Ben Carson Is Still Winning in One Way

2 minute read
Ideas

Ben Carson may have ended his presidential run, but he’s the frontrunner in book sales, beating Clinton by nearly 400,000 print copies sold.

Since the beginning of 2014, Carson has sold 688,000 print books according to Nielsen BookScan, which measures about 85% of the U.S. market. He has written four titles since the beginning of 2014: A More Perfect Union, One Nation, You Have a Brain and My Life, which is based on his earlier book Gifted Hands. In a November piece, TIME used Nielsen data putting Carson’s sales at 264,000 copies of those books, a number that did not include the hardcover edition of One Nation; with that data, plus all sales since November, Carson has another 424,000 books to his credit.

Carson’s closest contender is Hillary Clinton, who had a best seller with Hard Choices; the 2014 memoir of her years as Secretary of State has sold 292,200 print copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. (E-book information is not included in these figures.)

Donald Trump comes in third place with sales for November’s Crippled America and an updated re-release of 2011’s Time to Get Tough, totaling 214,000. Ted Cruz’s A Time for Truth (June 2015) sold 65,000 copies, while neither Marco Rubio’s American Dreams (Jan. 2015) nor Bernie Sanders’ Outsider in the White House (Sept. 2015) have hit the 15,000 mark, according to data through Feb. 21.

Will A More Perfect Union go down as a classic of its genre like Trump’s perennial 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal? It seems unlikely, but at least Carson has this one victory to hang onto.

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