'Just actually tired of this': 'Exhausted' readers no longer buying books about Trump
New book titles about President Donald Trump are no longer resonating as they once did, signaling a major slowdown in the political nonfiction boom, Politico reported Tuesday.
Despite the nation's early appetite for Trump tell-alls, sales have significantly dipped. The report quoted insiders as saying that publishing houses are seeing “a slump … across all of nonfiction,” with enthusiasm waning in the president's second term.
Industry figures described a landscape where big advances are drying up and success now hinges on established names or partisan angles.
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The report noted: "Trump’s first term saw books authored by prominent journalists sell hundreds of thousands of copies each as the public rushed to learn the inside details of Trump’s norm-shattering presidency."
"But similar books aren’t exactly flying off the shelves in his second term, and the bar to getting onto the coveted New York Times bestseller list has been lowered as the overall nonfiction book market has dipped," it added.
An "industry watcher" told Politico: "There’s definitely a slump, and it’s across all of nonfiction. Part of it is that we were just actually tired of this, and we’re exhausted, and we don’t want to spend 30 bucks and six or eight hours of our time feeling worse.”
The report further highlighted that the book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf sold around 6,000 hardcover copies in its first week. According to last Wednesday’s NPD BookScan figures, the book debuted at No. 4 on the Times bestseller list, underscoring how the threshold for nonfiction success has dropped.
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By comparison, a No. 4 bestseller from July 2017, then-Sen. Al Franken’s (D-Min.) memoir, moved nearly 11,000 copies in the same time period, even weeks after release, per the report.
Michael Wolff, best known for Fire and Fury, saw his 2018 book sell 25,000 copies in its debut week and eventually top 900,000 in total sales.
But the report reveals that his latest release, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, launched in March, sold only about 3,000 print copies in its first week and has reached approximately 11,000 overall so far.
These middling results are prompting publishers to rethink investments in Trump‑themed projects.
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One agent told Politico: “Editors are not spending anywhere near the amount of money that they did this time eight years ago. The days of just writing a book to write a book and checking the box for someone’s career — those days are over.”
