Inside the Political Book Machine

*A name has been changed at the request of the subject.

**Cited book sales data has been compiled by BookScan.

In late June of 2016, the flagship imprint of HarperCollins published a debut memoir by an Ohio-born lawyer named J.D. Vance. As was expected from a memoir without a known name attached, it initially received modest attention from both the media and book buyers. But that all changed three weeks later when Donald Trump was named the Republican nominee for president, leaving many baffled liberals searching for answers between the pages of books. In the final months of Trump’s first presidential campaign, weekly hardcover sales for Hillbilly Elegy shot up over 20,000** amid a sea of headlines crowing, “‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author offers insight on Trump’s appeal,” (AP) and, “New book gives insight into Trump fervor” (CNN). After Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat on November 8th, weekly sales for the book tripled**.

When Harper’s executive editor, Tim Duggan, acquired Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis three years earlier, no one expected it to become one of the most widely talked about nonfiction books of the year, nor to be adapted into an Oscar-nominated film, nor to sell more than two million** copies in combined formats. Back in 2013, “President Donald Trump” was still just a punchline, and Hillbilly Elegy was still just a midlist family memoir. While Duggan told me that Vance’s book proposal was “eye-opening and original,” he couldn’t have foreseen that it would be published at the exact moment when millions of people were desperate to understand white working class voters—the precise group for whom Vance’s book claimed to speak.

“There was shock and awe at how we had published this book that seemed to be exactly right for what people—elites—were looking for,” said Eloise*, who worked in the editorial department at HarperCollins in 2016. “A memoir that could really explain to them what this section of America was going through that they hadn’t thought of before.”

Gaelen Morse/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesJ.D. Vance signs a copy of Hillbilly Elegy at a campaign event in Ohio in 2022.

That Hillbilly Elegy and Vance rode to relevance on Donald Trump’s coattails in 2016 is both amusing—given the Senator’s previously-voiced disdain for his now-running mate—and a textbook example of how election cycles impact the publishing industry. Much of a presidential election’s impact on books comes down to attention: who’s getting it, where they’re finding it, and how they’re landing it. A presidential election is like a black hole the media falls into every four years, swallowing up all the air in the room reserved for talking about anything else. Because publishers can’t rely on surprise bestsellers like Hillbilly Elegy to keep the lights on, they find themselves playing a game of 4-D chess every fourth fall: how can they schedule their busiest season in an attention vacuum? And more confoundingly, what should they publish in the face of an uncertain outcome, and how will it influence the national conversation?

During election season, nonfiction books are undoubtedly impacted the hardest by an otherwise occupied media landscape. Priscilla Painton, vice president and editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, confirmed that she strategically scheduled high-profile 2024 books on her list, like Hillary Clinton’s something lost, something gained (out 9/17), Nancy Pelosi’s The Art of Power (out 8/6), and Bob Woodward’s War (out 10/15), adjacent to the 2024 election, while moving non-political books out of the season altogether. “We’re aware of the amount of television, radio, and podcast time that’s going to be dedicated to issues related to the election,” she said.

John Lamparski//Getty ImagesHillary Clinton signing copies of her book, What Happened, in 2017.

Unless you’re dealing with a nonfiction author with an established and devoted fanbase, like Erik Larson or Malcom Gladwell, you’re “fucked,” said one veteran book publicist I spoke to—which isn’t a place anyone wants to be in an industry that runs on razor-thin profit margins. “I don’t remember the last time I represented a nonfiction book published in an election fall that wasn’t somehow tied to politics,” said Pilar Queen, a publishing agent at United Talent Agency who has worked with political writers like Mary Trump, Brian Stelter, and Molly Jong-Fast. “It’s so hard to get attention and airtime if you’re not talking about obviously some of the most important decisions and moments in our country.”

While the election season has always drawn attention away from certain types of content, its impact has spread like wildfire in recent years. Ever since Trump awkwardly rode down that escalator in 2015, the media has been stuck in a political K-hole that’s left less and less space for authors to promote their books. “I have done book publicity [during] elections since 1996, and I would say things started getting trickier in 2015 after Trump announced he was running,” said Kathleen Schmidt, CEO and founder of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations. “People were glued to politics, and it has gotten progressively worse because technology has evolved. We are now able to access political media 24/7, and it affects people’s attention spans, which, in turn, affects book sales.”

The shrinking media attention for non-political books—made ever-worse by media industry layoffs that leave fewer and fewer full-time books editors to pitch—can be a hard pill to swallow for the authors of the hundreds of thousands of new books published every year. “It’s hard to communicate to an author that their May or June book isn’t getting coverage because of the election; it feels like an excuse, but it’s true,” said Tracy*, an independent book publicist who spent eight years working in the Big Five (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette). “It used to be a problem pretty exclusively contained to fall, and we could forecast for that and plan around that, but now, politics dominates the news basically the entire year of the election.”

