Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 04:57 pm
On his MSNBC program Keith Olbermann mocked the bomb that is Sarah Palin’s latest book America By Heart. Olbermann said, “Even if the book as sold as many copies at Walmart as it has everywhere else combined, you’re looking at 70% of a print run sitting in warehouses waiting to be returned to the publisher.”
Here is the video from MSNBC:
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Keith Olbermann was kind enough to update us all about just how badly Sarah Palin’s second book has bombed, “The already soggy sales of Sarah Palin’s “America By Heart” just got soggier. Publishing sources confirm that at a time when 43 of the 50 nonfiction best sellers saw sales jump on Nielsen book scan, what with Christmas looming, Palin sold 29% fewer copies than the week before. 36,000 compared to 51,000. One of the other titles to sell less “Kardashian Confidential.” Total sales through 3 weeks, 144,812. Total sales of “Going Rogue,” 811,491. Even if the book as sold as many copies at Wal-Mart as it has everywhere else combined, you’re looking at 70% of a print run sitting in warehouses waiting to be returned to the publisher. Oops.”
It is amazing how few books Palin managed to sell when she was not padding the sales numbers by buying the books herself. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, “$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.”
When you subtract the books that Palin bought from her total, and if we knew the number, we could subtract the boatload of copies that Newsmax bought to give away to subscribers, and it is a pretty safe guess that Palin might have sold closer to 15% of her print run, not 30%. If you remember correctly, the sales numbers for “Going Rogue” were also grossly inflated by Newsmax and various conservative think tanks and organizations buying tens of thousands of copies of her book. Palin is a bestselling author only in the loosest sense of the term. She is neither an author, nor a best seller.
Sarah Palin is cult of personality built on a small, but loud and dedicated following. She is a failed governor, a failed vice presidential candidate, and now a failure as an author. The only thing Sarah Palin has been successful is convincing people to pay her for being Sarah Palin, which is a nice gig if you can get it. The sad thing is that the Republican Party is in such a poor state that Palin’s following is certain to make her a serious 2012 GOP presidential contender. Even if she should be successful in capturing her party’s nomination, Palin had better make space of her resume of fail for a new entry, failed presidential candidate.
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
