Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/15/donald-trump-jr-book-sales-re.html
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Hey those landfills aren’t gonna fill up by themselves!
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Donald Trump Jr.Many many conservative pop stars’ book sales reportedly goosed by bulk purchases “close to the author”
This isn’t just TrumpJr and Scientology…
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They’re trying to dance around this by explaining that they’re not bulk purchasing, they’re buying on demand, since they’re giving out copies of the book in exchange for RNC donations. Which is the same thing, really, but ‘on demand’ makes it sound like people actually want this thing.
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This also happened with a lot of religious books connected to churches.
A church would goose print-runs with warehouses of books to give away, and then report them as “sales”.
It’s not new.
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As with elections, the conservative response to the real world is always “if you can’t win, cheat”.
As I recall, the Xtianists picked up on this bulk purchase trick pretty quickly after the Cult of $cientology did. They also use it to promote the boffo box office of their anti-atheist movies (which “proves” the U.S. continues to be a Christian nation).
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It’s sort of the equivalent of buying Twitter followers, before Twitter.
And while I also would be happy to lay the blame for it with Scientology, they’re the late-comers. It’s been a grift for religious publishing for as long as print had a marketplace.
Look at Charles Sheldon and Ellen White as a couple of specific examples. More generally, the Bible itself from the start of European-trade-printing, has been given credit for “sales” that should more accurately be described as “printing and pushing like a brochure”.
(And without getting too general, DonJr is still corrupt AF, and this is a great example of it, specifically. These are not sales, they’re in-house support presented as public interest.)
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Guess what the naughty children are getting this year.
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I thought the Trump Foundation had been shut down?
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Magazines are still doing it. I get Golf, The Red Bulletin and I used to get GQ also.
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Let’s not be hasty - they could have a fireplace.
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Hey Rob, I’m not getting the “Fred Perry” reference… this an anglicism I’m heretofore unaware of?
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“Fred Perry” is a clothing company whose polo shirts are favoured for some reason by members of the American alt-right.
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Insuated by as such by you, not by the Times. Bulk purchases are not intrinsicially fraudulent or suspicious; they’re just bulk purchases.
By the NYT, too, at least as far as “suspicious” goes:
The New York Times explained to Erin Barnett via Electric Literature, if they believe a book made its way onto the list in a way that seems “suspicious,” it places a small dagger symbol next to the title: “Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of The New York Times Best-Seller List Desk editors based on standards for inclusion that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations. When included, such bulk purchases appear with a dagger (†).”
[source]
They become such if one of their primary goals is to game a system, which is definitely the case with Donnie Jr’s book.
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When bulk purchases are the primary reason a book makes it to the top of a bestseller list and those bulk purchases appear to have been made by people close to the author then YES, they are inherently suspicious.
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… close to the author
I wonder how many bulk purchases will be made by governments thousands of miles away from the author? 
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