Simon & Schuster's dominance over the Donald Trump exposé category is likely to be reaffirmed this September 15, when the publisher will release the latest title by Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, of Watergate coverage fame.
Rage, Woodward's 20th book, presents "an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of original reporting on the Trump presidency," S&S said in a release. It added that the book, Woodward's follow-up to his bestselling 2018 book Fear, "goes behind the scenes like never before, with stunning new details about early national security decisions and operations and Trump’s moves as he faces a global pandemic, economic disaster, and racial unrest." No print run for Rage has been announced.
The book is centered on a series of more than a dozen exclusive interviews with President Donald Trump that took place from December 2019 to late July 2020. It also "draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses, as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars, and confidential documents," including 25 personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that have yet to been made public, S&S said.
Fear has sold more than a million print copies, according to NPD BookScan, and around 2 million across all formats to date according to Simon & Schuster. In 2018, S&S announced that Fear had the largest first week of sales of any book in S&S history, selling a total of more than 1.1 million copies across all formats. This year, the publisher reported that Mary L. Trump's Too Much And Never Enough had broken that record, selling a total of more than 1.35 million copies across all formats, including pre-orders, sales of print books, e-books, and digital audiobooks, in its first week on sale.
This article has been updated with further information.