“Now, politics dominates the news basically the entire year of the election.”Few books have the potential to draw media attention as aggressively as a buzzy “drop-in title,” also known as a “crash book.” When a publisher “crashes” a book, it moves to release it as quickly as possible after acquisition in order to seize on a moment for sales that may evaporate under the standard publishing timeline—like the three years it took for Hillbilly Elegy to go from acquisition to publication. 2020 drop-ins included the memoir of Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, Disloyal (announced August 13th, published September 8th), and then-New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s American Crisis about his handling of the coronavirus pandemic (announced August 18, published October 13). “The book—and the $5.1 million deal Cuomo got to write it—later became the subject of an ethics investigation and an extensive legal battle. Cuomo was later ordered to forfeit $5,100,000 in earnings from the book’s sale.

Headline-heavy drop-ins are sometimes criticized for prioritizing an author’s financial gain over the swift release of critical information that could impact the results of an election. “Obviously there’s a lot of criticism from the public about why these scoops are held for the book as opposed to being released in the media,” said Brett*, a publicity director within the Big Five. “There are two answers. One is the simple answer, and that is because those scoops pay off very well if they’re tied to a book. And two, often the stories in the books become more relevant when put into a larger context.”

Schmidt, who worked at conservative publisher Skyhorse when they published Cohen’s memoir, said she’s seen a book go from unedited manuscript to the printer within as little as eight weeks. “Usually, an agent or attorney will get in touch with a publisher to let them know that a high-profile politically adjacent person has a book,” she said. “The publisher will then talk to the editorial director and sometimes the publicity director to get their input. They will look at the publishing schedule to see where they can slot it in, and then query the president of sales to get their take on how many copies they think they can ship. If the numbers work, the project will be a crash book, and the media will move things around to accommodate it—if it’s big enough. It’s always a gamble, but one that often pays off.”

Skyhorse’s high-profile “gamble” this election cycle is the former First Lady’s debut memoir, Melania (published October 8), which was announced on July 25, the same day her husband announced a new photo book from a different conservative publisher. Melania’s cover is plain black with white text, while Donald’s is—to no one’s surprise—the photo of him with this fist raised high after catching a bullet to the ear, just 12 days before the book was announced.

Brandon Bell//Getty ImagesCopies of Melania hit shelves in Austin, Texas.

But it’s not just the media gobbling up these books. Press hits are worthless to publishers if they don’t lead to sales—and clearly, the consumer appetite for books that speak to our current political landscape on both sides of the aisle is still represented on the New York Times bestsellers list, where nine of fifteen books on the September 29, 2024 hardcover nonfiction list less than two months before the election are new releases with clear ties to the national political narrative, among them: Confronting the Presidents, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard (#1), Lovely One, by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (#4), and Who Could Ever Love You, by Mary L. Trump (#5). Melania has hovered in Amazon’s Top 20 Books ever since it went on sale.

In a national moment wracked with anxiety and confusion, many people are searching for some combination of practical answers and validated emotions in order to cope. Much the same way that millions of people stay glued to MSNBC or Fox News all day, hearing the same headlines over and over again, there are those who process the lead-up or aftermath of a presidential election by falling face-first into a pile of books.

Queen said she knows they’re selling these books into an echo-chamber, rather than inspiring anyone to change their vote. She remembered, “In 2020, I was standing in a bookstore, and the woman behind me had Bob Woodward’s book, and I want to say Michael Cohen’s book, too. She was holding them, and I said, ‘You know, they’re all saying the same thing, right?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I can’t get enough of it.’ The appetite for these books related to the political season and specifically Trump hasn’t gone away.”

Hillbilly Elegy was a harbinger for how readers would cling to buzzy political books for answers in the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to power, and its ability to meet a moment that did not yet exist is the type of bestseller synergy that publishers dream of. But for most authors whose books are pressed into service to explain the results of an election, the votes need to be counted first. “Because we don’t know the outcome and because we don’t know what the temperature of the country is going to be two years from now when the books come out, it’s really hard to publish into the void,” said Queen, who represents several journalists at UTA. “Last November, we sold a book by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman in an extraordinary deal, and we sold it as the definitive book about the Trump campaign. They’re not even going to start writing it until after the election.”

The Washington Post//Getty ImagesA marker rests atop a copy of Hillbilly Elegy during a rally for J.D. Vance in Radford, Virginia, on July 22, 2024.

For everyone else heading into the election without a book deal, the victor at the ballot box determines which writers get signed in the years ahead. “Books critical of a candidate that loses an election are less interesting than books critical about a candidate that wins,” Brett said. “Thus, a book critical of Trump becomes less appealing if Trump loses.”

