Hillary Clinton’s first memoir featured revelations about how she learned about one of the sex scandals of the century. Her second memoir, Hard Choices, does not. Washington’s press corps is salivating over the result of this—the first run of Hard Choices, a million copies, is not going to be sold out soon. In the Huffington Post, Howard Fineman* reports that sales have been falling by 50 percent each week, down to 26,190 in the latest week, and that this might challenge the idea of Clinton’s 2016 inevitability.
Seems silly, but this has burbled up from enough sources to warrant an official response from Correct the Record, a project of David Brock’s progressive messaging network (Media Matters, American Bridge) that is fairly explicitly out to defend Clinton. They sent this around yesterday:
ATTACK: The right wing launched an attack that Hillary Clinton’s memoir, “Hard Choices,” has not been successful so far.
FACTS:
• “Hard Choices” is #1 on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list for the third week in a row.
• “Hard Choices” has sold more copies than books by a number of leading Republicans including Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy.
• “Hard Choices” sold more in its third week than Rand Paul and Jeb Bush’s books did total, combined!
• In the third week for sale, “Hard Choices,” sold more copies than Scott Walker’s, Rick Santorum’s and Bobby Jindal’s book ever sold.
• “Hard Choices” is among the year’s most popular nonfiction books, selling approximately 160,000 copies so far, according to the Associated Press and press reports.
• The book’s sales saw less of a drop-off in the percentage of sales in its second week of publication than her 2003 memoir, “Living History,” which went on to sell 1.1 million copies.
• “Hard Choices” debuted on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list as the No. 1 “Nonfiction Print Hardcover,” No. 1 “Nonfiction E-Book,” and No. 1 “Nonfiction Combined Print & E-Book.”
It goes on like that.
*Fineman’s story originally described the sales decline this way:
It now describes it this way:
There is no disclaimer on the page about why the sentence was altered.