How to Write a Best-Selling Political Book

Welcome back to the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch from Culture. Editor at the Bulwark. And I’m very pleased to be joined by Eric Nelson. Eric is the vice president and editorial director at Broadside Books.

He has been there since he’s been at Harper since two thousand seventeen. And I I’m very excited to have him on today because I I wanted to talk to Eric, about something that’s very interesting to me. And maybe maybe, you know, people don’t quite understand this, but there are lots of conspiracy theories. About book sales. There are there are lots of people who simply don’t believe that certain certain people could sell a certain number of books And this is very amusing to me because Eric is the editor on two recent bestsellers.

One of which is by my colleague and my friend, Tim Miller. His book about, you know, his kind of time of horror as Trump comes to comes to power. Great book. Everybody should check it out. And also Jared Kushner’s new book, another bestseller, obviously, a very different point of view than than my friend Tim’s.

But, you know, equally maybe not equally. Maybe maybe much more popular who who could say much less popular. And this is one of the questions that I have for Eric because book sales are kind of a black box, not really a black box, but a black ish box. Right? We don’t have, like, box office numbers that say, okay, here’s how much money a movie made.

And it goes out to everybody and everybody can, you know, check it on variety every week. Instead, we have best seller lists that are kind of informed by BookScan, but not really. Explain this to folks who don’t really understand how book sales work and how they’re tabulated and how they are kind of how how these best seller lists are created. Okay. So the Publishers Weekly list is that list that you think

doesn’t exist. The Publishers Weekly list is it’s it’s not just informed by BookScan. It’s just the BookScan list. And BookScan is the Nielsen ratings company, you know, that does TV, They also do a point of purchase system where they count every book that’s sold through a major retailer and most of the independent retailers. So when they buy the grocery store, or at, you know, the a bookstore in your small university town, it it goes into BookScan, and then publishes weekly publishes their best seller list, and they’ll say, you know, this week, Jared Kushner’s book sold forty six thousand two hundred and thirty one copies, and you can actually look at that for yourself.

So that’s the p w list, and the Wall Street journalist is also yeah. It’s also from BookScan, so it It’s always the same as the p w list even though it’s pretends like it’s a separate product. And then there’s the New York Times list. Which is no one knows how it gets made. I mean, there are we have sales analysts who have put countless hours into trying to reverse engineer it to figure it out what it is.

Part of which skews it is is that it comes out every Wednesday night around five o’clock. And if everyone else is delayed because Barnes and Noble is like, we had a computer crash and we can’t submit our numbers this week, They’ll all delay while they wait to hear from Bart and Noble. And the New York Times is like, oh, here’s our list. So there there’s no one really quite knows. What the book what the New York Times list does explicitly say they are is a list of the bestselling books that their readers would be interested in.

So they feel free to exclude books because they don’t feel like this is the right sort of you know, it doesn’t fit in any of the categories. For a long time, they left out religion books. They had a religion bestseller list, and then they got rid of it, and then they just didn’t include religion books at all. And then now, they sort of include religion books. And there are lots of books.

They don’t clip nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. There there hasn’t been a week in my lifetime that it isn’t one of the fifteen bestselling fiction paperbacks in the country. But it’s old so they don’t count it. If they did a new special edition, maybe it wouldn’t come up, but as long as they’re just an old book, it doesn’t count. So theirs is an editorial product that they are that they are putting out.

And it seems like they heavily weight independent bookstores and then brick and mortar’s real regular bookstores, like books and money, and Barnes and Noble, and then Target, and then Amazon, the least, which is where frequently, there’s the there’s a a sort of conservative conspiracy theory, which the New York Times just leaves them off out of out of malice in spite. And that’s not true. What happens is that usually they just get downgraded or not included because Remember, if you’re counting Amazon less than everywhere else, nobody is buying Jared Kushner’s book at an independent bookstore in a university town. Right? The everyone is buying is buying on Amazon.

When you have someone, you know, like like Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, a lot of those books are going to places that don’t even have a Barnes and Noble. You know what I mean? They’re going all over Tennessee, and I don’t know how many Barnes and Nobles are in Tennessee, but in the outside of the three urban areas, probably not very many. So so what happens is all those books are just The New York Times has specifically created a system where if you’re, you know, a a book about tech especially as another area where people mostly buy it on Amazon and and aren’t going to bookstores, some sorts of business books, those things all tend to get counted less than other books on the New York Times list.

I yeah, to to clarify something, when I say that that the, you know, the the best seller list of just pure numbers doesn’t really exist, what I mean more is that it is it’s not and maybe I’m wrong here. This is just my understanding. It is not something a a publisher is not likely to put publisher’s weekly bestseller on the cover of their their book. Right? It’s like New York Times bestseller.

That’s what that’s what everybody wants. Everybody wants New York Times bestseller. Maybe they’ll put Wall Street Journal bestseller on there, but it’s like, that’s that’s the stamp. Right? That’s like the number one thing.

If

it’s businessy, you might put Wall Street Journal bestseller on

it.

If it’s romance, they often put USA Today bestseller. On it. And then for the rest of the industry, we have a thing called a national bestseller, which you probably seen on a lot of book covers. And this sort of unwritten rule is It makes two best seller lists. You can call it national best seller.

