Donald Trump is very proud of his book sales—he has claimed that The Art of the Deal (his second-favorite book after the Bible) is the best-selling business book of all time. (It isn’t.) But Trump’s newest book, Crippled America, like the candidate himself, is struggling to top Ben Carson. Crippled America will debut at number five on the New York Times Bestseller list, behind Carson’s work of Constitution-themed fan fiction A More Perfect Union, which is in the fourth slot.
Interestingly, Trump is beating Carson on both Amazon (he’s 99th; Carson is 150th) and Nielsen BookScan, which recorded 27,686 sales of Crippled America and 27,251 of A More Perfect Union in the week ending November 8. The Times bestseller list is notoriously fickle but it’s obvious that the race between them is tight, regardless of how sales are judged.
In any case both Trump and Carson are handily beating two of their competitors in the Republican primaries. According to BookScan, the paperback of Marco Rubio’s American Dreams has sold only 843 copies since it was published on October 6, while the hardcover of Rand Paul’s Our Presidents & Their Prayers has sold 1,323 copies since its publication on October 20.