Plenty of A-Rod Books Still Available

Have you read A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez? Judging from the sales figures, you haven't. Selena Roberts' expose of the Yankees third baseman is languishing on store shelves a month after its release.

HarperCollins printed 150,000 copies of the book, but Nielsen BookScan reports that just 16,000 copies have been sold. According to the Associated Press, 11,000 of those copies sold during the first week of release. Given the nature of the story and the intense media coverage preceding its release, it's unlikely that too many interested readers were unaware of the book's availability.

Even New Yorkers weren't interested in reading about one of the city's most polarizing figures.

At the Rizzoli Bookstore in midtown Manhattan, "A-Rod" has sold two copies. Twenty-seven copies have sold at Posman Books, based in Grand Central Terminal, but none in the past two weeks.

So why the lack of interest?

Have you ever seen a trailer for a movie that looked funny, gone to see it and realized that all of the best jokes were in the trailer? If you have, you probably weren't rushing out to see the next movie that looks funny in a trailer. That phenomenon may be at work with Roberts' book.

There were so many leaks, so many stories about what was in the book and so much other coverage about Rodriguez that it seemed unnecessary to actually go out and spend money on something that was freely available. I'll confess to not buying the book after spending some time with it at the local bookstore. There wasn't anything of interest that hadn't already appeared in other places, and what was there didn't make for all that compelling a read.

On that front, numerous poor reviews couldn't have helped. The main complaint was that Roberts relied too heavily on anonymous sources and innuendo, which is problematic for a book that was pitched as an investigation into the life of someone who has been covered as exhaustively as Rodriguez.

From his predilection for muscular she-males to his tone-deaf public relation strategies to, by the time of the book's release, his steroid use, there wasn't much about A-Rod that hadn't already been discussed to death. To overcome that, a book was going to need some fresh, sharp angles that Roberts didn't provide.