Wouldn’t it be loverly if people read more books because of our political turmoil?

Uncategorized 2 Minutes

Maybe politics will have the incidental benefit of increasing books sales generally.

The Washington Post now has a book club email. Here’s an interesting excerpt:

The next book we all want. Like everybody else in America, I was transfixed by Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony in Congress yesterday. I have no insider knowledge of her plans to write a memoir, but I know there would be tremendous interest in such a story. Howard Yoon, a literary agent and principal of the Ross Yoon Agency in Washington, tells me, “Dr. Ford could easily get seven figures from a publisher. It’s not clear how high the ceiling would be ($1.5 to $3 million?), but if she chooses to write a book, you can guarantee there will be a major bidding war among publishers.” David Kuhn, a literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management in New York, estimates a slightly lower advance, but agrees that the book would be a major property. “I think Dr. Ford could get a whopping big book advance were she to propose a book to publishers,” he says, “anywhere from high six figures to $1 or $2 million. Of course, the size of it would depend significantly on what she proposed to do. But the potential is enormous: She comes across as sympathetic, authentic and intelligent. Her background in psychology suggests that she could do much more than tell her own story in a book but also tackle issues that a lot of female book buyers would relate to, ranging from issues surrounding sexual assault, to anxiety, self image, marriage, civic duty. A significant percentage of book buyers see her as a heroine already, and that will only increase no matter what happens to Kavanaugh.”
Make Book Sales Great Again. The demand for books about Donald Trump continues to soar. In its second week, Bob Woodward’s “Fear” sold even more hardback copies than in its first week — a remarkable development given that the opening week data included pre-orders, which accumulated during massive pre-publication coverage. Total hardback sales for the first two weeks were close to 700,000. (Read our review.)

And next Tuesday, three more huge Trump books will be released:

  • “Full Disclosure,” by Stormy Daniels, the porn star currently engaged in two lawsuits against the president. Much of the pre-publicity hysteria around “Full Disclosure” has focused on Daniels’s cringe-inducing description of Trump’s genitalia, but our reviewer, Jill Filipovic, writes that Daniels’s memoir “forces all of us to take a look at the judgments we level at certain types of women, whether they’re Stormy Daniels or Hillary Clinton, whether they’re too sexy or too competitive or too ambitious.” (Read the review.)
  • “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy,” by The Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Greg Miller. “Miller’s account of the Russian hacking of the Democrats is highly persuasive,” writes our reviewer Kai Bird. “But for Trump, this is the one thing he can never admit — that ‘his victory might not have been earned free and clear.’” (Read the review.)
  • “The Fifth Risk,” by Michael Lewis. The Guardian ran an excerpt that reveals just how totally unprepared Trump and his colleagues were to lead the nation. Look for our review next week.

 

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