New biography of Tucker Carlson flopped after only 3k copies sold in first week.
Like anyone promoting a book, the general plan is to create buzz, get people talking and, hopefully, get them buying. While people might be talking about Tucker, a new biography by Chadwick Moore about former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the buzz apparently failed to translate to book sales.
With so much hot goss about Carlson’s abrupt ouster from his top-rated Fox News show in the wake of the bombshell Dominion settlement, one would think that a book putting the cable news star in the spotlight — and featuring “hundreds of hours of interviews with Carlson” — would pump up sales. Not to mention Moore’s sensational promotional tour, jam-packed with rumors about Carlson’s firing and attacks on his former home.
True, Patrick could be a trailblazer for the preppy performance artist and bow-tied bloviator, but I have another Texan in mind, a broadcaster-cum-politician further back in the colorful reaches of the Texas past. At a midlife existential moment for the once — and future? — prince of cable TV, a man who has won and lost jobs at CNN, MSNBC and now Fox, Carlson should look toward the man affectionately known over eight decades ago as “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy.”
According to numbers provided by Publisher’s Weekly, Tucker, in its first week of release, sold just 3,227 hardcover copies, putting it at number 15 on the Hardcover Nonfiction list.
But that’s not the only list Tucker made (or didn’t make). On Amazon, in its list of best-selling biographies, Tucker placed at Number 57 — just behind the graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, which came out in 2004 (#52), and the Audible version of presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2021 book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (#53). The Kindle version of Tucker did not break the top 100.
No, it’s not Dan Patrick, even though the lieutenant governor is the one and only media star in the Texas Legislature to have catapulted from Houston-based radio and TV shock jock into the most powerful elective office in state government. The lite guv tweeted on the evening of Carlson’s defenestration: “Tucker Carlson is a good friend and a voice for millions. He will be missed.”
“Pappy” O’Daniel — maybe Carlson heard the name in the Coen brothers’ movie “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” — was arguably the first to transform a huge broadcast following into a political army. O’Daniel’s career trajectory could be both a model and a cautionary tale — for Carlson, to be sure, but also for the rest of us who, now and then, mistake winsome celebrity for authentic substance.
