Pippa Middleton begins the introduction to Celebrate, her new collection of home entertaining tips, by saying she is "by nature an optimist". Which ought to come in useful, given the book has only sold around 2000 copies in its first week.
This comes in spite of a 50 per cent
discount on the cover price, and a considerable publicity campaign by Penguin, which paid a reported £400,000 ($776,000) advance to publish Pippa's poorly received tome.
So far, that's about £200 per copy sold.
As a celebrity publishing flop, Middleton is in illustrious company. Julian Assange was supposedly paid £500,000 for his memoirs, which sold just 644 copies in its first weekend.
Arnold Schwarzenneger's stellar career and scandalous personal life could shift no more than 27,000 copies of his autobiography Total Recall in the month after its publication. He reportedly received a seven-figure advance.
