Sales For Olivia Nuzzi’s ‘American Canto’ Fizzle—And Vanity Fair Cuts Ties

Vanity Fair, which had recently hired Nuzzi as West Coast editor and published an excerpt of the book, announced in a joint statement with Nuzzi Friday it would part ways with her, saying it was “in the best interest of the magazine…to let her contract expire at the end of the year.”

“American Canto,” which billed itself as “a mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade,” sat at a middling No. 5,546 on Amazon’s bestsellers rank on Friday, three days after its release, and No. 3,059 in the Kindle store.

Amazon’s somewhat mysterious rankings don’t reflect real-time book sales, as Amazon notes it considers both historical and recent activity, and changes in rank can take days to update, while publishing observers caution they don’t always capture all audience demand.

But Dan Sinykin, an assistant professor of English at Emory University, called the sales ranking “strikingly low,” and said the book will likely underperform expectations.

“American Canto” did not appear on Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” list Thursday, which chronicles the largest gainers in sales rank over the previous 24 hours, and is often a bellwether of success on the best-seller charts in the days after a book’s release.

For a book to break onto the New York Times best sellers list of the top 15 selling books—an immensely important ranking that often determines how a book will be distributed and displayed in bookstores and airports across the country—it needs a concentrated burst of sales during its first reporting week, Hannah Yelin, a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University on culture, told Forbes, which the Amazon list is definitely not capturing.