As of today, A Promised Land was No. 1 on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, said that the superstore chain easily sold more than 50,000 copies its first day and hoped to reach half a million within 10 days.
"So far it has been neck and neck with Michelle Obama's book," he said.
By comparison, Bill Clinton's My Life sold around 400,000 copies in North America its first day and George W. Bush's Decision Points around 220,000, with sales for each memoir currently between 3.5 and 4 million copies.
The fastest selling book in memory remains J.K. Rowling's seventh and final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which came out in 2007 and sold more than 8 million copies within 24 hours.
Obama's 768-page memoir, which came out yesterday and has a list price of US$45, had unusually risky timing for a book of such importance to the author, to readers and to the publishing industry.
It came out just two weeks after election day and could have been overshadowed had the race still been in doubt or perhaps unwanted by distressed Obama fans if President Donald Trump had defeated Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But Biden won and his victory likely renews interest in an era when he was Obama's trusted and popular vice-president.
Obama himself acknowledges that he didn't intend for the book, the first of two planned volumes, to arrive so close to a presidential election or to take nearly four years after he left the White House — months longer than for My Life and two years longer than Decision Points.
In the introduction to A Promised Land, dated August 2020, Obama writes that "the book kept growing in length and scope" as he found he needed more words than expected to capture a given moment — a bind many authors well understand.
He was also working under conditions he "didn't fully anticipate," from the pandemic to the Black Lives Matters protests, to, "most troubling of all," how the country's "democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis."
Because of the pandemic, Obama will not go on the all-star arena tour Michelle Obama had for Becoming.
But he benefits from the attention of any memoir by a former president and by the special attention for Obama, who has the rare stature among politicians of writing his own books and for attracting as much or more attention for how he tells a story than for the story itself.
Obama has already written two acclaimed, million-selling works, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, which came out in 2006.
His new book covers some of the same time period as his previous ones, while continuing his story through the first 2 1/2 ears of his presidency and the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by the Navy Seals.
Publishers Weekly praised the book as "shot through with memorable turns of phrase," while other reviews were more qualified, calling the book all too reflective of Obama's thoughtful, even-handed style.
The New York Times' Jennifer Szalai wrote that the "most audacious thing" about A Promised Land is "the beaming portrait" of Obama on the cover.
The Washington Post's Carlos Lozada noted that in "domestic policy and foreign affairs, in debates over culture and race, Obama splits differences, clings to the middle ground and trusts in process as much as principle."
"It turns out he is not a 'revolutionary soul' but a reformist one, 'conservative in temperament if not in vision.' Behind those dreams, the audacity and all that promise is a stubborn streak of moderation," Lozada wrote.
Obama's book is the highlight of publishing's holiday season and for some independent bookstores, the potential difference between remaining in business or closing.
Publishing sales have been surprisingly stable during the pandemic, but much of the benefit has gone to Amazon.com as readers turned increasingly to online purchases.
The American Booksellers Association, the independent sellers' trade group, has warned that hundreds of stores could go out of business if holiday sales fall short.
- AP
