Media stokes "Fire and Fury" sales: 70 percent of sales occurred between leaks and release date

“Fire and Fury”, Michael Wolff’s new book about the inner workings of the Trump White House, flew off the shelves upon its official release. According to data from Slice Intelligence, 38 percent of the book’s first 10 days of sales (including pre-orders) occurred on January 5th.

As the book started gaining traction in the media its sales numbers began to spike. Seventy percent of the book’s sales occurred between January 3rd (the day excerpts from the book started to leak) and January 5th. January 4th, the day the President’s legal team issued a cease and desist letter to the publishing company, made up 29 percent of sales by itself. As the week wore on, and news coverage of the book waned, sales dropped with only slight upticks on the days when news broke about Stephen Bannon leaving his position at Breitbart, and Trump issuing the now-infamous “shithole countries” remark.

The 10 states that bought the most copies of “Fire and Fury” made up 58 percent of the total sales in the first 10 days of availability. California was far and away the top buyer making up 15 percent of total sales, followed by New York at 8 percent, Texas and Ohio at 6 percent each, and Florida at 5 percent. Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, and North Carolina rounded out the top 10 with between 3 and 5 percent of sales each.

Baby Boomers were the biggest buying audience for this book, and it wasn’t close. 43 percent of all first-week buyers were Boomers, and an astounding 65 percent were at least 45 years old. Millennials and Gen X’ers, meanwhile, accounted for 22 and 26 percent respectively.

When it comes to income, though, things are a lot less variable. Buyers making between $25,000 and $49,999 a year were the biggest group, making up 22 percent of sales, but every other buying group above $50,000/year accounted for between 15 and 17 percent of sales. The lone exception were those who make less than $25,000. They accounted for a not-too-much-smaller 13 percent of sales.

With a panel of 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.