Rightwing controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos has branded reported low sales of his new book “fake news” after official figures revealed the writer has failed to rock the book charts on either side of the Atlantic, despite his claims to the contrary.

According to Nielsen Bookscan, which monitors book sales through almost all outlets, including Amazon, the former Breitbart technology editor has sold only 18,268 copies of his book in the US and 152 in the UK since its launch on 4 July.

The figure is far below the 100,000 copies, including pre-orders, that his PR team claimed had sold through Amazon alone on the day of the book’s launch. Though ebook sales are excluded from the charts, Andre Breedt, managing director of Nielsen Book Research, said: “As our sales include Amazon sales it is unlikely to be higher.”

In a statement, Yiannopoulos claimed that his higher figure was not a count of retail sales, but included copies sent to wholesale sellers. “By now, you may have heard reports claiming we only sold 18,000 copies of Dangerous and that our 100,000 copies claim is exaggerated. I’m happy to report that this is fake news,” he wrote.

“It’s true that the major booksellers only managed to ship out 18,000 copies to retail customers by the list cutoff. But that’s because they didn’t order enough ahead of time, and have been scrambling to play catchup ever since.

“The real news is that we’ve received wholesale orders and direct orders of such magnitude that our entire stock of 105,000 books is already accounted for.”

Books sent to wholesalers are not counted by monitoring agencies like Nieslen, as it is usual practice for wholesalers to return unsold copies to the publisher. On average, a new book makes 80% of its sales in the first 12 weeks of release, with the first six weeks accounting for the bulk of that figure.

Dangerous reached No 1 on Amazon on the day of its release but had dropped to fifth spot in the nonfiction charts and No 52 overall by Thursday 6 July. On Apple BookStore, the book has now fallen to No 100 overall after entering at No 20.

The figures are in stark contrast to claims by Yiannopoulos that his book had already sold 100,000, aided by 65,000 pre-orders on Amazon’s US site. It is the latest blow to the ex-Breitbart editor who was unceremoniously dumped by Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold in February after a controversial interview emerged on an internet livestream in which he appeared to downplay the significance of child abuse.

In the interview he said “you can get quite hung up on this child abuse thing”, before going on to suggest that sex between boys as young as 13 and older men could be “a coming-of-age relationship … in which the older men help those younger boys discover who they are”.

Though Yiannopoulos strongly denied he supported paedophilia, claiming on Facebook that he had been “selectively edited”, it was a step too far for S&S, which terminated his reported $250,000 (£193,000) contract within hours of the interview emerging.

The controversy ended a deal that had seen S&S come under fire from celebrities, writers and booksellers, and forced its CEO Carolyn Reidy to make an unprecedented statement to the publisher’s authors that the book would not contain hate speech.

Last week, Yiannopoulos marked the self-publication of his book by announcing a $10m lawsuit against the publishing giant, claiming breach of contract and that, had the book been published with S&S’s marketing clout, it would have sold far more copies.

The poor performance in the UK appears to vindicate British publishers’ decision to spurn Dangerous when it was doing the rounds. At the time, industry insiders doubted it would be picked up, not because of any controversial content, but because Yiannopoulos remains a relative unknown in his home country.