MillenniumPost
Editorial

Woodward's Fear on fire

Woodward's Fear is the fastest selling book – virtually, every week, there's a new book about the Trump White House. But, Bob Woodward's book is in a class of its own. Fear is already one of the top-selling books of the year, not just on the politics shelf of the bookstore, but in the entire store itself. According to Barnes & Noble, Fear has had the "fastest sales for an adult title since Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman was released in July 2015". The bookseller called the pace of sales "phenomenal" and "amazing". Woodward's publisher Simon & Schuster has announced that more than 750,000 copies of Fear were sold, the first day it went on sale. The staggering figure includes pre-orders, first day sales of the print copy, e-books and audiobooks. President Jonathan Karp called it a "cultural phenomenon". "Based on an immense pre-publication and ongoing interest, the reading public clearly has an enormous appetite for what we believe, as Woodward says, is 'a pivot point in history'," Karp said. It is a testament to the widespread interest in and concern about the Trump presidency. Woodward's book describes a dysfunctional White House where some of Trump's own aides think he is a danger to national security. The only similar book that has sold as well as Fear, this year, is Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, which painted a similarly disturbing portrait of the president. What distinguishes Woodward is his decades of reporting on Washington. He has written or co-written 19 books, including Fear. So, when he sounds an alarm, it is serious. "I've never seen an instance when the president is so detached from the reality of what's going on," Woodward said. People are "underestimating how serious all of this is". He said, "people took actions to protect the country because the president wanted to do things such as withdrawing from a trade agreement in South Korea." What really seemed to have helped sales are the early leaks from the book and the resulting condemnations from President Trump. Book critics have quipped that Trump is an effective book salesman because his angry tweets and denunciations have fuelled interest in Fire and Fury, Fear and several other titles this year. His endorsement of pro-Trump books such as The Russia Hoax also helped with sales, but not as much as his expressions of outrage do. Simon & Schuster said, "We have reprinted six times for a total of seven to meet the extraordinary demand, and that will put one million books in print before we've even gone on sale." The book is selling well outside the US as well. It's also No 1 on the online charts in Canada, the UK and Germany.

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