Political Books Have Been a Financial Boon for Publishers—but for How Much Longer?

Two challenges lie ahead: the Biden years will be less drama-filled than the last administration, and conservative publishers are eager to pick up books turned down by the Big Five

Last year was the biggest year for political book sales since BookScan began tracking the category in 2004, in no small part due to the Trump administration (and the number-one title of the year, Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, which sold more than 2.5 million print copies). But now that Trump is out of office—and controversy surrounds the publication of Trump administration figures (see our April item)—will the industry now see a downturn?

The US Book Show offered a panel in late May to discuss the future of the category. It was moderated by Jimmy So, an editor at Columbia Global Reports at Columbia University, and included Eamon Dolan, Simon & Schuster vice president and executive editor; literary agent Tanya McKinnon; Eric Nelson, vice president and editorial director at Broadside Books (a conservative imprint at HarperCollins); and literary agent Keith Urbahn. The conversation was collegial and calm, even though the category is known for dramatic revelations and bombast.

Political books have been selling partly because of compelling narratives—and there are more to come. “Trump and his circle and his followers, whatever else you can say about them, they’re great copy,” Dolan said, later calling them “rollercoaster” narratives. “Part of the interest is simply in the story of it, the fact that these are great yarns. Some of the best yarns have yet to come out,” he said, referring to the last months of the Trump administration. “Those will draw interest from readers as well as the media.” Dolan later said he expects a lot of revisionist history coming. “I think we might even call this the age of revisionism. … I want it myself as an editor and reader.”

But aside from drama, readers also seek a greater understanding of a decisive and upsetting moment in history. “People are deeply concerned about the kind of country we’re living in,” McKinnon said. “People have turned to books that try to understand what we’re living through, whether they’re on the left or the right” and to make sense of their own experience. “The question is both about Trump but also much larger than he is. I don’t like to give him all the credit,” she said.

Nelson at HarperCollins believes that the superlative sales are gone for now. “Some of the books that really went into the stratosphere for Keith [Urbahn] and for me and for some other editors were really around whether or not Trump was going to stay in office.” Now that Biden is in office, things have quieted down. “It’s cut the top layer off the political books for four years,” Nelson said.

Urbahn pointed out that book publishers aren’t the only ones coming down off the “sugar high” of the Trump years. If you look at cable news ratings, newspaper subscriptions—all through the roof from 2016 through 2020—everyone’s experiencing a come-down. “Publishing doesn’t work on the same immediate time cycle, so it’s going to take a little while to see whether there is still that interest there,” he said. However, given the very heads-down, low-drama Biden administration, the media is looking for things to cover, and there’s nothing they love more, Urbahn said, than to cover what Donald Trump is doing in Mar-a-Lago and who he’s meeting with, as well as “the more radical fringe, Trumpy members of Congress who are doing stupid things.”

How the media behaves is critical for political books because they tend to sell based on earned media. Earned media is attention or coverage that authors secure, e.g., cable news, radio and podcasts, newspaper and magazine interviews or excerpts, etc. Urbahn expects that the first Trump memoirs to come out—the ones that try to decipher what the last couple of years have meant—will do well. “If you have a media that is hungry for Donald Trump even though he’s several years out of office, they’re going to come to [the book]. You don’t need to blow off the doors with revelations, you just need tidbits here and there.”

Big publishers continue to grapple with who in the Trump administration deserves a book contract—and what standards they’re held to. Urbahn thinks this question became much harder after January 6. “There are a lot of people in the administration—some fairly, some unfairly—got tarnished with being associated with the Big Lie. I know that’s affected book contracts, advance levels, whether or not editors will take meetings,” he said.