So it’s on US A today, NPW. It was on the Wall Street Journal, and it’s on the LA Times regional list. You can call it a national bestseller. That’s sort of a leftover from when the post and the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, they used to all have local best seller list where they Canvas local stores and put what their local bestseller was. And that’s why if you were a bestseller in Washington and in LA times, you’re a national bestseller, but now everyone uses it, you know, for for a book that didn’t make the times, a a book that should have and did not make the times, we’ll say national bestseller on the

front. Yeah. You you mentioned something very interesting, and I wanna I wanna jot down on that for a second. The the idea that nineteen eighty four should be on every best seller list, every every week that it’s constantly. How many how many classic books are like that.

If you if you looked at the the actual just pure number of books sold, how often would the fiction bestseller list just be dominated by nineteen eighty four. Yeah. You know, I I don’t know. Like Atlas shrugged, you know, like the kind of the books that sell a ton that everybody everybody talks about all the time, but, you know, you don’t wanna have the same list every week. You can you can just look

at the top one hundred on Amazon and see it. And nineteen eighty four is always in there. And the other book is the American psychological associations, like, handbook for for writing. Like, it’s it’s how to appropriately footnote things and — Mhmm. — according to the American psychological association, those are both always in the Amazon one hundred and but but don’t make

the New York

Times best seller list. I don’t know how many of the other ones there are. Nineteen eighty four is the one. There’s I’m not

sure

what’s happening with Tolkien right now, but that’s an example where because of the new show, I would bet that the well, now is a little bit of a weird time for the paper back fiction list, but I which I can go into for a minute. But Normally, like, those wouldn’t count, but then if you do a new edition, that’s a movie tie in edition, then it counts, and then sometimes The New York Times will count all of the different ISBNs as to put one of them onto the list and sometimes it doesn’t. And so it’s it’s hard to figure out whether or not they’re going to include something that has a bunch of different additions or not. Right now is a particularly weird moment though because of Colleen Hoover, which is not a I mean, you maybe read some book talk stories, which is like — Mhmm. — TikTok has made a bunch of books popular.

But Colin Hoover is sort of in

a

like, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, kind of space. Like, level of sales is just every week. She dominates the whole list with all of her books. And so there’s no room for anything else because calling Uber is this massive cultural

but you

you and I are, like, middle aged white guy, so we don’t we’re so we don’t we’re not reading calling Uber or talking about it. But But and and it’s two like, my kids are not the age to be reading Colleen Hoover, but it is it’s a huge cultural phenomenon that does not get discussed anywhere that Colin Hoover is is the most important writer in America right now.

That

you’ve never heard.

How

many I mean, I mean, how many invisible

massive sellers like that? Or I mean, and what I this might mean invisible to the general cultural conversation. Yeah. You know, because I for instance, I was I was looking up some some stats for a recent piece I was writing about anime. And there’s a there’s a author of manga style comics who I like the the dog dog man, you know, dog cop.

I I don’t know. Like, just millions and millions of copies. Yeah. And nobody ever took nobody in the in the again, in

the, like, elevated cultural conversation ever talks about this, but it’s huge. Yeah. I mean, it’s funny when you look at the list of top ten best sellers every year. And

there’s always, like, one person in there that you’re like, who? I remember going through this with with it was a more perfect union, and he wrote gifted hands. He was the the neurosurgeon who served under Trump? Why am I blanking on his name?

Oh, Ben Carson. Ben Carson. Ben Carson at

the point that he he was he was running for it was before he ran for president. And I would have conversations with people where I would say I worked at time at at Sentinel, which published him. And that’s saying, we have Ben Carson and I would get a blank stare from people in the industry. And I would say, hit His book is currently number one on the non fiction list. And I would get a blank stare.

I was like, and it has been for four consecutive weeks, and I would get a blank stare. And so it’s just, like, It’s just Liberals would look at the list and just skip past that one. It’s like they just didn’t bother to process it. Anyway, he he ran for president was something popular, people were like, who is this guy? And I was like, this guy is one of the ten best selling writers in America.

Right now, you just don’t care. I mean, there’s a book that we did called the subtle art of not giving a fuck maybe five or six years ago now. And it’s at some point, it it must be entering in the, like, top ten self help books of all time. And it has, like, no wider cultural effect. But the book, I we probably, like, five or six million copies now.

I mean, it’s there’s just nothing like it. It’s it’s the number one non fiction book

every year. And

people, if

you’re not if you’re not a guy buying this guy if you’re not somebody buying this guy’s book, you don’t notice it. It’s just the the it’s weird how things can stay under the radar.

I mean, the the number you throw out there, five or six million, just for for context, I I think on your on your Twitter feed recently, you said that the threshold for New York Times bestseller is something like twenty to twenty five thousand copies. Well, that

is that right? Yeah. I mean, that’s that’s life. That’s how long a a near ten best seller sells ever in hardcover. Right.

The threshold depends on the time of year. In the fall, it’s probably for a hardcover. About six thousand copies and hardcover gets you on the best seller list. And but like in August, there was a week this year where there was a book that made the list with fourteen hundred copies in hardcover was all of it sold. And for the non fiction list, I mean, non fiction paperback is not a real category.

