Tony’s Blair’s autobiography – A Journey – that needs to sell anywhere between 500,000 and a million copies to break even, has shot up the Amazon Bestseller chart after a recent announcement that all proceeds will be donated to the Royal British Legion. Where previously it had been lurking in the depths of the sub-50s, it has now rocketed up the chard to 7th place – no mean feat for a book still a fortnight from publication!
Even so, many industry experts are expecting the American market to make or break the book, which should come as no surprise to anybody who knows their books. Bestsellers in the USA regularly exceed a million sales and the works of politicians can proved especially popular, as was evidenced by Bill Clinton’s My Life, which sold over 400,000 copies within 24 hours! Even the grotesque Sarah Palin managed to sell a cool 300,00 copies of Going Rouge in her first day.
In short, no matter how enthusiastic we British may get about our books, we simply don’t have the manpower to easily make or break a book with an advance of £4.6. It should come as no surprise, therefore, than Tony unleashed a torrent of pro-American schpeal in the introduction to the U.S edition of the book; Clinton is described as a man of “ferocious intellectual capacity”, Obama a “man with steel in every part of him” and even Bush gets away with having a “great intuition”. According to Blair, the American people are respected around the world for their nobility of spirit… A claim I shall leave the rest of the world to consider.
Image from http://forums.airshows.co.uk
