JULY 10, 2015
I have to say that I didn’t see this one coming. Conservative media have been complaining today that Ted Cruz’s new book, “A Time For Truth,” has been omitted from next week’s New York Times best seller list. Their argument is that the list should reflect the total number of books sold, which in Sen. Cruz’s case was considerable, and not necessarily how they were sold.
At issue is the practices of “bulk purchases,” where large retailers buy significant numbers of copies of a book to place on sale. Bulk purchases have been routinely used by publishers of books by such conservative icons as Sean Hannity and Mark Levin to report sales that propelled their books to #1 in their debut weeks. The Times has been very aware of this practice and began adding a dagger to their listings, indicating that a bulk-purchase book has achieved that rank by this practice. But it has never left a book off the list until now.
According to Salon, the methods that Sen. Cruz’s publishers, HarperCollins, used were quite different, which constituted “strategic bulk purchasing”:
“In essence, The Times accused Cruz’s publisher of trying to buy its way onto the bestseller list by having a firm like Result Source hire thousands of people across America to individually purchase a copy of “A Time For Truth,” in the hope that some of those retailers are on the secret list of booksellers who report their sales to the Times, or that the aggregate purchasers will simply be too high for the Times to ignore.”
This kerfuffle may be a gift from the heavens for Cruz. This week, Donald Trump has been sucking up all the oxygen in the right-wing-activist room of the party, and this gives Cruz some reason to get his name back into the conversation. And if you’re going to pick a fight with the liberal media, who better to do battle with than the God-Almighty New York Times?
Ted Cruz is going to have some fun for the next few days.