People just don’t care. People don’t buy books and non non fiction books and paper back. And so — Really? — sometimes the list will go yeah. Sometimes the list will fall to, like, there’ll be a book that’s sold seven hundred copies on the non fiction list.

Well, part of this is is

and this

is I mean, if you have some real economic walks out there, they’ll enjoy this. When I started publishing in nineteen ninety seven, twenty five dollars was the price of a hardcover. And that’s, like, fifty five dollars now. And because twenty five dollars is still the standard price for our cover, and you’re buying it on Amazon, you know, for eighteen ninety nine. So books have gotten insanely cheap.

And so you can imagine why there was a paper back market for books. If a hardcover book was fifty five dollars, It totally made sense to wait for it to come out and buy it in paper back. But the price differential now between paperbacks and hard covers is is so small that people don’t bother buying paperbacks. It’s a pretty rare book. Now fiction is different because fiction sends a market signal.

People see books in paper back and they they just it means something to them when they see a fiction book and paper back about the genre and about you know, what what it’s for. It’s it’s yeah. It’s that’s that’s

so interesting to me. I had never really thought about that, but I it makes make some sense. Has has the Kindle and, you know, to, I guess, probably do a lesser extent than Nook replace the the paper back market at all for for for nonfiction? Yeah.

So this was there were there were mass market when it replaced as mass market. There were mass market imprints at the major houses that are essentially been dismantled and everyone laid off over the past ten years because those were people who were there were very few people who were price sensitive and not quality sensitive. Right? I mean, the biggest price for you in reading a book is the time you have to spend reading it. Right?

The actual cost of the book is immaterial compared to am I really ready to devote three weeks — Right. — to reading over this book? And so but there are people who read through science fiction and a certain kind of crime book and and a lot of

genre,

romance novels that were not price sensitive. They they were used to getting the books free at spinning thing in the library, like, leave one leave a romance taken romance. And so those people flock to the inexpensive Kindle books But but then once they had wiped out the mass market, we didn’t see much of an increase. So, like, all the publishers except for Random House went all in on, like, ebooks or the future and Random House, partially because the guy who runs it started as a printer and so has, like, in his heart a love for print and ink and didn’t buy that people were going to. What we’ve actually seen is digital audio is the format, the life changing format that ebooks never turned out to be.

Digital audio is for for a lot for for certain kinds of books can be as much as fifty percent of the market, either book that came out that’s been a a big success for us called the end of the world is just the beginning. And it’s a it’s a businessy book, but it’s a very, like, red team out there kind of book about the shape of the world for the next fifty years by a geographer. And And every week, we’re now we’re selling, like, seventy percent of our units every week in digital audio.

When you say digital

audio, you mean, like, audiobook. Like, audiobooks? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Audio book. Yeah. I

mean, that

that’s interesting. And that tracks with, frankly, my experience. I you know, sometimes some of my podcasts are friends yell at me because I’ve not listened to their podcast, but because when I’m at the gym, the only time I have to listen to stuff is at the gym, basically. I you know, because I’m either reading or working or writing the rest of the time, watching movies or TV shows, whatever. When I’m at the gym and I can, you know, get on the elliptical and do my hard hardcore, you know, forty minutes of cardio, two or three times a week.

That’s when I listen to things, but I listen to audiobooks because they are, like, they’re just better. Mean, they’re just they’re just better to to do. I I don’t know. It’s interesting. That that is a thing that I’m sorry.

I’m rambled right now, but that’s a thing that tracks that I — Yeah.

— I think You know? Now, what speed do you listen to audiobooks

on?

I

I listen to well, it depends. See, it’s it’s interesting. It depends. If I’m listening to something that is narrated by a person I know so or am familiar with. So, like, for instance, I’m currently listening to a Bruce Campbell book.

I listen at one time speed because I like there. But if it’s somebody I don’t know, it’s usually at one point two five or even one point five. Yeah. So

the I think this is a big part of why people started switching over to digital audio as the higher speed. So I I have a couple I love John Stanford, and I love his audiobooks, the the the police procedural writer. And when I get those, you know, I listen to it slow and and wallow in it. But if I’m, like, reading a history the twentieth century, Yeah. I’ll list it on one and a half, even one point seven five speed because I’m just trying to get the I’m just trying to squeeze all of the juice out of the lemon as fast as I can.

Yeah. And so I think there are a lot of people. That’s why we see business books is a huge category for that because people are just trying to,

you know,

they just want this biography, Elon Musk, and they wanna have it downloaded into their brain as soon as possible. Do

you guys get

the data on that? How fast people listen to? No.

Two things.

Nope. That’s why I asked because

it’s not it’s it’s anecdotal is the best research I can do.

Yeah. No. That’s interesting. You know, everybody complains about the lack of information. Since we’re talking about audible and and Amazon for a second.

