Graham Linehan memoir fails to reach top 1,000 Amazon bestsellers list
According to Amazon’s bestseller ranking, the hardcover edition of the book ranked 1,342 at the time of reporting. (Getty/ Eye Books)
A memoir by anti-trans campaigner Graham Linehan is hovering outside the top 1,000 on Amazon’s bestselling books ranking this week, despite his boast that the book has sold over 10,000 copies
The Father Ted creator turned ‘gender-critical’ pundit’s latest book failed to reach Amazon’s top 1,000 bestsellers after its release in early October.
The book, titled Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, reportedly serves as a “part diary” in Linehan’s so-called “gender wars cancellation” following years of posting vehemently anti-trans rhetoric online.
A newsletter from weekly email publication Popbitch claimed that, in the first week, Linehan had sold just 390 copies of the book.
Linehan refuted this claim in a post on X, formerly Twitter, claiming that the book had sold out the first print run of 10,000 copies, while also purposefully misgendering trans activist Katy Montgomerie, who had asked him to confirm the number of books sold.
However, Montgomerie later posted that she had received two screenshots from book sales aggregate Nielsen BookScan showing that he had only sold 390 copies in the first week.
The book’s publisher, Eye Books, refuted the figure in an email to PinkNews, saying that it had reprinted the book twice following its first print run of 10,000 copies.
It also claimed that direct sales were nearly 10 times that of the figure quoted in Popbitch’s newsletter, putting direct sales somewhere below 3,900.
In a separate social media post, Linehan claimed he had personally signed 3,500 books before release.
Montgomerie suggested in the social media post that the 10,000 printed copies were likely those sold to retailers and not direct sales.
According to Amazon’s bestseller ranking, the hardcover edition of the book is doing poorly, having dropped to below the top 1,000 best sellers at the time of reporting.
Among the more than 1,000 titles currently beating Linehan’s memoir are a box of reception-age phonics flash cards, and memoirs from Britney Spears, Miriam Margolyes, Peter Kay, Patrick Stewart, Dawn French, Billy Connolly, Rory Stewart and Adrian Edmondson.
On the Kindle ranking, Linehan’s book is trailing nearly 200 places behind a compendium of knock knock jokes for kids at the time of reporting.
PinkNews has contacted Popbitch for comment on the figures reported in its newsletter.
Richard Ayoade criticised after supporting Graham Linehan book
In the lead up to the book’s release, The IT Crowd star Richard Ayoade was heavily criticised for his review of Graham Linehan’s book, writing that it showed his “brilliance.”
“Graham Linehan has long been one of my favourite writers, and this book shows that his brilliance in prose is the equal to his brilliance as a screenwriter,” Ayoade wrote.
“It unfolds with the urgency of a [Samuel] Fuller film: that of a man who has been through something that few have experienced but has managed to return, undaunted, to tell the tale.”
Users on social media widely criticised the review, with one writing that it is “difficult to imagine” that Ayoade was “not aware of ‘Glinner’s’ extreme bigotry”.
Linehan’s anti-trans campaigning arguably began following a controversy in 2008 after an episode of The IT Crowd was criticised as “transphobic” for its portrayal of a transgender woman.
Since then, the showrunner has gone on to compare gender-affirming care for trans youth to Nazi experiments in concentration camps and has been given verbal harassment warnings by police for doxxing a trans woman.
