Trump has many picking up books again

Bestsellers chronicling the White House escapades is leading to a bumper year for publishers

Make America read again. That could be the publishing industry’s slogan given what President Donald Trump has done for book sales. Just as newspaper subscriptions surged after the 2016 election, book publishers are now enjoying a jump in customers.

The number of political books sold in print is up 27 per cent this year from a year earlier. Those 7.55 million copies include blockbusters like Bob Woodward’s Fear, which went on sale this month and sold 1.1 million copies its first week.

Other big sellers include Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which has sold more than 2 million copies, former FBI Director James Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty, and Unhinged by former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman. (Many more Trump-related titles are in the works.)

About 12 million copies were sold in the five quarters after Trump took office.

That’s almost double the 6.8 million that were bought during the same period after the 2012 election, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks 85 per cent of print and e-book sales.

“People are so consumed with the ■ news cycle,” said Kristen McLean, NPD’s executive director of business development. “All the attention is getting sucked in that direction right now.”

Preorders for Fear were the highest in Simon & Schuster’s history. Political books aren’t the only genre growing in the Trump era. The “self-help” category is up 11 per cent in 2018 from a year earlier, which could reflect the anxiety of a nation following the news cycle, McLean said.

Surprisingly, many people are still reading in print. When Apple Inc. unveiled the iPad in 2010, some observers assumed print would die off. But e-book sales have declined from their peak in 2013 and are down 7.5 per cent through the first quarter, according to NPD.

Number of political books sold in the US this year