Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer’s new book is flying off the shelves—and nobody knows exactly why.
Sitting atop the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for two months now, the conservative Washington Post columnist’s Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics, a collection of his writings, is not the kind of fiery, rash conservative commentary that generally climbs to the top of the bestsellers’ lists.
And yet, the collection has sold enough to make publicists and pundits (时事评论员) alike scratch their heads, It is, as conservative publisher Adam Bellow told Newsweek, "a phenomenon. "
Published October 22 by Crown Forum, a Random House imprint that specializes in conservative authors, it first hit the Times bestseller list in November. Within two weeks, it had surpassed the latest works of conservatives Glenn Beck and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and Brian Kilmeade to climb to No. 1. And there it remains.
It ranks No. 8 on Amazon’s list of best-selling books of 2013. According Nielsen, the book has sold 601,000 hardcover copies in the United States alone. Crown says Things That Matter is in its 18th printing, with 970,000 copies in print.
"Was I surprised I was surprised," said Bellow, who runs HarperCollins’s conservative imprint Broadside Books. "The collective wisdom in publishing is that anthology (选集) collections don’t sell."
The Krauthammer compendium (概略) appears to be surfing a particularly vicious wave. The conservative publishing industry has flourished in recent years and books by conservative authors routinely make the bestsellers’ lists.
But few books sell as many as Krauthammer’s, particularly anthologies of previously published work. "Anything at that level is largely serendipitous," Bellow said.
Success, it seems, begets even more success. "Once a book becomes number one on the best seller list, it functions as a form of advertising," Bellow explained. "More copies are stocked at Barnes & Noble. When consumers walk into the store, they see big piles of them and, like in some experiment created by B. F. Skinner (the American psychologist who argued that free will is an illusion), they reach out and buy it."
But when you get to the heady level Krauthammer has reached, it begins to look as if it is far more than just the marketing machine at work. And there are almost as many theories about Krauthammer’s success as books sold.
How you feel about the book’s popularity largely depends on how you view the author. To many, Krauthammer is a thinking conservative, in contrast to the bluster of the modern-day Tea Party and quick-fire figures like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
To those who are trying to make sense of the rise of the conservative movement, Krauthammer’s success is a triumph for temperate, smart conservatism. Americans thirsty for a subtle, intellectual debate are buying his book in droves.
serendipitousWhat does the word "serendipitous" in Paragraph 8 mean