The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Lefty Visualization And The Bookstore: Brown Must Bomb

Posted on | February 10, 2010 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Salon’s article title and blurb are all about projecting gloom:

If past is prologue, Scott Brown’s book will bomb
The new Massachusetts senator may soon join the long line of legislators who have penned forgettable tomes

And then, emphasis mine:

As the tea party hero who seized Ted Kennedy’s old Massachusetts Senate seat for the GOP, Brown may actually find a decent audience for his tome. (Decent by senator-turned-author standards, at least.) It’s an annual Senate tradition: Some solon gets it in his (or her) head to put the collected wisdom of his life into print. And in most cases, that wisdom — boilerplate title and all — winds up remaindered not much later.

And, so, like, what if there is substantive material about the lead-up to the election? One hopes they drag Stacy for an edit, like he provided on Michelle Malkin’s book.

What if there is significant thought about how to save the country from Progressivism?
What if Governor Paling flogs the tome, and really drives sales?
What if it, you know, doesn’t suck?

As the left navigates the Kübler-Ross model, the sheer ignorant silliness of it all, for example, advertising an opponent’s book still in the planning stages, continues to astound.

Just keep pluckin’ that chicken, Salon.

Comments

2 Responses to “Lefty Visualization And The Bookstore: Brown Must Bomb”

  1. Ui2
    February 11th, 2010 @ 9:00 pm

    Palin, Beck, O’Reilly and Levin continue to rule the NYT Best Seller lists, and it shows no sign of letting up. Malkin, Coulter and Savage too. There was even talk of separating conservative books from the nonfiction list in an attempt to marginalize (read: ghettoize) these authors and let someone else win for a change.

    [ Beck even topped the NYT Fiction list during the winter of ’09 with The Christmas Sweater — the first time an author reached #1 in both fiction and nonfiction lists during the same year. ]

    Yet the book industry wants to continue to believe the fantasy that conservatives don’t read, and therefore couldn’t possibly understand anything, let alone why a caged bird might sing.

    Analyze the last five years of book sales and you confront an inconvenient truth: It’s difficult to make the case that liberals read — at all. Unless your last name is Clinton or Obama, your liberal book won’t sell (your Air America will go bankrupt, your MSNBC will lose 5:1 in the ratings, etc.).

    Those who claim that Brown’s book won’t sell are living in a fantasy world. In their reality, Sarah Palin didn’t actually write a book because it didn’t have a table of contents. Eleven weeks later and it finally drops below #10 on the list. Most hardcover books don’t last two months, yet O’Reilly’s Bold Fresh is still on the list, selling in hardcover since early in the Nixon administration.

    So before Salon writers start predicting that a conservative book will get “remaindered” early (recycled as cheap bargain books), maybe they ought to try combining all the sales of all of the books every written by every author on their staff, and see if they can collectively beat the sales of even one Beck, Palin, Levin or O’Reilly title. Good luck with that.

  2. Ui2
    February 11th, 2010 @ 4:00 pm

    Palin, Beck, O’Reilly and Levin continue to rule the NYT Best Seller lists, and it shows no sign of letting up. Malkin, Coulter and Savage too. There was even talk of separating conservative books from the nonfiction list in an attempt to marginalize (read: ghettoize) these authors and let someone else win for a change.

    [ Beck even topped the NYT Fiction list during the winter of ’09 with The Christmas Sweater — the first time an author reached #1 in both fiction and nonfiction lists during the same year. ]

    Yet the book industry wants to continue to believe the fantasy that conservatives don’t read, and therefore couldn’t possibly understand anything, let alone why a caged bird might sing.

    Analyze the last five years of book sales and you confront an inconvenient truth: It’s difficult to make the case that liberals read — at all. Unless your last name is Clinton or Obama, your liberal book won’t sell (your Air America will go bankrupt, your MSNBC will lose 5:1 in the ratings, etc.).

    Those who claim that Brown’s book won’t sell are living in a fantasy world. In their reality, Sarah Palin didn’t actually write a book because it didn’t have a table of contents. Eleven weeks later and it finally drops below #10 on the list. Most hardcover books don’t last two months, yet O’Reilly’s Bold Fresh is still on the list, selling in hardcover since early in the Nixon administration.

    So before Salon writers start predicting that a conservative book will get “remaindered” early (recycled as cheap bargain books), maybe they ought to try combining all the sales of all of the books every written by every author on their staff, and see if they can collectively beat the sales of even one Beck, Palin, Levin or O’Reilly title. Good luck with that.