NBC News’ Jonathan Allen and author declares he is going back to writing about the Clintons after his book about President Joe Biden flopped. “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency” never made the Times best-seller list and so far has sold fewer than 10,000 copies since its release in March 2021, according to NPD BookScan, which is considered the gold standard of book sale measurement but does not include every sale, writes Politico.
Allen says he enjoyed a multi-stop national tour when he co-wrote a book on how Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.” Allen wrote the book with fellow journalist Amie Parnes, and sold more than 125,000 copies and landed on the New York Times best-seller list.
However, when it came to the book on Joe Biden, Allen didn’t even get the satisfaction of seeing a copy in stores, Politico notes; he most definitely didn’t get to go on a media book tour. “Biden never does anything interesting,” said Eric Nelson, the publisher of HarperCollins’ conservative imprint Broadside Books. “The Hunter Biden stuff has done pretty well, because he’s appropriately interesting. But Hunter Biden is not the president.”
Allen says he will steer clear of any more Biden books and go back to focusing on the Clintons, saying Biden “has tried to be kind of a drama-free president, certainly in comparison to his predecessor, and that makes it harder to write a book, both in terms of getting information and turning his story into one that is compelling for readers.”
Politico writes:
The few books that have been written about the Bidens have not exactly been flying off the shelves.
New York magazine writer Gabriel Debenedetti’s “The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama” has sold fewer than 1,500 copies, according to NPD BookScan. The Associated Press’ Julie Pace and Darlene Superville’s “Jill: A Biography of the First Lady” has sold fewer than 2,500 and Chris Whipple’s “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House” and POLITICO’s Ben Schreckinger’s “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power” have each racked up fewer than 5,000 books sold.
That’s in contrast to the almost million copies that Michael Wolff’s Trump-focused “Fire and Fury” sold, according to NPD BookScan, and the more than 400,000 copies that Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s “Peril” sold, among many other Trump-focused books on which publishers made a killing.
