Michael Knowles’ Book ‘Speechless’ Hits No. 1 On Amazon, New York Times Still Silent

Conservative News DailyJuly 2, 2021

Daily Wire host Michael Knowles’ new book, “Speechless,” became the bestselling book on Amazon Friday.

Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer for books, making more than half of all book sales in the United States. Knowles’ book surged to the top of the online retailer’s bestseller list after being released last week.

“Huge thanks for all the readers for making SPEECHLESS the #1 bestselling book across all categories on Amazon!” Knowles said, touting the book’s success on Twitter.

Huge thanks for all the readers for making SPEECHLESS the #1 bestselling book across all categories on Amazon! pic.twitter.com/8mRr4rgnFd

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) July 2, 2021

Regnery, the publishing house for Knowles’ book, also celebrated the news.

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 https://t.co/61Q4PezlAp

— Regnery Publishing (@Regnery) July 2, 2021

Despite his book’s success on Amazon and other bestseller lists, “Speechless” did not appear on the prestigious bestseller list for The New York Times. The Times did not include Knowles’ book anywhere on its list despite the book posting huge sales numbers on other bestseller lists.

As The Daily Wire reported:

Daily Wire host Michael Knowles’ new book, “Speechless,” sold nearly 18,000 copies in the week ending June 26, making it the top-selling nonfiction work in the country — far ahead of the second- and third-place books by Bill O’Reilly and Malcolm Gladwell, at nearly 13,000 and just over 9,000, respectively.

That’s according to Publisher’s Weekly, which gets its data from NPD BookScan, the industry’s most comprehensive count of book sales.

But you wouldn’t know it from reading The New York Times. The Times’ prestigious “bestseller list” does not include “Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds” at all in its list of the top 15 books for the same week.

Instead, it lists books like “On Juneteenth,” which according to BookScan sold only 4,774 copies that week, or just over a quarter as many as Knowles’ book. At #13, it lists “Somebody’s Daughter,” a “memoir about growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration” that does not appear anywhere in Publisher’s Weekly’s list of the top 25 nonfiction books.

The Times lists O’Reilly’s book, “Killing the Mob,” in first place.

The criteria for making the Times list is a guarded secret in the book industry, and it is not clear how the Times selects the titles that do appear on its list. According to the Times, books are selected to its bestseller list based on data retrieved from select booksellers. “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 says.

Regnery President Tom Spence expressed skepticism at the Times’ criteria, saying that there should not be so large a gap between the Times’ list and other bestseller lists even if the methodologies the same.

“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,” Spence told The Daily Wire.

The Times defended leaving Knowles’ book off its list, claiming that “Speechless” did not “meet the standards for inclusion this week.”

“Our best sellers team will continue to track this title and will rank it, if its sales meet our standards for inclusion for future weeks. Recent lists have included other books published by Regenery [sic] including those by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz,” a Times spokeswoman said.

Knowles’ book is available on Amazon and other major online booksellers.

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