Michael Knowles skyrockets to #1 on Amazon after NYT’s snub

July 2, 2021

Knowles, author of the wordlesss classic Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide, has written another book that's topping the charts.

Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds is even out-ranking Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited fictional work Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a novelization of the acclaimed director's Academy Award-winning film.

Knowles sold almost 18,000 copies of Speechless in the week ending June 26, thousands ahead of runner ups by former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, according to Publisher's Weekly.

What's peculiar is that Knowles wrote the top-selling nonfiction book in the nation, yet the work is absent from The New York Times bestselling list of the top 15 books showcased by the left-wing publication for the same week.

Instead, the outlet lists books like On Juneteenth, which according to BookScan sold less than 5,000 copies that week, just over one quarter as many sales as Knowles has garnered. Holding the #13 spot is Somebody's Daughter, a memoir about "growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration," which does not appear anywhere on the Publisher's Weekly chart.

The New York Times says its list is based on sales figures, but it gets its data on a "confidential basis" from select booksellers, then estimates total sales based on extrapolation, the Daily Wire reports. "The panel of reporting retailers is comprehensive and reflects sales in tens of thousands of stores of all sizes and demographics across the United States," the Times methodology says.

The site claims its rankings reflect unit sales reported by vendors "offering a wide range of general interest titles published in the United States."

That means the Times numbers aren't expected to track the same as BookScan's figures, which form the basis for lists published by The Wall Street Journal and other review publications, the Daily Wire reports.

Regnery president Tom Spence, who leads the publishing house responsible for Knowles's book, said something was clearly off, if the work is reported to have vastly outsold every other nonfiction work, according to BookScan, but didn’t even rank in the top 15 by the Times standard.

"One result of the BookScan service, which now reports almost all retail book sales, is that there are two kinds of bestseller lists: those that reflect how many books have been sold, and the New York Times list, which reflects — who knows what? The omission (once again) of the week’s bestselling book from the Times' so-called bestseller list confirms that fact-free journalism has found a comfortable home at the former newspaper of record," commented Spence.

The response from the Times solidifies the double standard, in which the outlet's rankings of books is editorialized. The publication told Daily Wire that the book didn't meet its "standards for inclusion this week."

"The New York Times's best-seller lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time," the Times spokeswoman said in an email.

But to combat the notion of political bias, the Times spokeswoman added that other books published by Regenry includes works by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were included in its past listings.

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