Books on Politics, Trump Get Election Sales Bump

The surprising election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency was followed by a sales bump for books bearing his name and books about America’s politics and class relations in general.

Amazon’s Movers and Shakers page, which tracks the site’s biggest gainers in sales rank over the previous 24 hours and is updated hourly, saw books including Nancy Gibbs’s The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity, George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Kelly S. DiPucchio’s Grace for President, and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right make significant gains in orders the day after the election, November 9. Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution and Donald Trump’s Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America saw bumps of 243% and 198%, respectively (in Sanders’s case, the increase was in preorders—the book was released November 15).

The burst in sales for Grace for President began before the election, according to Disney Book Group director, editor-in-chief, and associate publisher Emily Meehan, resulting in the title going out of stock in some accounts, and sales for the week ended November 13 fell 48% compared to the previous week, according to Nielsen BookScan. A 10,000-copy reprint is on its way from China.

Trump’s Great Again paperback was also out of stock on Amazon as of November 17—although its hardcover version, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, was still available.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux v-p and director of publicity Sarita Varma said the publisher saw “a significant pop in sales” for Packer’s The Unwinding, adding that a number of major accounts have reordered the book, leading FSG to go “back to press for another 10,000 copies.”

At Melville House, David Cay Johnston’s The Making of Donald Trump also saw sales tick up on November 9—especially, Melville House founder Dennis Johnson said, in international channels: “We sold almost as many books into libraries and international channels as we did domestically.”

Scribner has also seen a sales bump for Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power by Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish, the publisher said, as well as increased foreign-rights interest.

Post-Election Sales for Select Books on Donald Trump Or Politics

*Great Again is the paperback edition of Crippled America. Source: Nielsen BookScan

CORRECTION: This article previously used a mistaken title for FSG's Sarita Varma​.