In the wake of being chosen as President Trump’s running mate, sales for Senator Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and viewership for the subsequent movie adaption have skyrocketed, likely in part because he has been on the national political stage for such a short period of time. 

The senator’s memoir captured the attention of many Americans — especially on the coasts — after Trump’s victory in 2016. Those who failed to see any possibility of a Trump victory that year were looking for answers about what they may have missed. 

The memoir was an instant bestseller, and has received new attention since the senator won the veep nod Monday. Currently, the book is charting at both number one and number two on Amazon’s bestseller page. The first spot is taken by the eight dollar paperback version, while the runner-up is the more pricey hardcover. 

The review section on Amazon was flooded with negative comments after Mr. Vance was tapped for VP. “Vance pushes the narrative that poor people are poor because they don’t want to fix their situation. If they would just work harder and ‘pull their selves [sic] up by the bootstraps’ they could be successful like him,” one commenter wrote. “This book is much like the man who wrote it — garbage,” wrote another.  

A number of amateur book reviewers on the website have praised it just on Tuesday to counteract those negative reviews however, writing that it is evocative and insightful into the real Appalachia. One reviewer, Martha, says the memoir makes her “incredibly grateful for the stability I enjoyed as well as the need to appreciate the importance of understanding others less fortunate.”

The movie adaption, starring Amy Adams as Mr. Vance’s drug-addicted single mother and Glenn Close as the senator’s hardnose grandmother, has also piqued the interest of many across the country. According to numbers shared with the New York Sun by the data firm Luminate, more than 163,000 Netflix users watched the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie version just on Monday alone — an increase of more than 1,000 percent over the course of just a few hours. 

The data shows that users spent a combined 19 million minutes watching the film.