Books about Biden struggle to capture public attention due to a perceived lack of excitement in his actions.
Books on President Joe Biden Struggle to Capture Public Interest
Authors delving into the world of President Joe Biden and his presidency have been left disappointed as their books fail to generate the same level of excitement and sales as those about his predecessor. In fact, many of these books only manage to sell a fraction of what books on Trump achieved.
For example, NBC News’s Jonathan Allen published a book on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign in 2017 and Biden’s campaign in 2021. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign sold more than 125,000 copies and landed on the New York Times bestseller list, while Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency has sold just 10,000 copies, according to Politico, using statistics from NPD Bookscan.
Related books on the topic have fared even worse. The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama by New York magazine writer Gabriel Debenedetti has sold fewer than 1,500 copies, while The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple and The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power by Politico’s Ben Schreckinger have both sold under 5,000 copies.
In stark contrast, books on Trump and his administration consistently sold significantly more. Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, centered on Trump, sold over a million copies, while Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa sold roughly 400,000.
When speaking with experts in publishing and the authors themselves, Politico discovered a common theme: the perceived lack of excitement surrounding the Biden administration compared to the chaos and drama of the Trump administration.
“Biden never does anything interesting,” Eric Nelson, the publisher of HarperCollins’s conservative imprint Broadside Books, told the outlet. “The Hunter Biden stuff has done pretty well because he’s appropriately interesting. But Hunter Biden is not the president.”
Another major conservative publisher added, “If your nickname is Sleepy Joe, you kind of have to simultaneously say this person is ruining everything and is supremely evil but also he’s inept, and that’s sort of a challenging combination.”
Keith Urbahn, the president and founding partner of Javelin, experienced great success with authors like former FBI director James Comey and former national security adviser John Bolton. However, he noted that the interest in political books declined significantly in 2021, as the Trump era’s intrigue and drama gave way to a desire for more stable governance.
“There was a sugar high in the Trump era from intrigue, the leakings, the nonstop drama, which was at once exhausting but also generated billions of dollars in clicks, book sales, cable ratings, and in 2021, that interest fell off a cliff,” Urbahn said. “What makes for stable governance makes less dramatic copy.”
Interestingly, this issue was not encountered by former President Barack Obama, whose books consistently become bestsellers. His fourth book, A Promised Land, set a first-day sales record of over 890,000 copies sold, according to Forbes. Within a month, it had sold 3 million, as reported by the Associated Press.
Similarly, former President George W. Bush’s Decision Points sold 220,000 copies on its first day and over 2 million within a month, as reported by Business Insider.
However, it is worth noting that memoirs written by presidents tend to sell more copies than books about them. Only time will tell how many copies Biden’s memoirs would sell.
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