Milo Yiannopoulos' book Dangerous has proved an embarrassingly timid competitor on the book sales market.

According to Nielsen Bookscan, which monitors sales through almost all outlets, including Amazon, the right-wing media personality has only managed to sell 18,268 copies in the US and 152 in the UK since its launch on 4 July.

Ebook sales are excluded from Nielsen Bookscan, but Andre Breedt, managing director of Nielsen Book Research has clarified: "As our sales include Amazon sales it is unlikely to be higher".

Yet, Yiannopoulos' PR team (via The Guardian) claims that the book has sold 100,000 copies, including pre-orders, through Amazon alone on the day of the book's launch.

"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," Yiannopoulos' released in a statement, claiming the higher count was not of retail sales, but included copies sent to wholesale sellers.

"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."

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What Yiannopoulos appears not to have realised, however, is that Nielsen does not count books sent to wholesalers as it's usual practice for them to return unsold copies to the publisher. Therefore, it's pointless including wholesale sales without knowing how many of those books will be returned unsold down the line.