I wanna I wanna ask, you know, one thing people suggest is that people game the Amazon purchase system by buying in bulk. But that’s

hard. Right? Yeah. It it’s it’s really hard to do, but because I’ve

had

authors reach out to me and they because they start buying in bulk and I mean bulk by they’re, like, by order twenty five copies through Amazon. And often because through it’s actually cheaper for them to order from Amazon than order from us because we are giving them a big discount, but we’re charging them for shipping. So if they have Prime, they’re like, I will order my own books from Amazon. And then they’ll get limited to five books and then no more. And one of the reasons is that Amazon worries that that it’s a bot who is leveraging an improper pricing.

This actually happened once with salt salt heat acid fat. Somehow, Amazon accidentally priced it at, like, three ninety nine like a forty dollar book and immediately went to number one on Amazon. And no one was even sure, like, it eventually, they people were buying it to have the book, but people were pretty sure that it was a bot who was who was buying all the copies. And at least got it, drove it into the top one hundred because it was, you know, buying them and reselling them

back.

Yeah. Sure. Amazon somehow. Well, there are

Yeah. Like arbitrage. Like, they’re buying it for four dollars and selling it for ten dollars — Yeah. — you know, instead of forty when when the price goes back up.

Yeah. Interesting. So So it’s it’s hard to do that. And then also, I don’t I don’t think that Amazon would allow you If you bought twenty five hundred copies from Amazon, I don’t think it would send you to number one on Amazon. And that’s that’s enough copies in twenty four hours to get you to Amazon sometime to number one sometimes.

I don’t think Amazon would do it. I think that they would count each purchase as one purchase for the point of the ranking

system. There’s

this there’s no reason to think and then one of the things is we can see hourly sales for books. And so if if Jared Kushner bought five thousand books, you know, at seven AM on a Monday. We could just see in our system, oh,

somebody bought

twenty five hundred copies. Right at seven AM. Because what we do see is, like, he he he went to number one on Amazon, the first day that is the day before his book went out because he did Life Liberty and Levin on Fox, which is the absolute best place to sell books. And Linden said, this is the definitive story of the Trump administration. You’re not gonna find a better book, which is like, what you hope a host would say, on air when about a book.

And and we could see that halfway through the show, we started selling thousands of copies and then, like, by midnight, it didn’t tapered off. But we were selling we want for Peter Schweitzer, we want to sold eighteen thousand copies in one hour after Mark Levin. Shared because he did a whole hour and just everybody who saw the show, it seems like went and bought

a copy. I’m I’m

really interested. So this is one of the reasons why I wanted to to have you on. One of the reasons I I started actually talking to Tim Miller about this. Because this very this very stat about Mark Levin is is fascinating to me. In terms of In terms of the and you don’t feel I I don’t want you to name names here because I don’t want you to get in trouble with any bookers or shows or anything.

But in terms of the the the the quality of hits, when you were when you as an editor are looking at where do we wanna get our folks? Obviously, the Mark Levin TV

show, huge, huge seller. Where else are you looking? And like, what just doesn’t really matter from your POB. So the the the best things to sell books are your the

things that get there’s a movers and shakers list on Amazon. Right? Which is books that have suddenly selling a lot more copies than they were just hours ago. And when you see something on that list, it’s from a very small number of places. It’s from primetime, Talk TV.

It’s from daytime talk TV, you know, the view. It’s from a morning show, which could be talking heads TV or the regular morning shows, it can be one of a handful of NPR shows that are national. And it can be from a daily New York Times review, a daily Wall Street Journal review, or the author’s own efforts. They have a newsletter. They have a podcast.

Something to that effect. If it if it’s not in the list, I just gave you I don’t know that it’s really going to move it’s going to be a book booking that gets you on the best seller list. I mean, cumulatively, we still, you know, wanna have as much coverage as possible for a book. But you could do a ton of podcasts and, you know, the the federalist could write nine articles in one day about you. Oh, I’m sorry.

Brake fart should be on the list. Bray if Braebart really says your book is a must have book, then it will then it will shoot up on Amazon. No. That but that’s the only website I know of that has that ability to get people to move like that. So but there’s also a difference though on the quality of the hits.

Because the thing is, like, why does Carrie grow sell books? And the answer is because the people who who listen to Terry Gross are listening to think, okay, am I gonna buy the book by the person who’s on Terry today? That’s what they think before it even

starts. Mhmm.

And then, you know, Rachel Maddow show used to sell a crazy amount of copies, and Tucker Carlson Show can sell a crazy amount of copies, but Jake Tapper’s show does not. And the reason isn’t just the total number of viewers It’s how they handle book segment. When Tucker and Rachel do a segment, they’re like, this new book is the news.

And to know

about

the news, you have to read this book. And Jake Tapper is like, we have a guy here today who has written a book about China. In the afternoon book about Chinese like, alright. Now, you know, is Biden doing a good job of handing China? Let’s throw it to the panel and they bring up six heads and kick it around and it doesn’t it doesn’t communicate to readers that the book is the news.

And so one of the things for, you know, Lavin is that he will sometimes do two or three segments or even an entire show around a book or a personality. And then that’s that’s what sells an insane number. Because you could imagine if for anyone, if, like, Laura Ingram was, like, tonight, I just have one guest and we’re gonna spend an hour talking face to face with Lauren Beaubert about her new book. Then Lauren Beaubert’s book would just fly off the shelves because all of Law Ingram’s viewers would be like, oh, this book is major that she just devoted an hour and you know, it’s really in-depth and interesting. So Yeah.

