The day before Navy Seal David Goggins went on The Joe Rogan Experience, his self-published memoir, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds, was ranked #78,908 on Amazon books. The day after, it was ranked #572. After an appearance on The JRE, mixed martial artist Tim Kennedy saw his memoir, Scars and Stripes: An Unapologetically American Story of Fighting the Taliban, UFC Warriors, and Myself, jump from #180 to #85. Titania McGrath, the pseudonym of "anti-woke" comedian Andrew Doyle, saw their satirical book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice jump from #20,731 to #232. Other JRE authors have seen similar sales increases.
"A book may jump from #1,000,000 to #55,000 by selling just a single title," Keith Riegert, who teaches analytics and consumer insights at New York University explained to us. "But to get from #500 to #100, you need a steady stream of orders in the hundreds or thousands hourly."
Riegert, who is also the vice president of Ulysses Press, saw the Rogan effect firsthand after he published The Psychedelic Handbook by Dr. Rick Strassman. Before Strassman sat down with Rogan, it was #25,446. After, it was #222. "We have a number of other books about psychedelics. This just eclipsed everything," Riegert explained.
He was also struck by who bought the book: 66 percent of sales went to men. "It's a complete flip from what we normally see. Book purchases skew more female." Rogan is flipping the script on the book industry, where women and the college-educated have long reigned as the target audience. Rogan's listeners skew heavily male; according to Morning Consult, 72 percent of his "avid" adult fans are men and 69 percent have no college degree.
In more ways than one, Rogan, a tattoo-covered jock who dropped out of college, is an odd kingmaker for the book industry. He does jiu-jitsu, he bow-hunts elk, and is fond of telling the world to "conquer your inner bitch." In his blurb for the memoir Permanently Suspended: The Rise and Fall . . . and Rise Again of Radio's Most Notorious Shock Jock, by Anthony Cumia, he writes that Cumia is "an unapologetically masculine man, which is an increasingly rare thing in this ever pussified world we find ourselves in."
But Rogan doesn't only promote one type of book. In one podcast, he said to Professor Cornel West, who's now running as an independent presidential candidate, "I can't recommend your book Race Matters enough." He's made bestsellers out of memoirs and shooting manuals alike.
Ultimately, Rogan's impact is as complicated as his podcast. On the one hand, he connects with a demographic that does not read. According to Pew Research Center, more than a quarter of men did not read any books in the past twelve months. Among adults without a B.A., that number jumps to more than 50 percent.
When Rogan champions books like Can't Hurt Me, a memoir written by one of the first African-American Navy Seals, he makes reading look cool. When he endorses a politician and memoirist like Bernie Sanders, he also makes progressive politics look cool.
On the other hand, The JRE is one of the biggest platforms in the world for antivaxxers, flat earthers, and other fringe thinkers who might otherwise be at the bottom of Amazon's rankings. Alex Jones, the author of a book about "the global elite's international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet" (ranked #1 in Amazon's Political Corruption & Misconduct books) made much watched appearances on The JRE, though he has his own platform, too.
In 2017, The Bookseller reported that publications have been scaling back book coverage, and it's only gotten worse in the intervening years. As one editor at a Big Five publisher told us, "There is shrinking book coverage. Book sections are tiny, if not completely decimated from papers. We can't even get interviews for our authors."
While the legacy institutions ignore self-published memoirists like David Goggins, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, and other authors, Joe Rogan does not, and publishers have taken notice. "The truth is when books sell, we do more of the kinds of books that sell. It's that crass," explained one Vice President at another Big Five publisher.
While many of Rogan's authors will never see their name in The New York Review of Books or Harper's Magazine, the data suggests that these authors and their publishers don't need those institutions anymore.
Adam Szetela is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Shiyu Ji is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
