Looks like a lot of people want to read about the president’s psychological back story. “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” by Mary L. Trump has set a first-day sales record for Simon & Schuster, the publisher announced Thursday.
The memoir about life in the Trump family and its effects on the psyche of the current commander in chief sold 950,000 copies through Tuesday, the book’s first day of sales, the publisher said in a release. That includes presale orders of all formats.
“‘Too Much and Never Enough’ has entered the national conversation in a way that few books ever do, becoming a cultural phenomenon and must-read for anyone seeking to understand the singular family dynamic that produced the most powerful man in the world today. It is at once a revealing psychological portrait and a work of historic importance,” Simon & Schuster chief executive Jonathan Karp said in a statement.
Presale and first-day sales numbers are higher now than ever before — and more important to a book’s trajectory, akin to opening-weekend box-office numbers for movies. Online pre-orders have become an essential element of publishers’ sales plans.
Previous big sellers for S&S include Bob Woodward’s September 2018 effort “Fear: Trump in the White House,” which notched 750,000 copies in presales and first-day sales combined. At the time, “Fear” was the biggest pre-seller in the publisher’s history.
Highly anticipated fiction has sold better than headline-making nonfiction in the past, with Dan Brown’s novel “The Lost Symbol” hitting 1 million in first-day sales in 2009.
And Trump simply cannot compete with Voldemort. In 2007, J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in the best-selling “Harry Potter” series, sold 8.3 million copies by the end of its first day on the market.
DawsonBriggs on July 16th, 2020 at 19:19 UTC »
$24.99 at Barnes and noble. $17 on Amazon. At $20 a book that’s almost $20,000,000 in sales on day one. Wow.
Viocansia on July 16th, 2020 at 19:06 UTC »
The book is very interesting from a psychological standpoint, and it provides a lot of firsthand observations about the inter workings of their family. I think it could be perceived as overblown and as mere revenge from critics, but my great-grandfather was similar in some ways to Fred, and after he died, his three children inherited money, and my grandfather lorded it over my father (his only child) and used it to force my dad to comply to many things he didn’t want to. In my childhood the phrase “he could disinherit you” was commonplace. My parents were very careful to make sure we knew what was appropriate and not appropriate in front of my grandfather for fear of retribution. In fact, my grandfather was beloved by many who didn’t know what an actual horror he was at home. He used to say grandiose statements and would blatantly lie and double down on those lies every time. My point is that I think people who have not experienced someone like Fred or Donald first hand might find it hard to believe, but for me, it was chilling.
GeekAesthete on July 16th, 2020 at 18:42 UTC »
That lawsuit, and all the coverage of the verdict, ended up providing S&S with a lot of free publicity. Moving the release date forward was a smart move.