Book stores are having a hard time keeping the explosive exposé, ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,’ on shelves, as the publisher rushes to get another 1million copies printed.
The tome, which was originally due out on Tuesday, was bumped up to this past Friday for official release after the president threatened to stop it becoming publicly available with a cease and desist to the publisher, Henry Holt. The threat of legal action had the reverse effect, sending demand into overdrive.
Holt had initially printed around 150,000 of the books by Michael Wolff for the previously scheduled Tuesday release, but they now have orders for over 1million copies. They say the demand was so high, stores sold out before the end of Friday’s sale.
Flying off the shelves: Fire and Fury has a remarkable release with the original 150,000 printed copies sold in the first days with the publisher having orders in for 1million more copies
An attorney for President Trump tried to block the publication of author Michael Wolff’s (left) tome with a cease and desist, but the publishers responded by releasing it days early
Meanwhile Amazon is out of stock on hardcovers and offers shipping times from two to four weeks out. The New York Times reports ‘hundreds of thousands’ of ebooks have already sold with sales of the audiobook ‘in the low six figures.’
John Sargent, chief executive of Henry Holt’s parent company Macmillan, told the Washington Post: ‘We have multiple printings at multiple printers now and all of our suppliers are doing a remarkable job of getting books into the marketplace. They all realize the importance of this book as a commercial success, but they also recognize the huge importance of reading a book the government is trying to stop.’
In an email to his McMillan staff Monday, Sargent wrote of the ‘clear effort by the president of the US to intimidate a publisher into halting publication of an important book on the workings of the government’ and called the move ‘flagrantly unconstitutional’.
An interesting ripple effect has brought a 2008 book with the same title back to the top of sales charts.
Some, confused by the title ‘Fire and Fury,’ must have missed the subtitle that differentiates it: ‘The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945.’ While some purchased it in error, others who came upon it looking for Wolff’s work thought it was worth a read.
People stand in line, waiting for the ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’ book, at Kramerbooks and Afterwords in Washington, D.C.
Fire and Fury: Michael Wolff’s bestselling release has had the unexpected effect of bumping Randall Hansen’s 2008 book of the same title up Amazon’s best seller chart
The author, Randall Hansen, a Canadian professor, spoke to The Guardian explaining ‘I haven’t seen this level of interest since the book first came out.’
He logged into his own Amazon account Friday night and saw his book appeared on the site’s top three bestseller categories.
While Hansen appreciated the unexpected bump in sales, his Fire and Fury reference is about the consequences war holds for civilians, whereas Wolff’s reference relates to Trump’s threat of war against North Korea. He says he is just glad to be brought into part of the current conversation.
‘And we’re talking about that at a moment when we have this warmongering, unstable, deranged demagogue in the White House,’ Hansen said. ‘So that coincidence actually makes me happier than the sales.’