HARRY MOUNT on the winners and losers in the selling stakes
In its first week on sale, David Cameron’s memoir, For the Record, did better than some of his critics expected, shifting 21,000 copies.
Still, that’s nothing compared to the 120,000 copies Margaret Thatcher sold of her memoir, The
Downing Street Years, in its first week on the bookshelves in 1993. Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, urney, sold 92,000 copies in the first four days on sale in 2010. He ended up selling 350,000 copies altogether.
Poor old John Major only sold 5,415 copies of his memoir in the first week, but it still reached 200,000 in total. And Cameron will cheer up when he hears that Edward Heath didn’t even n sell 20,000 copies in total of The Course of My Life (1998). Gordon Brown’s My
Life, Our Times (2017) has s only ever shifted 27,846 copies.
All our prime ministers have got some way to go before they catch up with the biggest-selling political book of all time, The Quotations
from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, also known as The Little Red Book, first published in 1964. The book’s exact sales are hard to quantify, Communist China not being very transparent with the Great Helmsman’s commercial success. But estimates are around 800 million copies sold. Chairman Cameron is going to have to work pretty hard to catch up with Chairman Mao.
It helped that, under Mao’s tyrannical rule, every loyal citizen was expected not only to have a copy of his book, but also to carry it around all the time and read it every day. Even the most dictatorial of British prime ministers couldn’t demand that sort of treatment.
Wicked dictators, I’m afraid, tend to do well at the bookshop till. Hitler’s disgusting – and unreadably boring – manifesto, Mein Kampf (1925), sold 240,000 copies by the time he became Chancellor in 1933, making him the equivalent of £4 million. When he became Chancellor, the £1 million tax debt he owed on sales was waived. Sales of Mein Kampf soared to 5.2 million copies in 11 languages by 1939. During the war, every soldier fighting at the front and every newlywed couple got a free copy.
After Hitler’s death, copyright in the book passed to the government of Bavaria, which refused to publish it in Germany until the copyright expired in 2016. The book still does well around the world: around 15,000 copies a year are sold in America.
The finances of political books these days are hard to figure out. Cameron got an advance of £800,000 (he’s giving his advance and any royalties on top to charity, incidentally) and it seems unlikely his sales will work out that advance. The size of his serialisation deal with the Times is unknown but it’s unlikely to have made a very significant dent in that advance.
The days of newspaper megaserialisations have gone, as newspaper circulations have dived. Edwina Currie got a £300,000 advance and a £150,000 Times serialisation deal for her 1987-1992 diaries in 2002 – all thanks to the revelation of her four-year affair with John Major.
Peter Mandelson is rumoured to have got a £150,000 advance, immediately paid for by a £350,000 serialisation deal from the Times for his 2011 book, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour. I recently asked a leading agent how much he thought Theresa May would get for her autobiography. (Even though, at the Henley Literary Festival this autumn, the former PM said she’d rather write an Alpine whodunnit than write a memoir.) He said she’d be lucky to get £50,000. Even Cameron’s advance is dwarfed by earlier political memoirs. Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, got a £4.6 million advance (which he also donated to charity). On the whole, it’s the t outspoken political lieutenants rather than the big leaders who ea earn out their advances. Alastair Campbell Campb is rumoured to have got an £800,000 advance for The Blair Years, the first volume of his diaries, published in 2007. It went on to earn nearly £2 million in sales. The greatest political diarist of the modern era, Alan Clark, got a £150,000 advance for Diaries: In Power 1983-92. It went on to earn nearly £700,000 in sales. Occasionally, publishers do strike gold with political memoirs from the big guns. In 2017, the German publisher Bertelsmann paid a whopping £48 million for the memoirs of both Michelle and Barack Obama. Michelle’s sold more than 10 million copies within five months of publication. Barack is yet to deliver his but he’s got a good chance of selling in double-digit millions, too – Bertelsmann looks like it’ll end up doing well out of the megadeal. Even the Obamas will have to go some way to catch up with the book by the biggest leader of them all – God. The Bible remains the top-selling book of all time, with more than 5 billion copies sold or given away – over an admittedly rather long sales period. Eat your heart out, Jeffrey Archer.
‘It seems unlikely that Cameron’s sales will work out his advance’