John Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened” is the best-selling Trump tell-all in two years, according to week one sales figures.
Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, said Wednesday that it has sold more than 780,000 copies so far.
The total included print copies, ebooks, audiobooks plus “orders from consumers that are as yet unfulfilled due to extraordinary demand,” the publisher said.
Most authors are lucky to sell tens of thousands of copies. Selling hundreds of thousands of copies in one week is exceedingly rare.
Bolton’s success is a testament to his bombshells about life in the Trump White House; an aggressive marketing campaign with interviews on all the major networks; and an anti-Bolton campaign led by the president.
Trump’s Justice Department filed suit against Bolton before the book’s June 23 launch, which stoked even more interest in “The Room Where It Happened.”
A judge rejected the DOJ’s attempt to block the book’s release but indicated that the government may prevail in a longer-term attempt to claw back the money Bolton received for writing the book.
Simon & Schuster reportedly paid about $2 million for the rights to the book. The week one sales figures certainly justify the big paycheck.
“The Room Where It Happened” sold more copies in its first week than James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty,” according to sales totals.
There are multiple ways to crunch the numbers, so exact comparisons are difficult, but Bolton’s book is in the same sales league as Bob Woodward’s “Fear” and Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury.”
Like those books, Bolton’s memoir will debut at No. 1 on the best seller lists compiled by newspapers like The New York Times and USA Today.
Jonathan Karp, the publishing house’s CEO, said the company also expects the book to be “the top of the bestseller lists in The United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.”
Simon & Schuster, seeking to further capitalize on the interest, announced Wednesday that it has “ordered an 11th printing of the book that when complete will bring the number of hardcover copies in print to a million.”
“The Room Where It Happened” is currently No. 4 on Amazon’s dynamic list of best selling books. The No. 1 title is another Trump tell-all that hasn’t come out yet: Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
Mary Trump’s book is set to be published by Simon & Schuster on July 28. A judge has temporarily blocked its release.
