Pity poor Farmer John Klar, twice-failed political candidate, leader of the doomed Agripublican movement, and essayist for right-wing sites like American Thinker and, well, Vermont Daily Chronicle, and author of a new book that just hasn’t gotten the attention that Klar thinks it deserves.

Small Farm Republic was published at the end of June by the once-respectable Chelsea Green Publishing, lately best known for publishing books by anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers. About six weeks later, Klar posted a piece on Vermont Daily Chronicle griping about the lack of mainstream press coverage for his terrible book.

(No, I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. I feel safe in labeling it as terrible because every Klar essay I’ve ever read has been terrible. I don’t need to go fishing in a brackish, stinking, faintly glowing pond, and I sure as hell don’t need to eat any fish that lived in that mess.)

Klar’s Komplaint is that “progressive” outlets such as Seven Days and VTDigger haven’t taken the time to “critique” his book. Well, a couple of points need to be made. First, our media’s attention has been dominated by the July 10 flood and its ongoing aftermath. It’s too bad for Klar, but even he might have to acknowledge that the flood is just a bit more important. In fact, it’s kind of tasteless for him to be griping about his book when thousands of Vermonters are struggling to recover. Of course, perspective has never been Klar’s strong suit.

But even in the absence of a major disaster, it’s doubtful that Klar would have gotten the attention he craves. Digger doesn’t do book reviews. And while Seven Days has an Arts section that publishes reviews, its primary focus is on creative writing, not sociopolitical polemics. These outlets to occasionally take on a nonfiction tome, but only when the author is a prominent figure. Think memoirs by Pat Leahy and Jim Douglas, not a guy who couldn’t come close to beating state Sen. Mark Macdonald when the incumbent barely campaigned at all because he was recovering from a stroke. (Klar also out-fundraised MacDonald by a margin of three and a half to one in that campaign.)

Klar tries to put a smiley face on this lack of attention by claiming that they didn’t address his book because they couldn’t refute anything in it. If they could, they surely would have relished the opportunity to slam it, right?

Not really, Klar is simply too obscure and unsuccessful to warrant the attention.

He also boasts that despite the lack of media coverage, the book is selling. His evidence: In early August, it occupied the #1 spot on Amazon.com’s list of books in the Food and Agriculture category. Problem is, that means a lot less than Klar would like to think it means.

Amazon provides no actual sales figures, and it has approximately a million categories. When I checked a couple days after Klar’s essay went live, Small Farm Republic had dropped to sixth place in Food and Agriculture. Many of the top-selling books in the category had been published years earlier. Truth is, at any one time there are not that many new books in any of Amazon’s multitudinous categories.

In fact, when I checked today, Amazon did not list “Food and Agriculture” at all as a category for Klar’s book. Instead, it was listed as #12 in “Sociology of Rural Areas.” And again, a bunch of older books came in ahead of Klar’s new offering. J.D. Vance’s infamous Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is in the top spot and its Kindle edition checks in at #9. Beth Macy’s Dopesick, a 2018 book about the Oxycontin plague in rural America, is #2 (audiobook) and #4 (paperback).

Oh, and while Amazon doesn’t provide sales figures, it does post an overall ranking. Which puts Klar’s book in 56,172nd place. According to literary marketing consultant Rob Eagar, a book in such a ranking is likely selling fewer than five copies a day.

Ouch.

Eagar doesn’t think much of Amazon’s category rankings, either. He cites a few examples:

Well, I think the point is made. Klar has nothing to brag about.

It’s also more than a bit ironic that he’d lean on Amazon for proof of success, because his book is largely a paean to the small and local. He’s not a fan of big corporations. He thinks they’re the big problem in our food system. One would think he’d turn to some sales measure that includes brick-and-mortar bookstores like NPD BookScan or Publishers Marketplace BookScan. I can’t access their figures because you need to have an account to do so, but I bet he could get those numbers through his publisher.

Anyway, Klar’s terrible book is selling a few copies here and there, but overall it’s about as popular as Klar the twice-failed candidate. And even if our “liberal” media took time away from flood coverage to give his book a bit of attention, that situation would remain just about unchanged.