It took less than a week for publishers to get the redacted version of the “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election”—more commonly known as “the Mueller report”—into old-fashioned, analog, hold-in-you-hand book form. Scribner, working with The Washington Post, won the race to be the first on physical shelves; their version, fleshed out with an introduction and commentary from Post journalists Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotsky, is already in bookstores across the country.
Editions from independent publishers Skyhorse and Melville House, the former including an introduction from Trump defender Alan Dershowitz and the latter a “people's edition,” in the publisher's words, with no extraneous material, will be released this week; several publishers had put out electronic editions within 24 hours of the redacted report's April 18 release by the Department of Justice. (Full disclosure: I worked at Melville House for two and a half years and was part of the team that rushed the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture to print.)
It's no surprise that these publishers spent sleepless nights pushing the report to print—a very complicated experience, given its numerous redactions and other typesetting oddities. Shortly after the report was released, these three editions held the top-three places on Amazon's sales rankings; all three stayed in the top ten for the next week, with Scribner's edition holding its own against Michelle Obama's historic bestseller Becoming. These three editions are also continuing to do well against an increasingly crowded field of cobbled-together self-published editions—including one by special counsel target and nonsensical plot point Carter Page. Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook juggernaut, raced to record a 19-hour audiobook of the report, which was released for free (possibly because no one could possibly want to listen to a 19-hour, redaction-laden government document) last Monday. Demand was so high for bound editions of the report that some independent bookstores began printing and selling their own copies hours after its release.
That several publishers were racing to publish—and sell, at a price between $7.99 and $14.99—a report that is publicly available for free says a great deal about book publishing in the Trump era. Yes, the trends were already there, but the current president has accelerated things. For publishers in 2019, in an industry increasingly dominated by quick and easy cash grabs, Donald Trump is where the money is.
Initially, book publishers, like the rest of the media, were slow to take Trump seriously. Given the typically long lead times for writing and publishing books—several months, if not years—many assumed that he would be yesterday's news by the time their biographies and exposés were released. In 2016, David Cay Johnston's The Making of Donald Trump—published by Melville House after the big houses shrugged it off—and the Post's Trump Revealed (published by Scribner) were bestsellers, but sales of both paled in comparison to books that approached Trump's support more tangentially. J. D. Vance's enormously flawed Hillbilly Elegy was the year's breakout hit, thanks in large part to being embraced by the establishment class as an explainer for Trump's diehard base.
When, however, it became clear that Donald Trump was going nowhere, publishers began pumping out a flood of books recounting his innumerable misdeeds. Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury (5 million copies sold) and Bob Woodward's Fear (1.1 million copies sold in its first week) were breakout hits, both detailing a seemingly unending succession of presidential temper tantrums—and the efforts of aides to prevent Trump from blowing up his presidency or, maybe, the world. (For comparison's sake, Omarosa's Unhinged sold a respectable 86,000 copies as of late-December.) They are joined by a wave of other books from people with central roles in the drama (Corey Lewandowski's Let Trump Be Trump, James Comey's A Higher Loyalty, which has sold over a million copies, Sean Spicer's The Briefing, which sold significantly less than that), books about people in Trump's orbit (Joshua Green's Devil's Bargain, about Steve Bannon, Vicky Ward's just-released Kushner Inc.), and a barrage of books justtrying to figure out what the hell is happening. Books explaining—and, more often than not, recommending—impeachment have become a micro-genre in recent months, as have books suggesting that the president is a Russian agent (what happens to this genre post-Mueller report is anyone's guess). And conservative publishing, a juggernaut long before Trump's presidency, has published a number of bestsellersdefending the president and attacking his critics.
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