Publishers cranking out copies of best-selling ‘Mueller Report’

Now that the Mueller Report is officially a No. 1 best-seller, the three publishers in the game are starting to crank up their print runs, which will send at least 875,000 copies to market.

A big payday, however, is still down the road. The reality is there have been relatively few copies sold at retail so far. That is primarily due to the delay in getting copies printed and shipped to retailers following the April 18 release of the report.

Scribner’s offering, with analysis by Washington Post reporters, landed in the top spot on the NY Times best-seller list that hits Sunday. On Thursday, it said it was upping its original 350,000 print run by another 25,000.

It suggests the publisher, which is part of Simon & Schuster, may be expecting demand to soften after special counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr fade from the daily news cycle.

NPD BookScan, which tracks retail sales through about 80 percent of the market, said that Scribner sold only 42,117 copies in the first week.

Skyhorse Publishing’s version, with an introduction by Alan Dershowitz, had an initial press run of 200,000 copies but sold only 3,740 copies, according to BookScan.

“We had a shipping snafu, and our back orders from some customers shipped later than the Washington Post’s edition,” said Skyhorse CEO Tony Lyons. He’s still expecting strong demand and added another 100,000 copies to his print, pushing the total to 300,000.

Brooklyn-based Melville House managed to sell only 196 copies at retail, But CEO Dennis Johnson is still planning to up its print run from 50,000 initially to 200,000 in anticipation of pent-up demand.