Donald Trump may have dismissed Bob Woodward’s Fear as “a joke”, but readers are showing themselves to be keen to share in the comedy, with more than 750,000 copies of the White House exposé sold in American in just one day, according to its publisher.

Fear, which “depicts a White House awash in dysfunction, where the Lord of the Flies is the closest thing to an owner’s manual”, according to a review in the Guardian, was published on 11 September. Simon & Schuster said yesterday that it sold a combined total of more than 750,000 copies of the book on its first day on sale in the US. The publisher has now ordered a ninth printing, bringing the total number of hardbacks in print in America to more than 1.15m.

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“Bob Woodward’s Fear is selling with the force of a cultural phenomenon, in extraordinary numbers across the board, in hardcover, ebook, and audio editions,” said S&S president Jonathan Karp. “Based on immense pre-publication and ongoing interest, the reading public clearly has an enormous appetite for what we believe, as Woodward says, is ‘a pivot point in history’.”

The US chain bookstore Barnes & Noble said that the investigation by veteran reporter Woodward, who broke the story of the Watergate scandal with his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, was its fastest-growing adult title since Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was published in July 2014. “Fear had amazing first-day sales and is in high demand across our stores and online,” said Barnes & Noble’s Liz Harwell. “We haven’t seen an adult title sell this quickly in over three years, and are working with S&S to keep our shelves stocked to meet what we expect will be continued demand.”

Fear, based on hundreds of hours of interviews, details a White House in chaos. On Monday, Trump took to Twitter to rail against it: “Just another assault against me, in a barrage of assaults, using now disproven unnamed and anonymous sources. Many have already come forward to say the quotes by them, like the book, are fiction. Dem[ocrat]s can’t stand losing. I’ll write the real book!”

Jake Cumsky-Whitlock, co-owner of Solid State Books in Washington DC, told Publishers Weekly that he expected Fear to outsell ex-FBI chief James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, and Unhinged, by former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman. “Woodward has the pedigree,” Cumsky-Whitlock told the magazine. “Fire & Fury traded on gossipy business. Fear has some really explosive, damaging revelations by serious names and high-ranking members of the administration.”

Comey’s memoir sold 600,000 copies in its first week on sale in the US, while Fire and Fury sold around 200,000 copies when it was first released; however, Wolff’s publisher Henry Holt’s initial print run had failed to meet the huge demand and the book would go on to sell 1.7m copies in its first three weeks.

Washington DC bookshop Politics & Prose told Publishers Weekly that it had sold 60 copies of Fear in the first two hours of opening, with 300 copies on hold. Co-owner Bradley Graham said that there had been bulk purchases from officials from foreign embassies. “One purchased 13 copies,” said Graham. “Another asked for four.”