Source: Politics<\/p>\n
NBC News\u2019 Jonathan Allen went on a multi-stop national tour when he co-wrote a book<\/a> on how Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. \u201cShattered: Inside Hillary Clinton\u2019s Doomed Campaign,\u201d written with fellow journalist Amie Parnes, sold more than 125,000 copies and landed on the New York Times best-seller list.<\/p>\n But for the pandemic-era book<\/a> he and Parnes wrote on Joe Biden, Allen didn\u2019t even get the satisfaction of seeing a copy in stores. He didn\u2019t go on a tour, either. \u201cLucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency\u201d never made the Times best-seller list and so far has sold fewer than 10,000 copies since its release in March 2021, according to NPD BookScan, which is considered<\/a> the gold standard of book sale measurement but does not include every sale.<\/p>\n Now, Allen says he\u2019s turning his attention back to the Clintons. He has no plans to write another book on Biden.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has tried to be kind of a drama-free president, certainly in comparison to his predecessor, and that makes it harder to write a book, both in terms of getting information and turning his story into one that is compelling for readers,\u201d said Allen.<\/p>\n After the Trump gold rush for the book industry of the last few years, the Biden era has, so far, been a bust. And that\u2019s not just the case for mainstream journalists accustomed to chronicling the presidency in book form. Conservative readers don\u2019t appear all that interested in reading hundreds of pages about a president they think is senile.<\/p>\n \u201cBiden never does anything interesting,\u201d said Eric Nelson, the publisher of HarperCollins\u2019 conservative imprint Broadside Books. \u201cThe Hunter Biden stuff has done pretty well, because he\u2019s appropriately interesting. But Hunter Biden is not the president.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf your nickname is Sleepy Joe, you kind of have to simultaneously say this person is ruining everything and is supremely evil, but also he\u2019s inept and that\u2019s sort of a challenging combination,\u201d added one major conservative publisher granted anonymity to speak freely.<\/p>\n The few books that have been written about the Bidens have not exactly been flying off the shelves.<\/p>\n New York magazine writer Gabriel Debenedetti\u2019s \u201cThe Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama<\/a>\u201d has sold fewer than 1,500 copies, according to NPD BookScan. The Associated Press\u2019 Julie Pace and Darlene Superville\u2019s \u201cJill: A Biography of the First Lady<\/a>\u201d has sold fewer than 2,500 and Chris Whipple\u2019s \u201cThe Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden\u2019s White House<\/a>\u201d and POLITICO\u2019s Ben Schreckinger\u2019s \u201cThe Bidens: Inside the First Family\u2019s Fifty-Year Rise to Power<\/a>\u201d have each racked up fewer than 5,000 books sold.<\/p>\n That\u2019s in contrast to the almost million copies that Michael Wolff\u2019s Trump-focused \u201cFire and Fury<\/a>\u201d sold, according to NPD BookScan, and the more than 400,000 copies that Bob Woodward and Robert Costa\u2019s \u201cPeril<\/a>\u201d sold, among many other Trump-focused books on which publishers made a killing.<\/p>\n Superville conceded her book sales were \u201ckind of a drop in the bucket\u201d compared to the Trump-era works, but said she wrote it more for educational and historical purposes. She talked about elementary school kids doing projects on first ladies finding her book in the library.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t written really to be kind of a best-seller book or to land on the New York Times top 10 or anything like that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Whipple said in an email that \u201cThe Fight of His Life\u201d barely missed the NYT bestseller list. He also quoted from the Times review of his book<\/a> which was largely positive but included the line that \u201cthe minor fender bender of the last two years does not make for titillating rubbernecking, especially compared with the 18-car pileup of the Trump era.\u201d<\/p>\n Keith Urbahn, the president and founding partner of top D.C. literary agency Javelin, saw his business boom during the Trump years when he represented authors including former FBI director James Comey, former national security adviser John Bolton and the \u201canonymous\u201d Trump official<\/a> later revealed to be Miles Taylor.<\/p>\n \u201cThere 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,\u201d Urbahn said. \u201cWhat makes for stable governance makes less dramatic copy.\u201d<\/p>\n Urbahn and his firm have repped several books about Biden that have seen lackluster sales, including one from the president\u2019s sister Valerie Biden Owens \u2014 \u201cGrowing Up Biden: A Memoir<\/a>\u201d sold fewer than 9,000 copies \u2014 and Schreckinger\u2019s more critical look at the Biden family.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one has yet written a successful book taking readers inside the Biden administration,\u201d he noted. \u201cI think it\u2019s partly because it\u2019s a very disciplined no-leaking culture which makes it harder to get the scoops and access. And then there\u2019s the reality that the American public has mostly tuned out from Washington, D.C.\u201d<\/p>\n Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, is hoping that his new Biden book, \u201cThe Last Politician<\/a>,\u201d will buck the trend and sell well and said it has strong pre-order sales. But he is prepared for the possibility that many of the Atlantic subscribers who read his book excerpt in the October issue<\/a> won\u2019t make the leap to actually buy the book.<\/p>\n When asked about the challenges of writing about Biden versus Trump, Foer said in an interview: \u201cThere are no sensationalist stories. I think everybody\u2019s brain has been broken by Trump journalism and so our expectations about what\u2019s exciting and important are totally skewed.\u201d<\/p>\n Foer added that a fellow political journalist told him he had to think of his book as \u201cRussian literature\u201d compared to the Trump book genre.<\/p>\n Robert Costa, CBS News\u2019 chief election and campaign correspondent who wrote \u201cPeril\u201d with Woodward, said the Biden presidency \u201cis under-reported, understudied and often misunderstood.\u201d Journalists, he added, have a responsibility to cover the current occupant of the White House even while the media also still covers Trump. But asked whether he is writing a new book with Woodward on Biden, Costa said he\u2019s focused on his job at CBS, which will include an upcoming \u201cCBS Saturday Morning\u201d interview with Foer about his new Biden book.<\/p>\n Perhaps no reporter knows and understands Biden more intimately than the New Yorker\u2019s Evan Osnos. His book on China<\/a> received the National Book Award and his book on inequality<\/a> made it on the Times bestseller list. But his biography of Biden<\/a>, which came out before the 2020 election, didn\u2019t do as well.<\/p>\n \u201cJust as a general life maintenance rule, I never ask publishers for details on sales,\u201d he joked. \u201cIf my Biden book had made the bestseller list, I would have heard about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Osnos thinks that Biden, nonetheless, is an interesting subject given the extraordinary life he has lived and the many political resurrections he\u2019s had. That doesn\u2019t mean Biden\u2019s story matches the \u201calmost novelistic levels of wildness\u201d Trump exhibited.<\/p>\n \u201cHe doesn\u2019t hit the political frontal lobe of the American public with the kind of hammer that Trump does and so I didn\u2019t really expect that he would produce the same kind of sales that Trump did,\u201d Osnos said. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason Michael Wolff hasn\u2019t set out to write a book on Biden as far as I know.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked if he was writing a book on Biden, Wolff replied in a text message: \u201cApples oranges?\u201d<\/p>\n