The publisher behind Michael Wolff’s explosive book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is expecting sales figures to reach 1.75 million before the book even goes to paperback, Mother Jones reported Thursday.
The final figure depends on the complete sale of the 1.4 million hardback run printed by the publisher Henry Holt, an imprint of Macmillan. The company is currently preparing the second half of the printing run for bookshops across the country.
“We do expect the 1.4 [million] to be sold,” Patricia Eisemann, the publisher’s director of publicity, told Mother Jones.
Just last week Macmillan’s CEO, John Sargent, told the Associated Press that digital sales were now at over 250,000 and audiobook editions were sitting above 100,000. Factoring in physical copies as projected and digital editions, the opening figure will hit a colossal 1.75 million.
Fire and Fury has only been out for two weeks. At this pace, it will quickly outsell President Donald Trump’s own business bestseller, The Art of the Deal, which he co-wrote in 1987 with author Tony Schwartz. In the 31 years since it was first published, the president’s book has sold a total of 1.67 million units, Mother Jones reported.
The sales boom of Wolff’s White House expose was fuelled largely by controversy and the promise of an insider’s tell-all. Excerpts that ran in the press caused a very public fallout between Trump and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. Trump’s legal team even issued a cease-and-desist letter to the publisher ahead of the book’s release date, which merely served to ramp up curiosity.
“Not only is he helping me sell books,” Wolff said of Trump’s hostility to the book in an interview with NBC, “but he’s helping me prove the point of the book.”
Fire and Fury just needs to hold public interest long enough to keep it on bestseller list despite the constantly moving news cycle. But at this point, it looks like it’s more of a question of when—rather than if—the book will hit those huge sales figures.
H/T Mother Jones
