Booming sales for Woodward's 'Fear,' Trump presidency book

NEW YORK (AP):

Bob Woodward's Fear is spreading quickly.

Woodward's account of a dysfunctional Trump White House has already sold more than 750,000 copies, Simon & Schuster announced on Wednesday, September 12, a day after the book arrived in stores.

Fear is virtually assured of joining Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury as a million-selling takedown of Trump. The pace of sales, which include print,

e-books, and an audio edition, is among, the fastest in memory for a non-fiction work. In 2004, Bill Clinton's memoir, My Life, sold more than 1 million copies within eight days.

'Ill-informed and dishonest'

Fear has dominated political headlines since reports about it emerged last week. The book portrays Trump as an ill-informed and dishonest president and the West Wing staff as trying to minimise the damage. As with Fire and Fury and other anti-Trump books, the president has condemned Fear as false. Some former White House officials who spoke with Woodward have tried to distance themselves from the book.

The US president's son, Eric Trump, appeared on 'Fox & Friends' on Wednesday to denounce the book and was lambasted by critics for his choice of language.

"You can write a sensational nonsense book. CNN will definitely have you on there because they love to trash the president," Eric Trump said. "It'll mean you sell three extra books, you make three extra shekels."

The reference to "three extra shekels" drew criticism from people who believed it had anti-Semitic undertones. Woodward is not Jewish.

Woodward, since becoming famous in the 1970s for his Watergate reporting, has written several best-sellers about sitting presidents. Fear had more pre-orders than any other book in Simon & Schuster's history, according to the publisher, which has previously released such best-sellers as Hillary Clinton's Living History and Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.