Baseball Tell-all not a sell-all: A-Rod book sales weak

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Bench Warmer
Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Remember that tell-all book about A-Rod?

Just a month after making headlines with its allegations that the New York Yankees star likely used steroids as far back as high school, Selena Roberts' "A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez" has vanished from best seller lists.

Amanda and Melissa talk to Sports Illustrated's Selena Roberts about her A-Rod book and some of the criticism she's received since its publication.

Published in early May by HarperCollins with an announced first printing of 150,000, "A-Rod" has sold just 16,000 copies so far, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 75 percent of industry sales. The book sold 11,000 in its first week, then quickly faded.

At the Rizzoli Bookstore in midtown Manhattan, "A-Rod" has sold two copies. Twenty-seven copies have sold at Posman Books, based in Grand Central Terminal, but none in the past two weeks.

"I don't think he's ever been embraced by serious fans," Logan Fox, a manager at Posman, said Wednesday. "He's still considered an outsider."

"A-Rod" fell off The New York Times' hardcover list of nonfiction best sellers after three weeks, peaking at No. 9 in late May. As of Wednesday afternoon, the book ranked No. 2,904 on Amazon.com, where even James Frey's discredited memoir "A Million Little Pieces" -- at 1,776 -- is outselling it.


Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press
 
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