Books on Biden fail to draw public interest: ‘Biden never does anything interesting’
Brady Knox
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Books on President Joe Biden have failed to draw the public’s interest, selling drastically fewer than his predecessor.
Authors tackling the subject of Biden and his presidency have been disappointed with middling sales, in contrast with the White House book boom of the Trump administration. In many cases, definitive books on Biden only manage to sell a fraction of what books on Trump made.
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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 often fare 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. 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 contrast, books on Trump and his administration routinely sold more by orders of magnitude. Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, centered on Trump, sold more than a million copies, while Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa sold roughly 400,000.
Speaking with experts in publishing and the authors themselves, Politico found the common theme was the perceived boredom of the Biden administration compared with the perceived chaos and excitement 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.”
“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,” another major conservative publisher said.
Keith Urbahn, the president and founding partner of Javelin, saw great success with authors including former FBI director James Comey and former national security adviser John Bolton.
“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.”
However, this problem wasn’t encountered by former President Barack Obama by any means, whose books are frequent bestsellers. His fourth book, A Promised Land, published in 2020, set a first-day sales record of over 890,000 copies sold, Forbes reported. Within a month, it had sold 3 million, according to the Associated Press.
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Former President George W. Bush’s Decision Points sold 220,000 on its first day and more than 2 million a month later, Business Insider reported.
However, memoirs from a president tend to sell more copies than books about them. It remains to be seen how many copies the memoirs of Biden would sell.