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Like anyone promoting a book, the general plan is to create buzz, get people talking and, hopefully, get them buying. While people might be talking about Tucker, a new biography by Chadwick Moore about former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the buzz apparently failed to translate to book sales.

With so much hot goss about Carlson’s abrupt ouster from his top-rated Fox News show in the wake of the bombshell Dominion settlement, one would think that a book putting the cable news star in the spotlight — and featuring “hundreds of hours of interviews with Carlson” — would pump up sales. Not to mention Moore’s sensational promotional tour, jam-packed with rumors about Carlson’s firing and attacks on his former home.

According to numbers provided by Publisher’s Weekly, Tucker, in its first week of release, sold just 3,227 hardcover copies, putting it at number 15 on the Hardcover Nonfiction list.

But that’s not the only list Tucker made (or didn’t make). On Amazon, in its list of best-selling biographies, Tucker placed at Number 57 — just behind the graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, which came out in 2004 (#52), and the Audible version of presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2021 book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (#53). The Kindle version of Tucker did not break the top 100.

The book did not make it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

But hey, selling a book can be a tough business, especially when you don’t have a built-in audience… but here’s the funny thing about that: Tucker Carlson has a built-in audience. When he was a host on Fox News, his ratings were great. And when he started Tucker on Twitter, they were even bigger! (Except they weren’t. Despite bragging about 114 million people tuning in to his post-Fox hate fest, many of those “views” were people who might have simply happened upon the tweet containing the video while scrolling through their feed. That doesn’t mean they all watched the full video.)

There’s also the fact that the book appears to present both a generous and sensationalist look at his subject. Moore and Carlson both pushed the story in the book that the latter was fired from Fox News as a condition of the Dominion settlement. Both Dominion and Fox News adamantly and “categorically” denied that this was the case, with Dominion issuing this statement:

As the Fox principals who negotiated the settlement well know, Dominion made no demands about Tucker Carlson’s employment orally or in writing. Any claims otherwise are categorically false and a thinly veiled effort to further damage Dominion. Fox should take every effort to stop these lies immediately.

Despite those denials, Moore and Carlson have continued to suggest the erstwhile Fox host lost his job as the result of a secretive conspiracy. Sound familiar?

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