That’s

that’s that’s interesting. So, you know, one thing one thing back when I was working on kind of more mainstream conservative news that we would always talk about is look, conservative books sell more. The conservative conservative. Conservative books sell sell at higher levels. And, you know, we we would always say, oh, well, conservative.

Conservatives are really reader. You know, that that is always a thing that that we would talk about. Is that still true? Do you find that conservative conservative branded books sell sell better than, you know, liberal branded books. And I’m curious to get your sense of why that is.

There

there’s there are a couple different things. One, I think, often, there are books that are liberal that we the liberals are counting. Right? So, like, if Brian kill me to write the book about George Washington, that’s a conservative book. And then but if Jonathan Alter writes a book about George Washington, that’s just a book about George Washington.

So some of it is there’s a purposeful branding of one as liberal and not because of this sort of bias. A second thing is that the conservatives tend to be much more naked and just how they

pitch

the product. Right? So it’s easier to get to the top of the best seller list with a book that’s about

well, you’re

just calling the president a jerk.

Right?

If you’re but one of the we saw so many Trump best sellers partially because

the left finally

was like, I’m going to write a book and I’m just gonna call it trader why the president is a traitor. And so for a long time, just conservatives weren’t pulling any punches in their packaging and Liberals were. And there’s still a strong push for Liberals to call their books like, you know, the democracy paradox, why our future is at risk from part you know, something where it’s just It’s just not as in your face. And then the third thing is is that the the more original the book is, the harder to find this information and argument somewhere other than this book. Then the better the book is going to sell.

So this is why I mean, Alex Jones is at the top of Amazon right now. And r f k wrote a book that said Fauci killed tens of thousands or hundreds thousands of AIDS patients in the eighties is you can’t find that anywhere else. So that’s that sells really well. And so one of the things that you’re up against when you’re doing a liberal book is you know, I I did a book with Scott Gottlieb that was a best seller, and we were very proud of how it turned out. It was the best selling COVID book that took COVID seriously.

Side for Michael Lewis, who’s always the best selling book on anything. But but it was hard when we knew going in selling Scott Gottlieb’s book because the book

saying, you

know, COVID was bad. Here’s why it was bad. The vaccine was good. Here’s why it was good. Was just what you get every day and almost every media outlet in America.

And so he his book was never going to be a massive number one bestseller because If you wanted that opinion, you could find it somewhere else. And so one of the things that benefits conservative books is the way that they are marginalized by the rest of the media. Means that if you buy a book by a conservative, you’re likely to get things that are harder to

to find. One thing

you just said, if you if you wanted that opinion, you could find it somewhere else is very interesting to me. How much how much of book sales do you think is driven by some form of confirmation bias. People trying to find the argument the arguments that will help them win arguments. One hundred

percent. There’s literally no other thing that drives people to buy books. There’s just there’s nothing else that there’s no other impulse that would lead you to purchase a book. And so I always say for non fiction books, you want your number one Amazon customer to review just to be headline. I always thought this was true and now I can prove it.

Right? So sometimes a young actor would be like, I’m doing a biography of sting and it’s warts and all. And you’re like, no. No one who buys a biography of Sting wants to know about warts. They want to know that the police were the greatest band.

They were the greatest reggae band. They were the greatest pro rock band. They were the greatest pop band. You know, you you buy that book so you can tell your friends Why don’t you own every police album? I have a book that proves staying as the greatest songwriter and singer in history.

That’s why you buy that book. And so that’s true for every book. You buy you buy a book that’s like how to play golf better in fifteen minutes. It’s because secretly you thought I’m just fifteen minutes away from being an excellent golfer. I just need someone just needs to tell me the right thing.

And then I haven’t sort of worked this out for fiction, but I’m positive that it’s true for fiction. That that there’s, like, only a dozen fantasies that people bring to books. And then they just pick a genre and then push that fantasy into it. I mean, I know what mine is. Mine is Sherlock Holmes.

Every book that I really love has a person who gets away with with being terrible and everything because they are super good at their one thing. And so I just I’m I’m very drawn to that in a book. Yeah. So I I confirmation bias is always it. But the the thing is, but it still has to be they have it has to be it’s not just I always thought this was true, but the thing is now I can prove it and I couldn’t prove it before.

So I’ll get in pitch or someone who’s like, I have a book on how open borders are terrible. But and I’m like, where who who is the person who’s having who believes that, who is currently doesn’t have good information to prove that that’s true. And

so —

Yeah. — you have to say you have to look at every book and say, what are they saying new? About this. And often, they have to slice it, not exactly the partisan way. You know what I mean?

