama. Palin may be able to buy herself on to the bestseller list, but America has not and never will buy Palin as anything more than what she is. Palin who has been labeled a, “boorish drunkard bawling obscenities at a funeral,” is only on the national stage because she hit the desperate for the White House John McCain lottery in 2008. You can’t call a never-was a has-been, and Sarah Palin is best described as a delusion of what will never be.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association