Moreover, the Big Five publishers will no longer accept an author who just tells their part of the story. “For those who were in the administration,” Urbahn said, “they’re being pressed like they weren’t before—confronting the culture of deceit, conspiracy theories, all these things. Editors want more if they are going to publish these figures.” Urbahn concluded, “At the end of the day, as long as there’s an honesty and a willingness to grapple with the legacy as a whole, then … most of these books ought to be published. Whether they sell or not, that’s for an audience to determine. This is all new ground, and we’re just several months into it, and we’re going to learn a lot more over the next year.” Dolan at Simon & Schuster agreed with this and said editors see themselves as “interrogators,” asking harder questions of political book authors.

Nelson said that it can be counterproductive for publishers to cancel contracts or pull political titles: the books end up selling more as a result. Nelson pointed to the example of Senator Josh Hawley’s book on big tech, which was canceled by Simon & Schuster after the events of Jan. 6, then picked up by conservative publisher Regnery. So far, it’s sold about 25,000 copies (and still selling), according to BookScan. Nelson said he considers that a “ridiculous number of copies for a pretty boring book,” but it ended up being a hot item for conservatives. He thinks the better option would’ve been to just “ignore the book.”

Urbahn says conservatives see the future of publishing as being one that is hostile to them and people who identify as Trump supporters. These days he gets pitched every other week by a new entity that claims to be the new home for conservative books. “Where is this inflection point going? Is Trump going to run in 2024? Are we going to have a democracy that seems more in peril than it did a decade ago? If so, then maybe these small MAGA, pro-MAGA imprints will work.” He said this is an ongoing debate in conservative circles: whether there will ultimately be an entire conservative ecosystem (a conservative Amazon, a conservative internet, a conservative distribution network) to get these books out. “I tend to think that’s not realistic, that’s not going to happen. But there will be successful books by some of the smaller publishers who do have a bigger appetite for risk and the political PR blowback that a Random House or Simon & Schuster might not. … Some of them will succeed. I don’t know that that’s a long-term solution or something we’ll see viable 10 years from now. But it’s happening, and it’s happening at a pace I haven’t seen in over a decade in the business.”

Nelson emphasized that small conservative publishers have the ability to sell as many copies as the Big Five. While Regnery has lots of books that sell in small numbers, they also manage to get books that the big houses won’t take and that sell very well. He says Penguin Random House has cut “way back” on politically conservative titles and that Hachette as well may be drawing down. Macmillan was never much into the category to begin with. While this creates less competition for him at HarperCollins, Nelson finds it “distressing for democracy” that these conservative houses earn a bunch of money from these books—and then funnel that into publishing content that can be highly problematic (an example he gave: a book that argues vaccines cause more deaths than COVID). Additionally, he pointed out that books by the most controversial figures, when they’re published by mainstream publishers, don’t tend to become lightning rods and called fake news. “It’s much harder to write a whole book of craziness and get it past a mainstream publisher.”

What editors and agents are looking for right now, more generally: Nelson expressed interest in books that have a long shelf life based on a lot of original research. “The hardest thing to find in politics is a book where somebody has gotten really wonky and found something new to say as opposed to, ‘I’ve followed this very closely and I can explain it better.’ That works well if you have your own primetime TV show. It can be really tough to write and publish a book to explain what everybody’s already seeing.” Urbahn is being asked for more proposals about China—to understand what this rivalry is going to look like, what the future of the world is going to look like. “Whatever your views on Trump and our domestic politics, the reality of China being a major player in today’s day and age is one that I think almost every editor I talk to is interested in hearing something new and original [about].”

Bottom line: While political book sales are certainly destined to decline in 2021 (especially without a new Obama memoir releasing), political books, including social justice titles, will remain a critical and important category. “We’re in this strange moment where we don’t know where the future is going. People want to grapple with this unprocessed history of the country,” McKinnon said. “People want political books because political books begin to help them understand how those forces are both impacting and shaping their everyday lives and how it is that we’re going to move forward in response to some of these forces that feel quite frankly nefarious to many of us.” Urbahn said, “Political books are going to be the primary lens through which we understand recent history. Because it moved too quickly.”