Want your book to shoot up on the bestsellers list? A sure fire way is to have a celebrity or an enemy endorse it. The much maligned Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is one such enemy who has helped with the brisk sales of at least two books by promoting them at world venues. The first time, Chavez helped propel Noam Chomsky's “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” to Amazon's Top Ten list in 2006 by brandishing it during a speech at the UN. Now he has done the same favor to an obscure book of Latin American history by making a public gift of it to President Obama at last week's Summit of the Americas. The last time I checked, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" was # 2 on Amazon.
(Could we get Hugo to mention our blog in public?)
Accidental Blogger 