Emotion also factors into this. I can’t imagine we’d have seen as many heart-tugging books published by former Obama staffers from 2017-2019 (like Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, by Alyssa Mastromonaco, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, by Pete Souza, and Yes We (Still) Can, by Dan Pfeiffer) if we’d been experiencing Obama-era nostalgia through the lens of a Hillary Clinton presidency rather than a Trump one.

An election cycle also has a way of bringing emerging political voices to the attention of agents and publishers. “There’s no question we go looking for the next generation of political talent after an election,” said Painton. “The long tradition, which we continue, is to make sure we publish voices of people with new ideas and new stories to tell about themselves and their role in politics.”

While readers wait for the next class of political books to be released following an election, they often turn to other genres to cope. Kate Stayman-London, who worked as the lead digital writer for Hillary for America in 2016, published her debut rom-com One To Watch in the summer before the 2020 election, and her second book, Fang Fiction, came out on October 1, five weeks before voters head to the polls this fall. Despite the fact that her novels couldn’t be further from political tell-alls, she’s found a big advantage to publishing amidst a stressful political season. “The common thread I’ve noticed in both 2020 and 2024 is escapism,” she said. “When things are stressful in our country, I look to fiction as a means of escape. The week of the 2020 election, I got a flood of messages from readers telling me that they were reading or rereading One to Watch, and that my book was helping them cope with the stress of waiting for election results.”

It’s not just feel-good novels that see a spike in readership during times of uncertainty. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, and other dystopian novels boomed in popularity after the 2016 election as a clear expression of fear and trepidation about the incoming administration. In 2020, interest in pandemic novels swelled from readers cooped up at home while Trump and Biden made their cases for who would save us from the plague threatening the nation. We have always turned to fiction to process the world we inhabit, and no matter the outcome of this upcoming presidential election, I’m sure there will be a trend that rises up to meet it.

It still remains to be seen who will emerge victorious on November 5th, and as a result, what we can expect to dominate the bestsellers list in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Based on current polling, it’s just as likely that we’ll soon get a conveyor belt of books about the Harris campaign’s winning strategy told by a series of pundits and staffers as it is that we’ll have to endure another four years of tell-alls revealing the horrors of a second Trump administration. Either way, millions of people will be searching for answers to explain the country they find themselves in, and there’s a good chance a few key books will rise up to meet that demand. As Queen noted, most of them will be published into various echo chambers of like-minded readers searching for answers to coalesce around—much like those thoroughly baffled by Trump’s win did around the memoir of his future-running mate in 2016.

A book is just a book—it’s the tunnel vision that gets us in trouble. While we wait for the results, HarperCollins continues to reap the rewards of Hillbilly Elegy. Despite significant backlash to the narratives Vance spun about the people of Appalachia from the people of Appalachia themselves since the book was published in 2016, Harper announced a reprint in July to meet “surging demands” for the physical book, which sold about 538,000** copies in trade paperback (more than half of that format’s 964,000** lifetime to date sales) in the week before and six weeks following the announcement of Vance as Trump’s running mate. Despite the blockbuster sales of Hillbilly Elegy, it was reported in 2022 that the second book in Vance’s contract with HarperCollins fell through, and his original literary agent, Tina Bennett, confirmed that she is no longer representing Vance. HarperCollins did not respond to a request for comment as to why they parted ways.

As someone who worked at Random House (the publisher of Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal) during both the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, I can tell you that watching money roll into your company’s pocket for amplifying the voice of someone actively trying to take away your rights is a tough pill to swallow, but it’s also something publishing folks are used to. “It is pretty remarkable to see the sort of impact that it’s had on our country, given that he is now the vice presidential nominee,” said Christopher*, a HarperCollins employee who worked closely on Hillbilly Elegy in 2015-2016. “I don’t fault any editor for seeing what they think could be a potential hit for whatever reason and then positioning it based on that angle. That’s their job. And I guess, more power to both of them for that success.”

While I strongly disagree with giving new book deals to abhorrent politicians (like Simon & Schuster’s multi-million dollar 2021 deal with former vice president Mike Pence), the responsibility for Vance’s transformation from an unknown lawyer to a vice presidential candidate hardly lies with HarperCollins alone. The problem is the expectation that any one writer could explain a topic so vast and complex as Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton, or the plight of the Appalachian people––that we don’t need to listen to any other voices in the room. We need to widen the conversation to include a variety of voices, and ones more qualified to speak on many of the issues touched on in Hillbilly Elegy.

A book is just a book—it’s the tunnel vision that gets us in trouble. For the sake of both the publishing industry and our country, I’d advise cutting off the search for the next Hillbilly Elegy before it starts.