You have to figure out something where where not everybody agrees with you, even the people who you would think would agree with you, you

know. I mean,

I’ve this guy Joe Concha has a book coming about out about Biden soon. And part of his spiel is that for conservatives, is that Joe Biden is in control of the presidency. And he’s doing all the things that he said he would always do and all the things you don’t like or the things that you always didn’t like It’s time to admit Joe Joe Biden is the president and a terrible president. Because and we’ll see if it works, but you know, the if you watch Fox, Fox is like, you know, Joe Biden is essentially a mommy whose whose lips are being pulled with strings or stick or something, and

some cabal

of people is running the country. And so we’ll see if it works, but he’s he’s trying to you know, confirm people’s opinion that Joe Biden is a bad president, but try to tell them

that a new and different way than what they’ve been thinking so far. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s that sounds that sounds about right. Let me let me pull up the the

the list of myths here. You did you did a you did, like, I I was seven, eight, ten tweet thread, something like that, just the just the the list of myths. And I wanna run through them real quick for folks. You should be following Eric, by the way, on Twitter. Is Handle is at literary, Eric.

It’s just great great stuff if you’re interested in in the the business of books and and and all that stuff. Again, at literary area, go follow them right now. And

also if you wanna see Tweets praising Jared Kushner and Tim Miller, you know. And and Jonathan Last and Pete Hanksett. So if you want — Yeah. — if you wanna be driven by this

is this is my

life. This is where this is what I what I’m what I’m what I live with. Alright. So alright. So myth number one, you can buy your way onto the best seller list.

We’ve talked about this a little bit, but what what is what what are the formulas that that these lists used to to try and stop that? I mean, it it

boggles my mind that people think the New York Times and Nielsen BookScan would have made no effort to keep people from gaming their way onto the list. And so Part of the thing with their complicated way of of doing the math at the New York Times is to try to eliminate people who buy who can buy their way onto the list. And they leave people off every week who appear to have gotten their sales in some non fully traditional way. You can look at the p w list with this book scan every week and compare the two and there’s going to be a book, usually a business book, on the p w list that’s not in the New York Times list because they have decided the way that this book was bought was not right. Or another thing you very commonly see is that they have discounted some some bulk sales on the New York Times list.

And where the p w is not. So the p w, it’ll be number five in the p w list, and it’ll be number twelve on the New York Times list because they have somehow feel like they’ve sorted out the books. So one of the things about the dagger on the New York Times list is incredibly misleading because they they say that it it went to this book has had bulk sales. But it really appears like it’s the books where they’ve discounted the bulk sales because it it’s the books that tend to be either by politicians or business leaders where there are, you know, they go to an event and they sell a thousand copies to the venue having the event, and those books are are ranked a thousand copies lower than they otherwise would be on the New York Times list. And p w also we’ll leave books off for books for book sales.

The the Nielsen book scan list also leaves books off all the time where they have enough units to get on that they’ve decided that either because of the geographic spread or the amount sold versus the total amount of available inventory that they think something is fishy and they’ll leave it off their list. And so there there used to be people sometimes linked to a book to to an article in The Wall Street Journal eleven years ago about a company that you could pay to help you get on the New York Times list. But the New York times has reformulated their list many times since then, and so has Nielsen BookScan in an attempt to drive that company out of business and they sort of did. You can’t hire that company anymore to try to do this.

Yeah.

Alright.

So that that’s myth number two. Dagger means he the author bought his way on. Myth number three, the RNC has a basement full of books.

Yeah. This is it this really started because Don junior, he had a book that came out from Center

Street,

and the R and C bought copies and gave the copies away as a donor premium if you donated seventy five dollars. Right? The the thing is There there’s a bunch of reasons why this doesn’t make any sense. One, his book sold seventy five thousand copies the first week and the number two books sold forty five thousand copies. So, I mean, he blew away the number two book.

There

was never

the the five thousand copies the r and c bought made no difference to him being number one. Two, They’re often bought through books a million, and it’s not clear that those count that that that they’re not being excluded. They’re likely being excluded from any calculation in the list. And a lot of times, it’s not even clear if Barnes if books and million is reporting those, to the times their Nielsen book scan, they often show up very weird. Like, Jared Kushner did have some bulk sales.

They they

were supposed to appear a certain week they came out the first week, which we didn’t want because we didn’t want the dagger and we didn’t want. We just said if there’s any bulk sales,

make sure they’re

not in the first week, so we don’t get the dagger. So it’s absolutely pristine. They were counted. They got the dagger. Whatever.

But But the the r and c, actually, I I had heard that they bought over fifteen thousand copies of Don Junior’s book, and they bought them in one thousand copy tranches over time, which makes sense. And if you’ve ever been set a nonprofit where they’re

using something

as a fundraiser, you could just donate seventy five dollars. Like, the r and c is not just randomly mailing people copies of Don Junior’s book. It’s a people who when that email came out that, okay, this, I’m gonna order I’m gonna get seventy five dollars, and I’m gonna get my signed copy of Don Junior’s book. And they’re also, like I said, often comp buy them in, like, one thousand copy tranches. So there’s no

And there’s

no reason for them to have them just sitting in the basement. And then people are like, well, it’s a we’re you know, it’s to help Don Junior with the royalties and it’s a wave. But for every twenty five dollar book he sells, he’s getting, like, three fifty. And they can just hire Kimberly Gilfoyle at sixty thousand dollars a minute to give a speech. Like, they just wanna give money to the Trump’s.

They just give money to the Trump. It’s a terrible way to get money to Trump’s to five five thousand copies if your intention is to pulp

them. Yeah. So that he — Yeah.

— so that

he can get then he can get fifteen percent of that.

