The Surprising Return of the Blockbuster Trump Book

Literary agents and book editors are in the business of selling stories, so drama comes easily to them. Even temporary sales slumps breed alarmist pronouncements; book parties in disfavored genres begin to feel like wakes, sending off one more spirit to the inevitable afterworld of the remainder shelf. The novel has apparently been declared dead 30 times since 1902. But lately, the focus of industry laments has been nonfiction—from highly topical work to the more historically focused “dad book”—which has declined precipitously after a few years dominated by newsy books about Trump and his presidency (even Omarosa had her moment). The trend, if sometimes exaggerated, is certainly real. As of last month, according to BookScan, sales of titles dealing with politics and current affairs were down 19 percent from a year earlier. Yet even as conventional wisdom solidifies around the idea that no one wants to read about reality anymore, along comes an exception, perhaps a harbinger of a shift in publishing—or at least in Donald Trump’s position in the collective consciousness.Regime Change, a new chronicle of Trump’s second term by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, was published last week and quickly achieved stratospheric sales for a nonfiction book. I’m not really in the habit of quoting press releases, but Simon & Schuster is correct in characterizing a book that sells more than 300,000 copies in a week as a “blockbuster.” Most nonfiction books on the best-seller list can get there after moving fewer than 10,000 copies over seven days. For the publishing folks I spoke with, the numbers that Regime Change is generating are a genuine source of hope, as well as some head-scratching.Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the book in question is nearly 500 pages about Trump. One prevailing industry assumption is that critics of the president are thoroughly wrung out after more than a decade of content about his behavior, his psychology, a