Even suing Simon & Schuster can’t save Milo Yiannopoulos’ now-self published book Dangerous. It might have won the Breitbart alum some fresh headlines, but the lawsuit did nothing to inflate Yiannopoulos’ book sales. Nor did his PR team’s announcement that 100,000 copies sold the first day of the book’s Amazon release make that claim true. Instead (via a data analysis by The Guardian), he sold about 87,000 fewer books than he’s saying he did. But according to Yiannopoulos, that math is just fake news.
“It’s true that the major booksellers only managed to ship out 18,000 copies to retail customers by the list cutoff. But that’s because they didn’t order enough ahead of time, and have been scrambling to play catchup ever since,” explained the conservative star. “The real news is that we’ve received wholesale orders and direct orders of such magnitude that our entire stock of 105,000 books is already accounted for.”
The problem with that assessment is that, while it’s true that the sales numbers don’t include wholesale orders, the outlets putting in those wholesale orders aren’t necessarily going to sell those copies. It might give Yiannopoulos a thrill, but if the wholesalers can’t move Dangerous, they’ll return the copies to the publisher. And if the book isn’t moving already, it’s unlikely to have better luck in the days ahead. Dangerous debuted at the top of Amazon’s rankings but already fell to fifth place in nonfiction and just 52nd place overall. He sold just 18,268 copies sold in the U.S., and a dismal 152 were ordered in Yiannopoulos’ native U.K.
Yiannopoulos’ rising star abruptly imploded after an audio recording surfaced in which he seemed supportive of sex between older men and adolescent boys. After building a career upon shocking liberals, Yiannopoulos finally managed to pull the same stunt on his own base, and they fled. Simon & Schuster ate thousands of dollars of an advance they’d issued for Dangerous and said they would no longer publish the book, sensing it would not longer sell. Yiannopoulos even resigned from his post as tech editor at Breitbart news, the publication that gave him his start. But to hear him tell it, he’s been treated unfairly and has bigger and better things ahead.
Like his media company Milo Inc., which is staffed with other conservative millennials with a penchant for pushing buttons. It seems to be well-funded (if, maybe, not as well-funded as Yiannopoulos claims) in part thanks to the mysterious Mercer family, a conservative clan with financial ties to Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and the Trump campaign. Milo Inc. may indeed be the next big thing for its eponymous founder, but it looks like for Dangerous to sell the way he says it did, he’s going to have to ask his new benefactors to start buying up books.
(Via The Guardian)