Huffpo gets the story about Michael Wolff's bomb of a book:
The Huffington Post's Sam Stein reported last week that Amazon sales for Michael Wolff's much-hyped biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns The News, were "disappointing," and that its publisher, Broadway Books, "was set to pull back expenditures on its publicity."
This week, Nielsen BookScan data estimates the sales to date at just 6,000 copies (though BookScan does not include sales from Wal-Mart, Sam's, BJ's , airports or libraries). Further, as of Friday afternoon, the book ranked 2,586 on Barnes & Noble's website and 2,072 on Amazon. According to a source within Broadway Books, the imprint is not happy with the sales numbers and expected the book to sell dramatically better than it has. Executives there, according to the source, are blaming buzz about inaccuracies in Wolff's reporting for the lackluster sales numbers.
There's a great book to be written about Murdoch, just like there's a great book to be written about Roger Ailes and Fox News--or maybe by Ailes, about Fox News.
But obviously Wolff is not the guy. His book of a decade or so ago, "Burn Rate," was entertaining, but on this book, he simply burned himself.
