General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: LOL! Good One From The Rachel Maddow FB Page [View all]calimary
(80,699 posts)Because their publishers or sponsors or big-bucks supporters make bulk buys - aimed at creating and building the "story." The mere numbers are high enough to qualify as a "best-seller," because they always buy enough to reach the best-seller threshold at the New York Times and other prestigious, important best-seller lists. BINGO! Your author is now a best-selling author. Neat, huh? THEN, you use your media machine to massage that "fact" you just created, sending that author out and getting him/her booked up the ying-yang on all the TV and cable and radio shows - on the pretense that they're a best-selling author (hey, look at this Sunday's "New York Times," eh?) and you make a big deal about their instant credibility as spokespeople and legitimate view-holders and commentators. That's how people like that twisted scarecrow ann coulter make their living. Do the book tour thing and the speakers' bureau circuit. Lots of book clubs out there with an affluent membership, usually elderly, predominantly female, often church-related. And they LOVE booking marquee-name authors to come and speaker.
And when you have this infrastructure of "foundations" and "institutes" like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation that eagerly fund those bulk buys. Sometimes campaign committees do it and everybody who buys a ticket to the candidate's appearance or luncheon or fundraising meet-n-greet gets a complimentary copy of his/her book, or a copy is left at every place-setting on every banquet table, or it's offered for purchase at the event because the author's there to sign it, woohoo! Or if you join some crank wrong-wing organization, you get a bonus of so&so's book as a welcoming gift - OR "special discounts" on its purchase (as a member, you know!).
The most audacious example of this that I ever saw was back when limbaugh had his mercifully short run with his own ridiculous, ego-stroking TV show. Guess what his backdrop was, on the set - behind his chair and the chair(s) and side tables for his guests? Stacks and stacks of his "The Way Things Ought To Be" or whatever-the-fuck idiot book title he was hawking that year. There was a wall-to-wall panorama of his books. Stacked to human height, clear across the whole set behind where the chairs were, from stem to stern. Had to be thousands of books in that wall-to-wall display facade. I remember wondering who bought them, or how the limbaugh show acquired them and who paid for the books and the shipping/delivery. Probably plenty enough books on that set to clinch ol rushbo a slot on the New York Times Best-Seller List with his worthless waste of trees.
These wrongies are shrewd. They are SHREWD. They're better than anybody at cooking up these sneaky-ass, phonied-up, corner-cutting manipulations, I swear! We need a few devious thinkers on our side - if not to think stuff up so much as sound the alarm when the other side does it. It ALWAYS has to be spotted and then immediately called out for the manipulation it is. Otherwise, GUARANTEED, people will be taken in by it.