Over the weekend, Ted Cruz got a rude response from the New York Times when, despite blockbuster sales for his book, A Time for Truth, the New York Times refused to put it on their weekly list of best-sellers because they were convinced – convinced, I tell you – that Ted Cruz had been instructing his campaign to buy the book in bulk in order to pad his numbers. Cruz’s book, by all accounts, sold around 11,000 copies, which should have put him third on the list, behind a book about the Wright Brothers and a book written by a former Playboy bunny and reality television star.
The New York Times tried to excuse their “oversight” by claiming that they only honor “authentic” best-sellers, and that Cruz and his team had made “strategic bulk purchases.” Harper Collins, Cruz’s publisher, said Friday that they had investigated the book sales pattern and consulted other independent book sales arbiters, and found no evidence of bulk book sales. And today, Amazon, which has Cruz’s book listed at #13 on their site, overall, concurred.
The New York Times’ refusal to put Ted Cruz’s memoir on its best-seller list is once again being called into question — this time by Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the country.
On Sunday, an Amazon spokesperson told the On Media blog that the company’s sales data showed no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity for the Texas senator’s memoir, casting further doubt on the Times’ claim that the book — “A Time For Truth” — had been omitted from its list because sales had been driven by “strategic bulk purchases.”
“As of yesterday, ‘A Time for Truth’ was the number 13 best-selling book, and there is no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity in our sales data,” Sarah Gelman, Amazon’s director of press relations, said in an email.
Amazon’s findings match those of HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, which said Friday that it had “investigated the sales pattern” for Cruz’s book and found “no evidence of bulk orders or sales through any retailer or organization.”
The Times hasn’t been able to produce much evidence to back up their claim. But that doesn’t really matter. Whatever sales Ted Cruz would have gotten from placement on the New York Times best-seller list, an advertisment that is questionable at best, have long since been dwarfed by the publicity he’s gained in being blackballed. He honestly could not have asked for a better endorsement for his book than the New York Times’s skittish book editor claiming that he was bulk-buying his own tome and sending it free of charge to supporters, when it’s pretty clear people were just actually buying his book.
Next week, they might just have to list him at the top.
