Within both the worlds both of pop cultural and art writing, the release of Kim Kardashian’s Rizzoli book, Selfish, was a conceptually fascinating specimen, the seeming apotheosis of challenges to even the loosest of definitions of art. The collection of selfies was widely discussed among critics, with Jerry Saltz going so far as to suggest that it’s an American parallel to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. However, it turns out, according to what reps from Nielsen Bookscan told Radar, it was far from widely purchased.
Of course, occasional entrepreneurial failures are all tied up in the American struggle, so perhaps it still perfectly fits atop Saltz’s comparison, in which he said that it’s a “chorus of one, written in a personal language of compassion, infinite theater, stage sets, setpieces, ceremony, shallowness…unable to curtail one’s selfishness and obsession with one’s own image.” Indeed, it seems it was so individualistic that few others felt they needed to participate.
According to Radar, the book, which is currently going for a mere $9.95 on Amazon, has only sold 32,000 copies — a number accounting for 0.8% of the celebrity’s Instagram followers. Among fans, it hasn’t fared as well critically as it did within some circles of actual critics. On Amazon, it has 2.5 stars out of 5. Radar notes that it did, however, far out-perform the YA dystopian sci-fi novel by Kendall and Kylie Jenner (aka their ghostwriter, Maya Sloan), which has 2 stars on Amazon and sold around 13,000 copies in the months after its release.