Or do bookstores only stock right wing books? The most "left" book I can find at this Books A Million is the latest from Bernie Sanders 🙃
There's a huge grift in right wing book media.
They ghost write a book, buy it with campaign/superpac/donor/megachurch funds, and give them away at rallies, etc.
This has 3 benefits: funnels money to the "author", reinforces loyalty of those that get a free book, and makes them appear popular+legitimate by being a "new york times bestseller" (etc) which also gets them in more bookstores as you've described.
No, I think Donald Trump Jr. is definitely popular enough to make his book ”Triggered” a bestseller.
Is that right ? Any where I can read more ?
I know the newspapers and right wing tv channels are used to pay right wing loud mouths
I can't really furnish you with a link, though I saw some pretty convincing breakdowns back when I was on Twitter. Long story short, nobody is actually buying e.g. James Ball's books — they don't even print nearly enough to cover what the author is paid. It's similar to the columnist grift, which is definitely a thing in the US too
No worries - in light of the info seen on this post , it seems almost a widespread technique
No, PACs or think tanks or whoever buys a lot of the books then gives them away.
This bookstore thing you're seeing is probably the publisher paying for marketing. Stocking and shelf placement guarantees, etc. Essentially they pay to have the books displayed in major bookstores. It's not exclusive to the right, but it's more obvious.
Also, old people buy books because when they die they want to dramatically grab the bookshelf and knock all of their books down around them so that the investigators can make a pithy comment while putting on some sunglasses
"when we find who ever did this we'll be sure to puts on sunglasses throw the book at them"
YEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH
IMO you are seeing the confluence of two things
First https://electricliterature.com/are-conservative-titles-using-shady-tricks-to-get-onto-the-bestseller-list/
and second book retailers basically just filling their shelves with whatevers on the NYT bestseller list or determining what books to stock by similar metrics rather than some actually curated selection.
Worth noting that bookstores, especially corporate ones do not and usually will outright refuse to stock or even special order any leftist books. They will usually have no ability to even order you something that you're looking for. The furthest left thing you'll see is maybe some Noam Chomsky, angsty radlib YA fiction, or a democrat's ghostwritten memoir.
Yes, you all need to read more theory, but don't forget that we live in a capitalist society that's heavily preoccupied with actively repressing and destroying any leftist thought that may occur in opposition to it.
Of course, fascism is of course no threat at all to itself.
I saw the Communist Manifesto and two volumes of Capital at a Barnes and Noble once.
for right wingers these books are almost entirely for show and seldom read. having them is less about extracting knowledge from them but about the status symbol of having a trump or liz cheney or ted cruz book or showing off your opinions with these visual capsules of ideology. there isn’t anything in that book worth reading and they know that, it’s just about sending money to your favorite right wing grifter and then getting a little display piece out of it.
also the big chain bookstores are only shelving these books because they’re acceptable opinions in this fascist society. if they shelved lenin for instance i’m sure they’d get blasted by chud media for a week. many smaller independent bookstores will often have marxist stuff or, at the very least, some relatively left leaning authors.
I read years ago that right wing billionaires and groups buy up large quantities of right wing books in order to drive up purported sales figures.
It's all of the grift/graft reasons other people have written, but there are also a type of American that reads only this shit. They probably don't even read them, they just stack up until they die and their kids have to figure out what to do with them.
My partner volunteers at a charity thrift shop in the book section. They sometimes get shipments of books that were rejected by Goodwill because they're unmarketable. They get this kind of right wing political slop, which ends up in a dumpster.
heavily propagandized liberal country mostly sells liberal media
Liberals and fascists outnumber leftists greatly in the west. If you mean liberals vs fascists, liberalism I believe sells better, but boomers also love their book slop.
LATE NIGHT WITH JIMMY FALLON
"so i wrote this CANCEL CULTURE DICTIONARY......."
That's what I thought too, but it's some guy called Jimmy Failla. I was confused over why Fallon would have opinions on cancel culture.
Yeah if there is one guy who seemingly cannot be cancelled it is mr. blackface
Being right wing isn't a direct corollary of being less knowledgeable or less intelligent
Some people are just assholes
I used to work in one of these kinds of stores for a long ass time and this is what I figured out about the whole thing.
When it comes to books that are soley about current affairs rightists will buy a much wider selection of titles, but books that appeal to libs and leftists sell more copies overall. It's part of the rightwing grift for dudes like Ben Shapiro to publish a book every so often to launder their image as an intellectual and make some money while they're at it. They function more like fan merchandise than they do actual serious collections of thought since they usually deal with VERY current affairs and become totally irrelevant in about two to three years if not earlier.
Books that are politcal in nature that appeal to the other parts of the spectrum tend to show up in other sections and don't sell well next to stuff like you're seeing in that endcap display. In my store Marx was filed under philosophy, books on racial justice were found in social studies, and climate change was found closer to nuclear physics than it was Mark Levin's current ragebait cashgrab. So it's not really that rightwingers are better read, it's mostly how the bookselling industry works.
That being said... in half a decade I had probably 100s of requests for rightwing books ranging from Rush Limbaugh shit to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (side note, I would explain what it was to people and the reaction was usually something like "what? [Insert relative here] is trying to get me to read THAT?" so Im pretty sure I started some fights indirectly) and exactly 0 requests for Marx or Kropotkin or anyone like that. However books about racial justice, womens issues, queer matters, and the exploitation of labor sold reasonably well on their own.
Books that are politcal in nature that appeal to the other parts of the spectrum tend to show up in other sections and don't sell well next to stuff like you're seeing in that endcap display. In my store Marx was filed under philosophy, books on racial justice were found in social studies, and climate change was found closer to nuclear physics than it was Mark Levin's current ragebait cashgrab. So it's not really that rightwingers are better read, it's mostly how the bookselling industry works.
real and I cannot believe there are multiple comments talking about how chain bookstores don't have any leftist literature further left than Bernie Sanders. Penguin Random House will gladly print all three volumes of Capital or Kropotkin's Mutual Aid; both which I've seen and bought before at two different Barnes & Nobles both located in the US South.
OP looking at an end-cap presumably by the registers aside, I think people tend to overlook the fact that most bookstores (even the corporate chain ones) will absolutely take customer requests into consideration; much like how the same exact thing happens with public libraries!
Nobody prints Stalin, though.
Edit: not a disagreement, I just think it's weird that Marx gets printed in the imperial core but not Stalin
Big publishers will publish literally anything. Mileage varies on what chain bookstores will sell which is influenced by location and store size (as in physical size of inventory they can stock). I've personally never seen any leftist literature in any bookstore in any city that doesn't have a university for instance.
