Before former president Donald Trump tapped Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate, sales of the trade paperback edition of Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, had sold just under 10,000 copies this year through July 13 at outlets that report to Circana BookScan. It was a respectable number for a backlist bestseller first published in hardcover more than eight years ago.
That sales trajectory changed radically after the Republican National Convention, where Trump picked Vance to run for the vice-presidency. According to BookScan’s new figures, sales of Hillbilly Elegy skyrocketed to more than 197,000 copies in the week ended July 20, making it the bestselling book of the week by some 136,000 units. The book has been number one at Amazon for days, is in the top spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list, and even hit the American Booksellers Association’s adult nonfiction trade paperback list.
A representative of HarperCollins, which publishes Hillbilly Elegy under its Harper imprint, told PW that there has been “huge consumer demand for the book” since July 15. The publisher estimates that it has sold more than 650,000 copies in all formats, and as a result, is “printing hundreds of thousands of copies to fill the demand at our retail partners.”
When it was first released, in the thick of the 2016 election, Hillbilly Elegy was considered by many to be required reading for those looking to understand Trump’s peculiar appeal to the nation’s working class voters. That impression only increased following then–Democratic candidate and secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump that November.
Hillbilly Elegy sold more than 414,000 copies at BookScan outlets in 2016, making it one of the top 25 adult bestsellers of the year and catapulting Vance—at the time a prominent public critic of Trump—into the talking head stratosphere. (Following an about-face on Trump, Vance ran for office in 2022 with the former president's endorsement, and began his term in the U.S. Senate last year.) And Vance's book had legs—it was one of the longest-running bestsellers on PW’s adult nonfiction list in 2017, and was the top-selling nonfiction e-book and audiobook in the iBooks store that year. It was adapted for film in 2020.
Meanwhile, the sales impact of President Joe Biden’s July 21 decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, is yet to be directly quantifiable. BookScan numbers for the current week will not be available for another week or so, and Penguin Random House, whose imprints Penguin Press and Philomel Books publish Harris’s books, does not share its sales numbers. In any case, it’s too early to tell just how much competition Harris’s titles will offer.
Still, a representative of Penguin said that the imprint “saw a huge surge in demand for The Truths We Hold when Biden announced he was ending his campaign.” The representative told PW that Penguin “immediately went back to press, for both the hardcover and paperback editions, and though some retailers are currently out of stock, we expect that won’t be the case for long.”
A representative of Philomel said similarly of the children’s books by Harris it publishes, the young readers edition of Truths and the picture book Superheroes Are Everywhere. “Following President Biden’s endorsement of Vice President Harris, we have seen an increase in demand across accounts and consumers,” as well as an increased demand for the Who HQ biography series title Who is Kamala Harris? The imprint has gone back to print on The Truths We Hold young readers edition and Who is Kamala Harris?, the representative said.
