For all the media fluffing, this is a paltry result.

It has been a rather nutty couple of weeks as we have watched our media go into full-on massage mode with Hunter Biden. The President’s problematic progeny was on a promotional tour to pimp his upcoming publishing release, “Beautiful Things.” (No, it is not an adult-themed pop-up book.) He made the rounds and was back-slapped plenty by a Biden-friendly media, so what became of the book itself?

Well, it seems not so much. Hunter spent a good amount of time gabbing away, hitting up the CBS News talk shows, getting ribbed while sharing yucks with Jimmy Kimmel. At CNN Brian Stelter was gushing wildly over the release. “I’ve never read a memoir like this one before,” swoons the media Hall Monitor. “It is extraordinary! It’s breathtaking.” Okay, calm down Brian, you’ll get your blurb included on the paperback edition.

Rather amusing that Stelter would say this book is coming in “under the radar,” when Hunter has been a fixture in the press, selling this thing, for weeks. But for all that effort and camera time the recidivist rehab fixture did not inspire much in the way of buying interest. Yes, the title does land a spot on the New York Times Bestseller List, but that means very little anymore. That paper uses an arcane methodology that, ironically enough, is not based on sales. They resort to an in-house formula for tabulating what they feel is a popular book. This will be revealed in a moment.

Many of the booksellers seem coy about listing where the book performed, so we turn instead to the industry expert, Publisher’s Weekly, and there we finally find not only Hunter but some hard data to boot. Thankfully PW lists out the top-25 performing tomes, and it is there, in the expanded non-fiction list that we see Hunter’s memoir resting in the Number 12 position.

All of the hype and build-up led to just over 10,600 copies sold. It was edged out by a new release centered on calcium. So what exactly is going on with him landing in the top five at The Times as a hot-selling tome?

Despite heavy promotion on CBS News and Jimmy Kimmel, Hunter Biden’s book sells just 10,600 copies – somehow enough to find itself #4 by the shady metrics that determine the New York Times’ Best Sellers List.https://t.co/woUrXh4WVz

— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) April 15, 2021

That list is frequently filled out with preferred choices by the staff, following whatever metric they use to justify preferential treatment. The numbers prove this to be the case. Hunter Biden landed at Number 4 on their list, ahead of “The Code Breaker,” which sold over 3,000 more copies, and “The Light Of Day,” with 2,400 more in sales. His book was just behind “Broken,” which also outsold the First Son.

Thus, calling Hunter Biden a “Bestselling author” might be as valid as calling him a “natural gas expert/executive.”