
Hillary Clinton's "What Happened" easily beat out Bill O'Reilly's latest "Killing" book, marking the end of an era for the former Fox News talker.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign memoir, “What Happened,” continues to be a publishing juggernaut. During its second week in stores, it remains the best-selling book in America, selling nearly 100,000 hardcover copies, according to a publishing source with access to weekly NPD BookScan sale information, which tabulates the publishing data.

In its first sales week, “What Happened” sold 164,000 hardcover copies, making it the best first-week sales performance in five years for any non-fiction hardcover book. The title also set a Simon & Schuster company record for weekly digital audio sales, according to the Associated Press. Across all media platforms, “What Happened” sold approximately 300,000 copies in its first week.

That meant it sold more copies in one week than Donald Trump’s 2015 release, “Crippled America,” has sold in the last two years.


This week, Clinton claims another conservative publishing victim by denying Bill O’Reilly and his new book the top spot on the bestsellers list. It’s the first time in seven years that a book from O’Reilly’s “Killing” series — “Killing Kennedy,” “Killing Paton,” Killing Jesus” — hasn’t immediately shot to the top of the bestsellers list.

And this time it wasn’t even close: O’Reilly’s “Killing England” sold 65,000 hardcover copies, compared to Clinton’s 93,000.

For O’Reilly, that represents a huge decline in first-week book sales. Last year’s “Killing” entry, “Killing the Rising Sun,” sold 150,000 hardcover copies its first week in stores, and the title went on to sell more than one million copies to become one of the biggest titles of 2016.

There’s no way O’Reilly latest, “Killing England,” is going to follow that sales trajectory.

The marketing problem for O’Reilly is that he no longer has his nightly, national Fox News platform to drive his book sales. After being forced from Fox following a torrent of sexual harassment allegations, for which Fox has paid millions of dollars in hush money over the years to his victims, O’Reilly launched a podcast and an online broadcast, “No Spin News,” that nobody cares about.

O’Reilly made his first return to Fox News this week, appearing on Sean Hannity’s show where he whined about things old people whine about. The appearance was clearly an effort to try juice book sales. But it didn’t work.

So now O’Reilly has to bow to Clinton on the bestsellers list.