James Comey's Book Sold 600,000 Copies In A Week, But Isn't The Next 'Fire And Fury' (Yet) - Forbes

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APR 25, 2018 @ 11:50 AM 882 The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets
James Comey's Book Sold 600,000 Copies In A Week, But Isn't The Next 'Fire And Fury' (Yet)

Adam Rowe , CONTRIBUTOR
I write about the future of books and the business of storytelling. 
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Former FBI director James Comey poses with his book "A Higher Loyalty" (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, File)

Former FBI Director James Comey's book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, sold more than 600,000 copies in its first week of sales, according to its publisher. That's 400,000 copies more than Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury sold in its first week, but that doesn't mean Comey's book will become the next Trump-critical blockbuster: Fire and Fury has been on the New York Times bestseller lists for 15 weeks and has sold more than 2 million copies to date.

Comey's nonfiction book — published through Macmillan’s Flatiron Books in a reported $2 million deal — pre-sold nearly 200,000 copies before its release and consistently topped Amazon's hourly-updated bestseller list following its April 17 release in the U.S. and U.K., as well as topping lists from Nielsen BookScan and iBooks on its first week.

The Times' hardcover nonfiction list has seen an explicitly Trump-related book at the No. 1 position every week since the middle of January 2018, and the not-exactly-stable publishing industry isn't missing the opportunity to capitalize on the political climate. Random House inked a deal last week for #NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line, written by two survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Fl., David and Lauren Hogg, to be published June 5. Where does James Comey's book fall in the ranking of Trump-centric bestsellers?


Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury hit an early snag that definitely won't trip up Comey: Macmillan's initial print run consisted of 150,000 copies, a number far below demand as evidenced by the more than 2 million units that have been sold to date across all formats. This wasn't an oversight as much as an example of how difficult print sales can be to predict. Nevertheless, Macmillan took away its lesson — Trump exposés sell like hotcakes in 2018 — and have given A Higher Loyalty a 850,000-copy run, the largest Macmillan has printed so far this year. Given A Higher Loyalty pre-sales, it appears printing 850,000 copies was a smart move.

A few warning signs hint that Comey's book may simply be a success rather than a blockbuster. On Sunday April 15, George Stephanopoulos's much-touted ABC News interview with Comey averaged 9.8 million viewers: A strong showing, but lower than CBS's Academy of Country Music Awards' average of 12.1 million viewers that same evening, and well below Stormy Daniels' appearance on 60 Minutes, which drew an average of more than 22 million viewers. One attendant to a DC bookstore's midnight release event for A Higher Loyalty noted the smaller turnout, calling it a "different experience" in relation to the same store's release of Fire and Fury.

But the most meaningful metric that could prove whether Comey can compete with Wolff is how long A Higher Loyalty can stay on the bestseller lists, not whether it makes it there at all. Time magazine recently crunched the numbers, ranking The Times' nonfiction list of bestsellers since November 2016, and picking out every book "explicitly about Trump." They found that, since mid-January, every top best-seller has been about Trump: Fire and Fury topped the list in January and Michael Isikoff and David Corn's Russian Roulette beat it in March before losing its spot to Jennifer Palmieri's Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World.

So, is Comey's book objectively as popular as Wolff's take on the Trump administration? Not yet. Only the coming weeks will confirm whether A Higher Loyalty has the staying power to qualify as successor to Wolff's Fire and Fury, which has now passed its 15th week on The Times' hardcover nonfiction list.

One thing's for sure: Comey seems happy to feed the narrative that he's the underdog in the publishing industry's 2018-era Trump bump. "I don't crave to be known," he said during a Thursday interview for The New Yorker Radio Hour, adding that he'd be more comfortable "not doing something like this."