‘She’s produced a bestseller!” panted the Spectator. “Liz Truss’s new book has been out for less than 72 hours and it’s already sold out on Amazon.” Thus began the fairly widespread British media hallucination that the 45-day PM was once more igniting the nation with her 2024 book Ten Years to Save the West. In the end, Truss’s book sold 2,228 copies in the UK in its first week, which placed it at No 70 in the “bestseller” charts . The next week it had fallen back to 223, comfortably obliterated by any number of cookbooks, novels, self-help titles and sticker books, none of which had enjoyed anything like its level of publicity. You hear a lot about AI hallucinations, but rather less about the hallucinations suffered by journalists all on their own.
So, then, to the furore over the academic/recent Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s new book, which I find at least as high-stakes for our culture as that courtroom battle between Gwyneth Paltrow and the – I think? – retired optometrist who accidentally skied into her.
Goodwin has self-published
a book called Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, and the political writer Andy Twelves has made his case that the book is likely AI-assisted, given that it contains various imaginary quotes from philosophers and ChatGPT links in some footnotes and so on. One of them challenged the other to a debate on GB News, which was very much won by Twelves. But also by Goodwin, given we live in a post-shame political culture and you really could not buy this level of publicity for a sub-mediocre nonfiction book in its week of release. Neither gentleman is wearing their triumph lightly, shall we say. But we live in the click wars and the respective hustles have made a fun diversion while we wait for the petrol wars to start.
Goodwin is wisely posting through this wonderfully profile-boosting episode, and his chosen avenue is to suggest his book is a bona fide publishing phenomenon. (He has also said he used AI for research purposes only.) But let’s get down to brass tacks, because there are only so many self-aggrandising posts about this supposed cultural juggernaut I can become aware of before I have to ask the Opinion desk if I can file my column a bit later than usual so we can take a look at the actual verified sales figures when they drop. Guys, they’re in – and the second half of this column is for paid subscribers only. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Welcome, all; enjoy the stats.
To hear Matt tell it, this book has been taken up by a veritable army of “the people”. Of liberals/the left/whoever, he writes that “their biggest fear is coming true” because the book is the “second-biggest book in Britain”. Hmmm. I know you can’t say Easter in this country any more, but at the time of typing this paragraph, 11 out of the top 20 books on Amazon in the UK were Easter-themed children’s books. Goodwin was on Monday night pushing a picture of the top three on the Amazon UK bestsellers chart, with his book sandwiched at No 2, between Fluffy Chick: A Touch and Feel Book and a seasonal book about an illegal immigrant (Paddington’s Easter Egg Hunt). As Matt put it: “I’ve never seen anything like this.” You’ve never seen anything like coming second in something? Weird, because I heard you had – and only last month as well. Anyway, Goodwin was also relying on the “hot new releases” Kindle chart, presumably because at that moment, he was No 47 in the actual Kindle chart. Listen, you can make a lot of statistics seem to say a lot of different things.
In fact, many people will have noticed authors posting something along the lines of: “OMG I can’t believe I’m No 3 on Amazon’s Military Hardware and Bitcoin Numismatics chart! Thank you to everyone involved in this book – absolutely blown away!” Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that dear old Amazon wants to help authors push books, but a lot of these esoteric charts are the equivalent of participation medals.
Furthermore, dare I mention that March is a non-competitive month to release a book? If Matt really wished to gauge the strength of feeling for his output, he would publish in September or October, and see how he fares against the serious big hitters. And yes, I am including the airfryer books in that.
Of course, some books are so big that the release date doesn’t even matter. That Spectator article about the Truss literary supremacy went on to sniff: “Prince Harry may be rather affronted to see that his own book, Spare, is even lower on the biography chart in, um, 91st place.” Bless that “um”. Um, I think Prince Harry would probably have been OK with the fact that, despite being a January release, his was the fastest selling non-fiction title of all time, selling 3.2m copies in its first week – 467,000 here in the UK alone. On a Matt Goodwin-esque extrapolation of the stats, that means Harry was worth 200 Liz Trusses and, by populist demand, should have immediately replaced Rishi Sunak as prime minister. Never mind Harry’s royal titles – he should be fitted with the blurb “The PM They Tried to Ban”.
Ultimately, in a fractured culture, there’s always more than one way to spin a yardstick. Given that Truss only took an advance of £1,512, you could argue that as an investment her book was less commercially disappointing than, say, Boris Johnson’s. Given the publisher’s outlay-versus-return, BoJo’s was comparable to a big Hollywood flop, despite selling far more copies. Matt Goodwin’s self-published effort is the equivalent of a micro-budget indie horror.
Sorry, those actual stats, according to the official book sales monitor NielsenIQ BookScan. In its first week of sale, in a week where the No 1 book sold 33,000 copies, Suicide of a Nation sold 5,539, making it this week’s No 20. That’s a hell of a lot less than The Dinosaur That Pooped Easter, but you can’t have it all.
