BOOM OR BUST — The Biden administration appears to be a bust for the book business, as even big-name journalists have seen their books on the president fail to make a splash — many failing to sell even 5,000 copies. The president’s no-drama approach isn’t helping. The administration runs a tight ship, and its “no leak” policy, combined with the push for a return to normalcy, hasn’t left many juicy details for a spellbinding read. And Joe Biden himself doesn’t exactly excite traditionally Democratic voting groups — a recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his support within the party continues to erode, especially among Black and Hispanic voters. Biden books aren’t even worth a hate read among conservatives, who think the president is senile anyway, according to a report from POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman. It’s a stark contrast from the Trump era, when books containing stunning revelations about dysfunction and chaos — not to mention Donald Trump’s behavior — flew off the shelves. Here at Nightly, we must confess we’ve also focused our reading attention elsewhere. But we’re still fans of the genre in general, so we spoke with Daniel to find out more about the sluggish book sales, and also what the elements of a Biden blockbuster might look like. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Catherine Kim: Are book industry insiders/publishers surprised by the poor sales of Biden books? Is anyone surprised? Daniel Lippman: The book industry insiders I talked to are not terribly surprised that Joe Biden is not selling them a boatload of books and giving them the profits they need for second houses in the Hamptons. But they are definitely disappointed because they had gotten used to how the Trump administration and all of its wild turns provided great material for books, both pro-Trump and anti-Trump books, because people on both sides of the aisle really wanted to get every last detail about his administration. But for Biden, there’s just much less interest from readers, and people have gone back to reading about history and novels. They’re not as interested in books that don’t have jaw-dropping revelations at every turn. Kim: Is there just a general lack of appetite for political books these days? What do you find most interesting about the situation? Lippman: I thought it was really interesting how there aren’t that many conservative books critical of Biden that are getting huge numbers either. It seems like conservatives are getting their anti-Biden news from X or from conservative media outlets, instead of reading books. Since there haven’t been huge scandals surrounding the Biden administration, that deprives conservative authors and investigative journalists from digging into this stuff. And as one conservative publisher told me, Hunter Biden is not the president. We have seen some books that have touched on Hunter Biden, but we haven’t seen big scandals out of the spending from the infrastructure package and the IRA bill. And so that is bad news for conservative authors. Kim: How has the White House reacted to the seeming lack of interest in the administration? Lippman: The people I talk to around Biden tell me that it’s not their job to provide material for books. That they’re trying to bring back rigor to policymaking and enact their agenda. Of course, they want to shape how the history books view them. And so if Bob Woodward writes a book about Biden, then they’ll probably participate. But there’s a big culture in the White House and the administration of not leaking. And as a White House reporter, I know it is tough to get scoops that peel away what’s actually happening. And so you have to work doubly hard to get those stories. They are possible, but you don’t see the knife-fighting like you did in the Trump administration where so many people got fired and then tipped reporters off or wrote a book. There’s no anonymous senior official in the Biden administration writing a tell-all like we saw it with Trump and Miles Taylor. Kim: What are the elements of a successful presidential book? What really drives the sales? Lippman: Some of the keys to good book sales for a political or Biden book would be someone who is a brand-name journalist — like Franklin Foer, who wrote the newly released “The Last Politician” about Biden and has written a number of successful books before. And do you have the goods? Because people are reading a lot of this stuff in their daily news consumption. So a recitation of facts that they’ve already read does not always provide good juicy material for someone to write a page-turner. You need to have a well-written book, of course. And have truly new details on every page or else you’re just wasting your reader’s time. Kim: What have you been reading these days? What’s the last book about politics you’ve read that you’d recommend? Lippman: The most recent book that I read was Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. It’s about how Native Americans who had gotten rich from oil in Oklahoma got killed one by one back in the 1920s and how J. Edgar Hoover, who was building up the FBI at the time, and his people worked to find the killers. It’s a spellbinding book about a subject that I didn’t know almost anything about. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s guest at ckim@politico.com on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ck_525.
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