Yeah.

I mean, this is this this is a a one of the the myths later on. Basically, that you can you can bribe a politician with book sales. Yeah. I had a poll

I had someone try to help me bribe a politician with book sales. I don’t even remember who it was, but somebody said, I’m gonna have a guy call you. He’s this guy, Google them. I Google them. He’s like, you know, the seventy second richest person in America.

He calls me he was like, have you ever heard of this congressperson? And I was like, no. And he was like, would you be interested in a book by her? And I was like, probably not. And he was like, what if I was going to buy?

Twenty thousand copies. And I was like, well, that’s a lot more cartons than you think. Like, I I hope you have a whole warehouse and somewhere to put those. You know, plan on returning them. And I said, but it it’s not a good way for her to make money.

So she was a house member she can’t take in advance. And he was like, yeah, but then she get the royalties from the book. And I was like, well, you know, if you spend one million dollars on books. And he’s like, I’m not gonna spend a million dollars in the book. I was like, okay, great.

If you sell one million dollars in books, it’s that’s going to get her, like, a hundred and twenty five oops. A hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. To end royalties, like, a year and a half from now. Minus the ghostwriters, like, fifty thousand dollars. So maybe seventy five thousand dollars for your million dollar spend.

And he was like, oh, well, fuck that. And I was like, yes. Yes. Exactly. And he was like, alright.

Well, it was very nice talking to you when he hung up in because he was like, like, when he heard the math, he was like, now it’s insane. I could just, like, hire her husband as a consultant for seventy five thousand dollars.

Very nice talking

to you. Thank thank you for explaining why my bribe would not make sense. That is perfect. Alright. We we already discussed you can buy your way to number one on Amazon.

And Obama or Donald Trump Junior were best sellers because of donors. Politicians. Politicians line their pockets this way. Yeah. I mean,

this is part

of the

this is part

of the myth about, like, the the the bribery thing is that that you

can that

you could get Rich doing this. The re the the way that they make any money from doing it is you know, Ted Cruz is somebody who can appear on Fox that we just established that Fox is very good at selling books. So you you get them on fox. So it’s it’s the amount of money that they’re making is moderately lucrative, but it’s really based on their ability to to get on TV. And having their campaign by books is And often, you know, if you’re a senator and you get a half million dollars, remember that the you’ve gotta earn that out before you see anything past the five hundred thousand dollars.

And so buying five thousand copies for your campaign doesn’t begin to fill in the bucket. Of the five hundred thousand dollars, you know, not like a Mark Levin appearance does. So it’s so much

it makes so

much more sense to just get focused on trying to sell books at events and Mark Levin. Yeah. It’s kind of like the same with with cheating and elections is, like, when you look at how much money would take to bribe people for

ten thousand votes.

It just makes more sense to try to get ten thousand people to vote. Instead.

Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of Sanders, publishing houses give out the advantages in exchange for huge favors. And I just wanna read the tweet here because it it it, you know, it’s perfect. This one boggles my mind what valuable benefit could a New York based publishing house possibly get by giving it an advance to Ted Cruz or Elizabeth Warren aside from book sales or bragging rights?

Yeah. What what Why? Why do

people think this? Yeah. The they’re

yeah. I I I think it’s starts with New Kingrich got so many millions of dollars. From HarperCollins, I guess, twenty five years ago now. And it was investigated by the Health Ethics Committee and led to house members not being allowed to get advances. And there was some feeling that this was Rupert Murdoch just handing new king rich millions of dollars.

But even at least in that case, there’s some benefit you could see too. If you if you gave Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, a book deal, worth an unprecedented number of millions of dollars. You could say, they’re trying to influence policy. But even then, it’s not beneficial to the publishing company. Like, maybe there’s some

saw, you

know, like Rupert Murdoch would would be passing out money in exchange for having his political beliefs enacted. But, like, new Cambridge is going to do new Cambridge stuff whether Rupert Murdoch gave him money or not. You know, it doesn’t the the the where the the publishing company makes out benefiting doesn’t make any sense. We we’re not we’re not regulated in such a way that it would be that helpful. Like, when when when Andrew Cuomo got his huge advance, if he had somehow allowed us

to,

like, deduct biodegradable ink from our state taxes

you know, it’s

worth tens of thousands of dollars. I don’t know. I’m, like, ballparking it here, but there’s there’s nothing that Andrew Cuomo could do for a company. That’s worth five million dollars except for if he was able to sell, you know, one million copies of his book, which he did not because two of the worst deals for politician books ever are both Andrew Cuomo. He wrote two books and both were phenomenal disasters for their publishing company.

Yeah. That sounds about

right. I I mean, this gets to the last the last myth here, which is that politicians are always best sellers, so there must be a scam. And that that’s a myth that, like, I’m surprised people will think of because anytime I hear a story about politicians and book sales, it’s usually like, well, this politician is drastically underperformed their advance again. Yeah. This is this this has happened again.

And I’m I’m curious from your perspective as an editor, why do why do houses keep making these deals? So, I mean,

publishers do the bad dumb things all the time. And there was something that every and, you know, it’s like an economics one zero one thing called the winners curse. For auctions, which is that the more people in an auction, the more likely it is that the person who pays the most has grossly overestimated the value of the thing that they’re buying. And so when you have when you have like, when Kamala Harris is shopping your book, and I I don’t know. There there was a lot of complications around that.

