More than two-thirds of the book sales that earned Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom’s "Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery" a spot on The New York Times best-seller list were purchases by Newsom’s own political action committee (PAC), the publication reports.
“Gov. Gavin Newsom offered supporters who gave any amount a copy of his book. Roughly 67,000 donors received the memoir, accounting for about two-thirds of its total print sales,” The Times reported Thursday.
Out of the 97,400 print copies sold since the book’s February debut, 69% were purchased by the PAC and given to supporters who contributed any amount of money. Without the PAC purchases, Newsom would’ve sold only about 30,400 books.
In all, the governor’s PAC, the Campaign for Democracy Committee, paid more than $1.5 million to the Porchlight Book Company for what describes as “books at cost” - by far the largest expenditure for the governor’s federal PAC in the first quarter of this year.
A PAC offering books to donors is nothing new. But, in this case, the scale of the purchases is “noteworthy,” The Times reports.
Fellow Democrat Kamala Harris also released a memoir earlier this year, for example. Her PAC, Fight for the People, likewise bought books from Porchlight and offered them in exchange for donations of any size.
But, the former vice president’s PAC spent only $97,554 on copies of her book and didn’t make the offer until well after it had already become a best-seller.
The Times also notes that, when it suspects that a book’s sales have been boosted by bulk sales, it tags that book’s title on its best-sellers list with a dagger symbol to notify readers that sales include more than just retail purchases.
