Donald Trump may have dismissed Bob Woodward’s Fear as “a joke”, but readers are showing themselves to be keen to share in the comedy, with more than 750,000 copies of the White House exposé sold in American in just one day, according to its publisher.
Fear, which “depicts a White House awash in dysfunction, where the Lord of the Flies is the closest thing to an owner’s manual”, according to a review in the Guardian, was published on 11 September. Simon & Schuster said yesterday that it sold a combined total of more than 750,000 copies of the book on its first day on sale in the US. The publisher has now ordered a ninth printing, bringing the total number of hardbacks in print in America to more than 1.15m.
“Bob Woodward’s Fear is selling with the force of a cultural phenomenon, in extraordinary numbers across the board, in hardcover, ebook, and audio editions,” said S&S president Jonathan Karp. “Based on immense pre-publication and ongoing interest, the reading public clearly has an enormous appetite for what we believe, as Woodward says, is ‘a pivot point in history’.”
The US chain bookstore Barnes & Noble said that the investigation by veteran reporter Woodward, who broke the story of the Watergate scandal with his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, was its fastest-growing adult title since Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was published in July 2014. “Fear had amazing first-day sales and is in high demand across our stores and online,” said Barnes & Noble’s Liz Harwell. “We haven’t seen an adult title sell this quickly in over three years, and are working with S&S to keep our shelves stocked to meet what we expect will be continued demand.”
Fear, based on hundreds of hours of interviews, details a White House in chaos. On Monday, Trump took to Twitter to rail against it: “Just another assault against me, in a barrage of assaults, using now disproven unnamed and anonymous sources. Many have already come forward to say the quotes by them, like the book, are fiction. Dem[ocrat]s can’t stand losing. I’ll write the real book!”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