There was there was a rumor that she had gotten two million dollars and then but then the deal maybe fell apart. I don’t know. That’s it’s a little outside of my per view and is a little secretive, but it was it was supposedly two million dollars of the original amount. And the reason was not that hard to understand, which is that people thought she had a chance of being president. And the person who thought that for two million dollars worth was to clear was delusional.

I mean, she could still be present. Joe Biden could be dead while we’re talking now. But she’s not gonna get elected on her own. But what happened was that was something where there were, you know, like, seventeen different editors who wanted to bid on it. So then the person who was the seventeenth dumbest editor is the person who wins it.

So Yeah. And — Yeah. — and they’re they they’re famous and they get on TV and, you know, but people make this mistake in the other direction and that you know, Elon Musk wrote a book, sold nothing. Matt Gates wrote a book, it sold nothing. And partially, it’s because they’re like, this person is really famous.

Everyone is always talking about them. So their book must be a best seller, but it’s like if the people talking about you are not your fans, because remember, only your fans are buying things. This idea this is another thing people do say. It’s not on my list of myth, but it’s a common one as people will say, authors will say to me, like, oh, you’d be surprised how many people hate me, and they’ll buy the book just to read it, to be mad at me. And I’m like, no, they won’t.

There’s no evidence in existence that people will buy Jared Kushner book Jared Kushner’s book because they hate Jared and just want — Yeah. — even the famous New York Times Yeah. Yeah. No. I don’t think

Dwight Garner read

it. I’ll go on the record saying that the book has no his review has no overlap with the actual book, whereas, like, Laura Miller and Slate hated it as you clearly read the book and hated it on things that they’re not the things I would have focused on, but I understand why her readers would be like, yes, I legitimately would hate that about the

book. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is

I this gets it to an important distinction between the hate click economy and the subscriber economy. You subscribe to the things you love. You’ll you’ll hate click and hate share things that you can read for free and hate But, like, their their the overlap there is not is not particularly good. Yeah.

That’s why Facebook shares are a much better indicator of potential sales than tweets are. Meaning, you know, if you wrote if you wrote a piece and and it went viral on Twitter, then you’ve got possibly a book. If you write it and it goes viral on Facebook, you definitely have a book. Because on Twitter, people are sharing things much more negatively And so you could just be everyone dunking on you. Whereas in Facebook, people are saying, this thing that Sonny Bunch wrote, is me.

I want you all to know my personality is this headline from the Bulwark. And so that’s that’s a much more That would be an scary thing. It’s a

much more

scary idea. Yeah.

Alright. Well, that

was that was everything I wanted to ask. I always like to close these interviews by asking if there’s anything I should have asked. If you think there’s anything folks should know about the world book publishing, you know, the intersection of politics and culture and and books and all that in general. Or just I

do. So so one thing you had started with talking about Tim Miller and Jared, and I’ve done David From and Pete Hagseth, and I’ve done, you know, people from all across the political spectrum. And the standard that I use for will I publish a book is Is this commercially viable? There’s an audience for it? And will it be filled with true stuff?

And that seems like a low bar when I say it aloud. But, you know, I I’ve had since since twenty twenty I mean, since twenty twenty one, I’ve had I forget now, but it’s like

fifteen New

York Times best sellers. Almost

all

of them conservative. And and none of them election was stolen. None of them said COVID as a hoax. None of them said,

you know, Fauci

is purposely destroying America’s public school system to start a some you know, a a great reset or something. And sometimes it feels like I’ve done all of the conservative best sellers that didn’t say that. Like, I’m I’m I’m driving, you know, between two very large boulders in an attempt to not get crushed by them. And so the reason like Jared’s book, you could be mad at it, but I think if if people read it, they’ll actually see an honest person trying to to do their best to reckon with where they were for four years and same for Tim Miller, And, you know, Lou Dobbs did a book called The Trump Century that if you read it, you could hate it, but you’re not going to find that it’s filled with, you know, fake things or, you know, footnotes that lead to a blog by a dentist. So that that’s the standard is if it’s if it’s true and it’s, you know I think it improves the discourse to do any book that is at least filled with true things and smart arguments.

Yeah. I think that truthfulness and smart smart intelligent arguments, two two important things. And I’m glad I’m I look, I’m I hope the, you know, the bookmark it maintains its equilibrium as we as we see all of the other cultural entities kind of, you know, have have their issues. So I’m I’m I’m I’m happy to see books being sold regardless of who was writing them. Eric, thank you very much for being on.

I really appreciate it. Again, follow him on Twitter, at literary Eric. Check out check out the books that he has edited edited toward edited was the editor on and and I I again, if you haven’t if you’re listening this, you’ve probably read Tim’s book. But if you have not, make sure you pick it up again. He was very much the inspiration for this.

Yeah. Very good

old episode,

which I thought was thought was fun. My name is Sunny Bunch. I’m the culture editor at The Bulwark, and I will be back next week with another episode of The Bulwark goes to Hollywood to see guys.

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