Sales for even well-reviewed Biden books by respected authors have been anemic: New York magazine correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti’s buzzy book on the Biden-Obama relationship has sold just north of 1,000 hardcover copies since it dropped in September, according to numbers from Bookscan. My colleague Ben Schreckinger’s well-received, deeply reported 2021 book on the Biden family has a Bookscan number just above 4,000 in hardcover. And Associated Press reporters Darlene Superville and Julie Pace’s book on First Lady Jill Biden notched 1,867 in hardcover. (Bookscan numbers, which are considered relatively rough, measure cash-register sales, rather than units shipped by publishers; library, institutional, and bulk sales also don’t get included.)
The numbers...
