About a month ago, This American Life aired a story on California gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner‘s book Mount Pleasant: My Journey from Creating a Billion-Dollar Company to Teaching at a Struggling Public High School, which was released by Portfolio (a Penguin imprint) on April 1st. In the piece, Ira Glass called Poizner’s account of teaching, for one semester at a San Jose high school, “obviously and provably untrue.” Poizner described the school as plagued by gangs, teen pregnancy, and disrepair, while Glass instead found it not a “terrible school in a terrible neighborhood, but an average school in an average neighborhood.”

Glass also raised another question: whether Poizner’s campaign had “bought enough copies itself in the first week [of sales] to put the book on the bestseller list.” The book debuted at #5 on the New York Times bestseller list, though it immediately dropped to #33 and then slipped off the list altogether.

A follow-up story on the This American Life blog pointed to a report in California’s Capitol Weekly, which reported that “a significant number of people seem to have inexplicably received copies of Poizner’s book” from Amazon, despite the fact that they did not order it. The books were ordered using Amazon gift cards purchased by a man named Mat Miller, who has connections to two book marketing companies, Pink Moon Media and ResultSource, Inc. It’s unclear how many copies were purchased by Miller, but the company ResultSource, Inc. advertises that it can “launch your next book as a New York Times Bestseller.” Neither company, nor Poizner’s campaign, would comment on whether sales had been inflated.

As the Capitol Weekly story notes, it’s not impossible for a book covering a regional topic to make the New York Times bestseller list. In this case, though, the numbers seem to speak for themselves: According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of all book sales, the book sold 7,904 copies during the week that the mysertious copies were delivered to random Californians. The next week it sold 1,090 copies. Then just 179 copies the next. Just four weeks later — in the book’s most recent week of recorded sales, in the midst of a public battle for governor — Poizner has sold just 54 copies.