I have been following the release of the newest book by the highly acclaimed authors, Chuck Heath Sr. & Jr., for several weeks. You can apply the title of this story however you wish. Here are a few examples to get you started: (a) the two clowns pictured at left, (b) what the person who made this deal at the publisher has been doing with his time since the book's release, (c) what anyone who has scheduled a book signing for this bomb is doing about now, or (d) what you will feel like if you read even the Look Inside parts of Our Sarah at Amazon.
Our Sarah was first offered at Amazon in a pre-release mode several months ago. From April until yesterday, the official release date, the sales of Our Sarah dribbled. Twenty-five copies of the book were sold at Amazon on the 25th, its opening day. It is now the 26th and the last copy was sold from Amazon sixteen hours ago (and counting). The lowest Amazon ranking I have seen is 505. It might have been 585; I did not look closely enough to verify it. Currently the ranking is 1108. The total Amazon sales according to NovelRank is 104, including one at Amazon UK, the only copy sold outside the U.S. so far.
For contrast, let's look at another book released on the same day, September 25, and marketed to almost the exactly the same right-wing delusional readership. Ann Coulter's Mugged has sold 53 since late yesterday. I was not aware of the book until then so I do not have any tracking numbers throughout its pre-release period, however long that might have been. From watching the figures since yesterday evening, I can ascertain that the sales of Mugged were far beyond those of Our Sarah, as in out in the stratosfear! The NovelRank charts clearly show, for instance, that Ann's book has sold 28 copies since midnight while Chuckie & Chuckie's has bombed with a goose egg over the same time period. Mugged is currently ranked at #39, and I saw it as low as #25 yesterday.
As Bob Dylan once said, "Everybody must get mugged!" Whoever set up the publishing deal for Our Sarah must not have looked too closely at the sales charts of the many pro-Palin books as they have slid slowly down the drain. From the explosive boom of Going Rogue to the stumbling mumbles of Bristlebutt's pack of lies to Levi's ghostwritten nonsense, the downhill slide of the sales figures of each release has been inevitable. If I remember correctly, Going Rogue sold 2.3 million and Sarah's book signing at the Mall of America was a stupendous success. Two years later the signing of Not Afraid of Life and America by Heart by both Palin celebrities at the same venue was a bust with a couple hundred diehard fans showing up for signatures. Maybe someone should have kept her mouth shut after the Gabby Giffords shooting, you think?
Watching this dud slowly grind to a screeching halt has been a lot of fun. The dud is Our Sarah, the whole Palin phenomenon, and of course Sarah herself. I did read most of the Look Inside portions of Our Sarah, and it really is a dud. The font is large and the margins wide, so it is not a book with a high word count. Most of the words that are present are just one big baloney sandwich, anyway. A good example is Chuck Jr. complaining about the media questioning Sarah's college career. He spins the question off into something that it never was, as if we care that Sarah did not attend a fancy Ivy League school. Pass the baloney sandwich, please. Why did she return to the dipshit MatSu Valley college between two semesters at the University of Idaho? Just before that bit of horse puckey, he stated that she left the first Hawaii location because it rained too much. He claimed that she wanted to enjoy the sun and surf of Hawaii, and that's why she and her friends went there in the first place. But then he does a one-eighty and claims that she left the fun and sun for the snow of Idaho after only one semester. Does this make any sense to anyone?
Aside from this bit of balogna sandwich making, much of the book seems to suddenly and repeatedly veer off into an oblivion of anecdotes about various friends and family of the Palins. If you are a Palin fan at the depth of lunacy you might enjoy these little side trips, but I seriously doubt the mass appeal of such a book. Chuckie & Chuckie appeared on Fox & Friends early yesterday morning to promote this tale of nonsense, but it seems to have had minimal effect on the buying audience. I am waiting with bated breath to see what happens with the book tour planned for the next few weeks. My best guess is that the most likely sound we will hear from it is SPLAT!!
