Gavin Newsom’s Best-Seller Was Mostly Bought by Gavin Newsom

As part of his endless campaign for president, Gavin Newsom published a book in February with the obnoxious title, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.” Newsom governs a state of 39 million people and has spent the past two years doing everything he can to give himself a national presence, so he was definitely hoping to sell a lot of books. And he did, sort of.

Back in February he sent out a fundraising email with a unique hook. Donate any amount to help refill his coffer and you’d get a copy of the book sent to you.

Gavin Newsom is sweetening the deal for donors ahead of his expected 2028 presidential run – offering supporters a copy of his memoir in exchange for donations of ‘’any amount.”

”It’s a good book. Very personal. Not your normal political book at all,” Newsom wrote in a Jan. 31 email to potential donors ahead of the memoir’s release on February 24…

”The average cost per book is $22.45 including shipping. If you can give that, great. If you can only give $5, great,” Newsom writes.

This week we learned that donations of “any amount” wound up making up most of the book’s sales.

It turned out about 67,000 supporters did just that. The books those donors received account for roughly two-thirds of the print copies of the memoir that have been sold.

On Wednesday, new federal records revealed that Mr. Newsom’s political action committee paid $1,561,875 to buy and distribute copies of his book through the donation program…

Mr. Newsom’s team had hailed his book sales back in March, including a map in a news release showing all the sales by location across the country. “With more than 91,000 copies sold through organic, in-person and online, non-bulk purchases in the United States, the memoir surged on bestseller lists within hours,” the release said.

So Newsome came up with a way to juice his book sales and then claimed those sales were “organic…non-bulk purchases.” That definitely wasn’t true. 

A spokesman for his PAC earned more from the fundraising appeal than they paid out in sending out free books. That may be true but he doesn’t say how much they cleared or whether a few big donors wound up covering for a lot of people who gave $5 for the $22 book.

Thanks mostly to the bulk buy Newsom’s book wound up on the NY Times bestsellers list. The Times says it marked it as likely benefitting from bulk sales.

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokeswoman, said: “When The Times has reason to believe that sales of a book include a mix of organic and bulk sales, the book’s best-seller ranking is accompanied by a dagger. That’s what we did with the Newsom book.”

All laughable statements should come from a spokesperson name “Ha.” This is an obvious gimmick so Newsom can slap “NY Times bestselling author” on his list of accomplishments (and on paperback copies which are probably coming soon). The NY Times knows these numbers have been juiced but doesn’t care.

It turns out the $1.5 million Newsom’s PAC spent on the books was the biggest expenditure of the year so far. The Times suggest that Donald Trump Jr. did something similar when the RNC spent $100k on his books. But even the Times admits “the scale of the book purchases by Mr. Newsom’s PAC is noteworthy.”

All of this is just being treated as an advertising expense by Newsom. That’s all this book is for him. One more way to make sure you’ve heard about him so he can begin his real sales pitch for the big office sometime next year.

Here he is offering his best impersonation of a used car salesman trying to be disarming before a slightly hostile audience. Make no mistake, he wants a lot more than your wallet.

 

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