Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s inside account of Donald Trump’s first nine months as US president, is so incendiary it’s become a publishing phenomenon.
Quartz compared the 10 bestselling nonfiction books from the last 12 months, using sales numbers from each book’s first seven weeks in publication. We used point-of-sales data from NPD BookScan, which covers an estimated 85% of the US print book market.
The data show clearly that Fire and Fury blows all other nonfiction out of the water, not only in raw number of books sold but also in how rapidly its sales grew.
This chart includes early-week sales data from these books, in order of publication date:
- Old School: Life in the Sane Lane, by Bill O’Reilly and Bruce Feirstein (March 2017)
- Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant (April 2017)
- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, by Neil Degrasse Tyson (May 2017)
- What Happened, by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Sept. 2017)
- Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard (Sept. 2017)
- Leonardo Da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson (Oct. 2017)
- The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Come and Get It!: Simple, Scrumptious Recipes for Crazy Busy Lives, by Ree Drummond (Oct.
2017) - Obama: An Intimate Portrait, by Pete Souza (Nov. 2017)
- Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff (Jan. 2018)
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson (Jan. 2018)