NEW YORK — As she anticipates her estranged uncle’s return to the White House, Mary Trump isn’t anticipating any life e book to catch on like such first-term tell-alls as Michael Wolff’s million-selling “Fire and Fury” or her personal blockbuster, “Too Much and Never Enough.”
“What else is there to learn?” she says. “And for people who don’t know, the books have been written. It’s all really out in the open now.”
For publishers, Donald Trump’s presidential years had been a while of ordinary gross sales in political books, helped partially via Trump’s felony blackmails and angered tweets. In line with Circana, which tracks round 85% of the hardcover and paperback marketplace, the style’s gross sales just about doubled from 2015 to 2020, from round 5 million copies to round 10 million.
But even so books via Wolff and Trump, alternative bestsellers incorporated former FBI Director James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty,” former nationwide safety helper John Bolton’s “The Room Where it Happened” and Bob Woodward’s “Fear.” In the meantime, gross sales for dystopian myth additionally jumped, led via Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale,” which used to be tailored into an award-winning Hulu series.
However passion has dropped again to 2015 ranges since Trump left place of business, in step with Circana, and publishers lack of certainty it’s going to once more top so extremely. Readers no longer simplest confirmed negligible passion in books via or about President Joe Biden and his nation — they even gave the impression much less interested by Trump-related releases. Mary Trump’s “Who Could Ever Love You” and Woodward’s “War” had been each frequent q4, however neither has matched the gross sales in their books written right through the primary Trump management.
“We’ve been there many times, with all those books,” HarperCollins writer Jonathan Burnham says of the diverse Trump tell-alls. He added that he nonetheless sees a marketplace for a minimum of some Trump books — most likely examining the hot election — as a result of “there’s a general, serious smart audience, not politically aligned in a hard way,” one that might welcome “an intelligent voice.”
“It’s like the reboot of any hit TV show,” says Eric Nelson, writer and vice chairman of Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins that’s immune books via Jared Kushner, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump Cupboard nominees Pete Hegseth and Sen. Marco Rubio. “You’re not hoping for ratings like last time, just better ratings than the boring show it’s replacing.”
Within the days following Trump’s victory, “The Handmaid’s Tale” and George Orwell’s “1984” returned to bestseller lists, in conjunction with extra fresh works akin to Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” a 2017 bestseller that expanded upon a Facebook post Snyder wrote soon after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Books appealing to pro-Trump readers also surged, including those written by Cabinet picks — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “The Real Anthony Fauci” and Hegseth’s “The War on Warriors” — and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” his 2016 memoir that’s offered masses of 1000’s of copies since Trump decided on him as his operating mate.
First lady Melania Trump’s memoir, “Melania,” came out in October and has been high on Amazon.com bestseller lists for weeks, even as critics found it contained little newsworthy information. According to Circana, it has sold more than 200,000 copies, a figure that does not include books sold directly through her website.
“The Melania book has done extraordinarily well, better than we thought,” says Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. “After Election Day, we sold everything we had of it.”
Conservative books have sold steadily over the years, and several publishers — most recently Hachette Book Group — have imprints dedicated to those readers. Publishers expect at least some critical books to reach bestseller lists — if only because of the tradition of the publishing market favoring the party out of power. But the nature of what those books would look like is uncertain. Perhaps a onetime insider will have a falling out with Trump and write a memoir, like Bolton or former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, or maybe some of his planned initiatives, whether mass deportation or the prosecution of his political foes, will lead to investigative works.
A new “Fire and Fury” is doubtful, with the originally only possible because Wolff enjoyed extraordinary access, spending months around Trump and his White House staff. Members of the president-elect’s current team have already issued a statement saying they have refused to speak with Wolff, calling the author a “known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened.”
A publicist for Wolff said he was declining comment.
Woodward, who interviewed Trump at length for the 2020 bestseller “Rage,” told The Associated Press that he had written so much about Trump and other presidents that he wasn’t sure what he’d take on next. He doesn’t rule out another Trump book, but that will depend in part on the president-elect, how “out of control he gets,” Woodward said, and how far he is able to go.
“He wants to be the imperial president, where he gets to decide everything and no one’s going to get in his way,” Woodward said. “He’s run into some brick walls in the past and there may be more brick walls. I don’t know what will happen. I’ll be watching and doing some reporting, but I’m still undecided.”
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1. “Too Much and Never Enough,” by Mary Trump: 1,248,212 copies
2. “Fire and Fury,” by Michael Wolff: 936,116 copies
3. “Fear,” by Bob Woodward: 872,014 copies
4. “The Room Where It Happened,” by John Bolton: 676,010 copies
5. “Rage,” by Bob Woodward: 549,685 copies
Those figures constitute overall gross sales supplied via Circana, which tracks about 85% of the print marketplace and does no longer come with book or audiobook gross sales.