Gawker Book Sales Stuck Below 1,000 Copies

For those of you who have already seen Jeff Bercovici‘s item on his Portfolio blog about the miserable sales on The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media, here’s a point of comparison. While Nielsen Bookscan says that only 242 copies of the book were sold since its release at the beginning of the month—and I’ve since found out that 106 of those were in the New York market—it reports that another book based on a blog, Extreme Pumpkins, has sold 10,400 copies within roughly the same timeframe.

Obviously, there are easy explanations for that wide gap between the two: The pumpkin carving book is a cheaper paperback geared to the season, and its author was on the Travel Channel, while the only people who seem to have noticed the existence of the Gawker book outside the blogosphere were a handful of New York journalists who went to the launch party. But maybe you have some other answers…

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