Yesterday Drudge did a write up about how the sales of the book from the leader of the Klueless Kos Kids aren’t exactly what you’d expect from a guy who claims to get 100K hits a day.
A book hyped by major media as documenting a progressive revolution of “blogs” and political power, DAILY KOS ‘CRASHING THE GATE,’ has sold only 3,630 copies since its release last month, according to NIELSEN’s BOOKSCAN.
[NIELSEN claims only 2,062 copies of DAILY KOS have been purchased at the retail level; the rest coming through ‘discount’ outlets.]
Sounds pretty bad, huh? Well, it is actually a little bit better than that, but I’m guessing that it still isn’t was Kos was hoping for, because he goes on for six paragraphs about his calculations of his book sales for the three weeks the book has been out.
In his calculations, Kos figures he has sold nearly 10,000 copies what with adding up the numbers Drudge reported and from the book tour that takes up all of his time (he hasn’t posted regularly for at least a couple weeks) and indie book stores. He says that the book is listed as #25 on the Amazon top seller list and that his publisher has stated that they’ve got orders for 50,000 more copies.
I wonder just how much knowledge Kos has of the book industry? In the mid-90’s I worked at a mid-size book wholesaler here in the Seattle area. While there, it wasn’t uncommon for me and my co-workers to offload 10,000 copies of the same book off a single semi-trailer. They were logged into the company’s computer system, broken down off the pallets and separated into 10-box or 20-box groups, labelled and shipped out to the the chain book retailers that same day.
These were the hard-bound editions that sell for $25 a pop, not the $6 paperback editions. And these individual stores would get another shipment of the same book, in the same quantity, the very next week.
Granted, Kos isn’t Tom Clancy and his book is probably nowhere nearly as entertaining, but seeing as how the guy claims these huge unique hit numbers whenever they are brought into question and he is supposed to have an ungodly number of daily readers, you’d figure at least 1 in every 10 of his readers would have pre-ordered, but three weeks in, he can barely count 1% of his weekly hits as a buyer.
The guy should have sold 500 copies during his two-store signing here in Seattle alone. But no. Heck, he even admits that the link to the book that sits atop his mainpage next to accolades from ‘those who should know’ has only garnered 700 purchases.
The truly telling sign that the sales aren’t up to his expectations though, is that he even bothered to respond to Drudge’s post.