Book sales hard to believe

Speaking as I was about Pauline Andrew Bolt, once again I raise the mystery of why there has been such an effort by him, and the IPA, to promote and sell his book, especially when it was simply a collection of his already published columns from a newspaper and magazine.  Why would you even expect that to sell well?  All the words have been read by his fervent followers before:  it's not as if there was any effort put into creating something with original content.

And some sites have been mocking its initial small sales, and say that it has been pushed onto newsagents  who didn't actually order it.

Today Hanson Bolt  is claiming that there are only "a few" left out of its initial print of 15,000 - and that it is being reprinted. 

This seems a very surprising result for a political book (and surely it would count as that) with no fresh content.  Sales of over 10,000 for any political book in Australia seem fairly rare - according to this list, there were three that sold over 10,000 last year, and one of those was only 12,000.

Given the previous articles about how slowly it initially sold, I strongly suspect something funny is going on here.  Has the IPA (with staffer Bolt Jnr) snapped up a large number to send out for free if memberships are renewed?  Did Gina Rinehart have a particularly large gap on her library shelves that she decided to fill up just to make it look like reads a lot?   That's two possible theories that immediately spring to mind.

I await some commentary to appear on these implausible sounding sales figure to appear in the media soon.