Dangerous is no hazard to the charts

Milo Yiannopoulos’ Dangerous has declined 42% in volume on its second week in sale in the US, dropping from sixth to 31st place in the overall chart.

It sold 10,677 units last week, down from its opening week of 18,268 copies. The combined total, just under 30,000 copies, is still far short of the author’s claim of 100,000 units sold. 

In the UK, sales of Dangerous have improved, but are still at an incredibly low level. After a first-week volume of 152 copies sold, BookScan recorded 376 sold last week. While that’s an increase of 148% week on week, it only results in a ranking of 1,009th place.

The author’s PR company had earlier claimed that “100,000 copies were delivered to Amazon and sold out in the first day of release”, but that is not borne out by the Nielsen BookScan figures.

However, Yiannopolous said last week of the official numbers: ”They said I was dead and our movement was history…You may have heard reports claiming we only sold 18,000 copies of Dangerous and that our 100,000 copies claim is exaggerated. I'm happy to report that this is fake news. It's true that the major booksellers only managed to ship out 18,000 copies to retail customers by the list cut-off. But that's because they didn't order enough ahead of time, and have been scrambling to play catch-up ever since."

After the former Breitbart editor’s book deal with Simon & Schuster was shelved in February, he announced plans to self-publish the title through his imprint Dangerous Books. He has recently served the publisher with a $10m lawsuit for backing out of the deal.