Jeff Bercovici notes Ann Coulter’s declining book sales:
Coulter’s latest book, Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, is something of a misfire by Coulterian standards. Of course, what constitutes a disappointment for Coulter would be a mega-hit for most authors; in its two months on sale, Guilty has sold 100,500 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan (a number that only reflects around 70 percent of actual sales).
But with it moving steadily down the best-seller list, it looks certain that Guilty will fall far short of matching her earlier results. Her 2006 polemic, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, sold 279,100 copies in hardcover, according to BookScan; Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror, published in 2003, sold 396,600 hardcover copies, and 2002’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, sold 333,100 copies, plus another 108,300 in paperback. (The two other books she published over that period, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) and If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, are both collections rather than original works, so I left them out for the sake of apples-to-apples comparison.)
Bercovici muses, “Could it be that Barack Obama’s America has a smaller appetite for Coulter’s brand of take-no-prisoners, obey-no-logic conservatism?” To have any basis for analysis, I’d have to know how other public affairs are doing in this economy as well as the trendlines for liberal and conservative polemnics.
Looking at the best-seller list above, I see that A BOLD FRESH PIECE OF HUMANITY, by Bill O’Reilly is at number 9; A SLOBBERING LOVE AFFAIR, by Bernard Goldberg is at 13; and Coulter’s at 18. Judging by the authors and titles, no left-leaning polemnics are on the list at all.
To be sure, there are some books that should be popular with liberals: LAST LION, edited by Peter S. Canellos (Ted Kennedy’s career, with contributions from a team of six Boston Globe reporters) at 7; OBAMA, with an introduction by Bill Keller and biographical text by Jill Abramson at 8; THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS 2009, by Barack Obama at 10; and THE RETURN OF DEPRESSION ECONOMICS AND THE CRISIS OF 2008, by Paul Krugman at 20. But these are certainly of a different piece. (Books by Bill Maher and Al Franken, for example, would be comparables.)
My guess re: Coulter, for what it’s worth, is that people are tired of her schtick. Not right-wing screeds, necessarily — I predict plenty of success for those in the Age of Obama — but rather variations on the same theme by the same author. It’s a rare author who can crank out a book every few months that’s worth reading. Rarer still are authors who can do it using the same subject matter.
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, from whom I got the link, uses the news as an opportunity to slam Coulter as a “cynical drag queen posing as a fascist.”
