No, the other Fire and Fury: when books share titles
Before Michael Wolff’s bestseller was the one about the second world war. Its little-known author is not the first to benefit from a nominal muddle …
You’d think it would be hard to confuse Randall Hansen’s Fire and Fury, a 2008 military history book with a second world war bomber on its cover, with Michael Wolff’s No 1 bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, whose jacket shows the US president mid-rant. Yet Hansen, a Canadian academic, wryly revealed this week that the shared title had helped his 10-year-old study to return to three of Amazon’s category bestseller lists.
He’s not the first little-known author to benefit from a nominal muddle: Emily Schultz received “a big royalty cheque” as a long-tail bonus when Stephen King echoed her 2005 title Joyland in 2013; and Liam Callanan wrote a droll blog about the myriad repercussions of the release of the 2012 film version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, ranging from his own book The Cloud Atlas climbing to Amazon respectability to his website being “hacked by Russians and blacklisted by Google”.
