NEW YORK (AP) — Midterm election news will fill the headlines this fall, but, among book buyers, fiction will likely have top billing.Former President Joe Biden’s “Promise Me, America” stands out not just as a White House memoir — presidential memoirs are events unto themselves — but as a rare high-profile political book over the next few months. Nonfiction sales have slumped in recent years and political books haven’t approached the peaks of President Donald Trump’s first term.“The energy in political books seems to be subdued. I think folks are just ranted out,” says Kristen McLean, an analyst and vice president for client insights at Circana, which tracks retail book sales.“I think the (news) cycle is moving a bit too quickly for a lot of the very specific political books to catch on,” says Shannon DeVito, Barnes & Noble’s senior director of books.
Michael Lewis’ “Blockers,” a probe into Trump’s second term through the eyes of government workers, may be the only new release to rival the impact of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s summer bestseller, “Regime Change.” This fall’s notable political offerings otherwise revisit the Biden years, from “Promise Me, America,” to former Middle East envoy Brett McGurk’s “Brink: Inside the Race to Free the Oct. 7 Hostages” to Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s study of Biden’s Gaza war policies, “Crossing the Red Line.”Even Bob Woodward, who for decades released timely exposés of sitting presidents, is passing on current politics. In “Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir,” he reflects on presidents and White House sources dating back to the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal that made him famous..“Because he’s going more into his own life, I expect he’ll have a different and broader audience than for his other books,” DeVito says.
