The $75-million, Amazon-funded Melania Trump documentary is tanking at the box office, but a 2018 erotic thriller that depicts the First Lady as a sexual monster is rocketing up Amazon\u2019s sales charts. Melania: Devourer of Men is currently an Amazon bestseller, sitting at number 3 in the \u201cpolitical thrillers & suspense\u201d category in the Kindle store. A general search for “Melania” on Amazon returns a banner ad for the documentary, the First Lady’s memoir, and the erotic thriller as the top results.A Reddit-led campaign to disrupt the Amazon search results for \u201cMelania\u201d is behind the sudden spike in popularity of the eight year old book. \u201cThis weekend, Amazon is premiering its $75 million Melania Trump documentary. It already seems to be a flop,\u201d a post in r\/BoycottUnitedStates explained. \u201cWe’re going to add insult to injury by messing up Melania’s Amazon search results. Specifically, we’re going to amplify the paranormal erotic thriller novel Melania: Devourer of Men so it ranks higher than her movie.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of the success of the campaign is thanks to author J.D. Boehninger\u2019s willingness to give the book away. \u201cA redditor reached out to me last week and asked me if I would make the book free,\u201d the pseudonymous Boehinger told 404 Media. \u201cThey explained their reasoning, basically said they were going to try to pull this off, and why my book was the right choice. I loved the idea, so I made the book free. But that was the only role I played here.\u201dMelania: Devourer of Men depicts the First Lady as a monster whose life is upended after her husband becomes President and she has to move from New York City to Washington DC. \u201cNow, surrounded by young, strapping Secret Service agents and pursued by the cunning and handsome FBI director James Comey, Melania must work to keep everything from falling apart,\u201d reads the book’s description. \u201cBecause Melania has secrets of her own \u2013\u2013 deadly secrets \u2013\u2013 and no one yet knows how far she’ll go to protect them.\u201d\u00a0Boehninger said he wrote the book in 2018 as an experiment. \u201cIt was a test of the Kindle store algorithm,\u201d he said. \u201cMy friend told me that three things did well back then: monster fiction, erotica, and stuff about Trump\u2026so I figured I could write the book for the Kindle store: a combo monster fiction\/ erotica\/ Trump book. I thought it would blow up\u2026but, sadly, it didn\u2019t really perform back then. So glad to see people finding it now!\u201dThe Melania documentary is a two hour long film \/ bribe directed by Brett Ratner and distributed by Amazon. The company paid $40 million for the rights to it during a bidding war. \u201cThis has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn\u2019t involve music licensing,\u201d Ted Hope, a former Amazon film executive, told The New York Times. The expense of the film and the advertising push around its release have some people believing Amazon\u2019s support of the movie is a way for the company to get in good with the President.In the runup to its release, the documentary has become a source of scorn from a public exhausted with all things Trump. Its wide theatrical distribution is something Amazon doesn\u2019t do for most of its films, and certainly not its documentaries. Posting pictures of empty seats in ticket apps and defaced advertisements has become a popular pastime online. The film\u2019s distributor in South Africa stopped its release in the country, citing \u201crecent developments,\u201d but would not go into specifics.\u201cI know blessedly little about that movie! I’ve seen headlines about empty theaters but I don’t know much else,\u201d Boehninger said. He thinks it\u2019d be funny if the book sold better than the documentary, but he isn\u2019t expecting to make a lot of money. \u201cThe ebook is free in the Kindle store, and I think that for a lot of people, giving Amazon money would probably defeat the point of this protest. That said, I’ve seen that some people are paying money for the paperback version and for my other book. I appreciate that!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"