Michael Wolff’s Fox News Book Opens With Lackluster Sales
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News that Rupert Murdoch was stepping down as chairman of his sprawling media empire broke two weeks ago, and the timing seemed to be a dream come true for writer Michael Wolff, whose book Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty was set for release just a few days later. But despite the great fortune of having the thesis of his daring upcoming book confirmed — with its main subject ending his 70-year career within days of its publication — The Fall has so far flopped in terms of sales.
The book came out on September 26 and in its first week, sold just 3,219 copies, according to BookScan numbers obtained by Mediaite. By comparison, Cassidy Hutchinson’s tell-all about her time in the Trump White House, Enough, sold 51,317 copies, according to BookScan.
The low numbers are stunning given the timing of Murdoch’s retirement, which neatly coincided with Wolff’s book tour (including a stop on Mediaite’s The Interview.) At his New York book party, Wolff told attendees that the end of Murdoch’s reign at Fox News would come sooner than expected.
The following day, news broke that he was stepping down. Wolff was suddenly a white-hot booking, so he made the rounds and extolled the trove of sensational revelations from his book. It was a publishing promoter’s dream come true — until the numbers came in. On Thursday, Amazon had his book ranked 2,583.
I reached out to Wolff to ask why he thought his book is not performing like his previous exposes, which include blockbuster bestsellers on the Trump White House.
“I’m delighted the book is one of the bestselling nonfiction books in the country and already on the New York Times bestseller list,” he said.
It’s true, the initial sales were enough to get the book to 14 on the New York Times bestseller list of hardcover nonfiction (It did not make it onto the Times’s combined print and e-book list). The fact that a book selling just 3,000 units made it onto a bestseller list at all says a lot about the state of the book publishing industry, but that’s a story for another piece.
Wolff’s previous books have sold remarkably well. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, published in 2018, sold roughly a million copies. His two other Trump tomes, Siege and Landslide, sold roughly 50,000 and 65,00o since they were released, respectively, also according to BookScan.
