Barack Obama memoir off to record-setting start in sales
A Promised Land
The first-day sales, a record for Penguin Random House, includes pre-orders, e-books and audio.
“We are thrilled with the first day sales,” said David Drake, publisher of the Penguin Random House imprint Crown. “They reflect the widespread excitement that readers have for President Obama’s highly anticipated and extraordinarily written book.”
The only book by a former White House resident to come close to the early pace of Promised Land is the memoir by Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, whose Becoming sold 725,000 copies in North America its first day and has topped 10 million worldwide since its release in 2018. Becoming is still so in demand that Crown, which publishes both Obamas and reportedly paid around $60 million for their books, has yet to release a paperback.
As of midday Wednesday, November 18, A Promised Land was No 1 on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, said that the superstore chain easily sold more than 50,000 copies its first day and hoped to reach half-million within 10 days.
“So far it has been neck and neck with Michelle Obama’s book,” he said.
By comparison, Bill Clinton’s My Life sold around 400,000 copies in North America its first day and George W Bush’s Decision Points around 220,000, with sales for each memoir currently between 3.5 and 4 million copies. The fastest selling book in memory remains JK Rowling’s seventh and final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which came out in 2007 and sold more than 8 million copies within 24 hours.
Obama’s 768-page memoir, which came out November 17 and has a list price of US$45, had unusually risky timing for a book of such importance to the author, to readers and to the publishing
Aindustry.
It came out just two weeks after Election Day and could have been overshadowed had the race still been in doubt or perhaps unwanted by distressed Obama fans if President Donald Trump had defeated Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But Biden won and his victory likely renews interest in an era when he was Obama’s trusted and popular vice-president.
Obama himself acknowledges that he didn’t intend for the book, the first of two planned volumes, to arrive so close to a presidential election or to take nearly four years after he left the White House — months longer than for My Life and two years longer than Decision Points. In the introduction to Promised Land, dated August 2020, Obama writes that “the book kept growing in length and scope” as he found he needed more words than expected to capture a given moment — a bind many authors well understand. He was also working under conditions he “didn’t fully anticipate”, from the pandemic to the Black Lives Matters protests, to, “most troubling of all,” how the country’s “democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis.”
Because of the pandemic,
Obama will not go on the all-star arena tour Michelle Obama had for Becoming. But he benefits from the attention of any memoir by a former president and by the special attention for Obama, who has the
Arare stature among politicians of writing his own books and for attracting as much or more attention for how he tells a story than for the story itself. Obama has already written two acclaimed, million-selling works, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, which came out in 2006. His new book covers some of the same time period as his previous ones, while continuing his story through the first 2 1/2 years of his presidency and the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by the Navy SEALS.
Obama’s book is the highlight of publishing’s holiday season and for some independent bookstores, the potential difference between remaining in business or closing. Publishing sales have been surprisingly stable during the pandemic, but much of the benefit has gone to Amazon.com as readers turned increasingly to online purchases. The American Booksellers Association, the independent sellers’ trade group, has warned that hundreds of stores could go out of business if holiday sales fall short.
Kris Kleindienst, co-owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, anticipates selling around 1,000 copies by the end of the year, a number which makes “a HUGE difference” for annual revenues, she wrote in an email. Sarah Mcnally, owner of Mcnally Jackson Books in Manhattan, said she sold around 600 copies in the first 24 hours, a pace exceeded only by the final Harry Potter book. “It’s not hard to be a bright spot this year, a year when we would have gone out of business without federal aid,” Mcnally said. “But Obama does feel like a savior, as do our customers for buying this from us.”
A Promised Land has since gone on to sell more than 1.7 million copies in North America in its first week, roughly equal to the combined first week sales of memoirs by his two immediate predecessors and among the highest ever for a non-fiction book.
Crown has announced that it had increased its initial print run from
3.4 million copies to 4.3 million. Sales also include audio and digital books.
While there, Chris presses into a style of painting, the mastery of which has eluded him for as long as he could remember.
Painting flowers as a subject is an emotional trigger for him, but as his art moves from its characteristic darkness to light-bearing strokes, he inadvertently opens the doors of healing for its admirers.
Similarly, Chris’ network tells their stories in subsequent chapters, and we experience the delicate layering of loss and love, family histories, and the sharp pangs of regret. The subtext for this story may very well be to do what you need to do in the moment for there is no guarantee of tomorrow.
Despite the conflict with which each character comes to the story, we experience progression and enjoy what feels like them growing towards the light of understanding, acceptance, truth and community, just as Chris, Feliciane & Stephen push past their creative boundaries.
There are two bonus treats in this novel. We get to experience Paris through the eyes of the author’s motley crew, and we feast on a smorgasbord of classic art and their artists. As usual, this Caribbean story does not stop short of mouth-watering descriptions of food: steaming piles of peas and rice, fragrant pools of oxtail, and mounds of plantain adorn the tables of the book. Mckenzie imperceptibly applauds ever-expanding boundaries of the Caribbean Diaspora and its influence when we visit a nouveau-caribbean restaurant in Paris, and we smile.
We are reminded that everybody needs somebody. Time is precious; life is fleeting and why it is important to wrap our arms around everyone we hold dear and let them know it.