Tuesday, June 10, 2003

About That Bridge They Are Buying: The media is swallowing the entire Hillary hype oyster in one gulp. Take the "million copy" claim.  There is no way to prove such a number has been published. Take the "lines around the block for the book signing" report. In New York that many nutballs would turn out for Charles Manson....

--Catty comment posted this morning at Lucianne Goldberg's Lucianne.com (translation: "Please, God, pretty please, let Hillary's book be a failure!")

Clinton Book Sets Barnes & Noble Record

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs set a Barnes & Noble sales record for nonfiction books on its first day on store shelves, the company said Tuesday.

Clinton signed over a thousand copies of the book, "Living History," at a promotional event at a Barnes & Noble store in midtown Manhattan Monday, the first day the book was on sale.

The company said the former first lady's White House memoirs sold more than 40,000 copies in the first 24 hours it was available, instantly making it an in-house best seller.

Nationwide sales figures for other booksellers were not immediately available.

Late Monday, publisher Simon & Schuster, which paid $8 million for the tome, announced it would print an additional 100,000 copies, on top of an extraordinary initial printing of 1 million copies....


--AP story posted at Yahoo News this afternoon

Har-de-har-har.

Barnes & Noble has no motivation to fake sales numbers (nobody in New York media wants to be caught telling stretchers these days) -- if B&N says Hillary broke a record, she broke a record. And S&S has no motivation to reprint the book unless it thinks its warehouses could be out of stock soon. So this baby is really selling. Forty thousand copies at one chain in one day is a nig number in book publishing. (Books that sell 50,000 or 60,000 copies in total routinely make the lower rungs of the New York Times bestseller list.) Like her or not, she did it.

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