Former president Barack Obama’s A Promised Land sold more than 1.7 million copies in North America in its first week — which is roughly the combined first-week sales of memoirs by his two immediate predecessors, and is among the highest ever for a non-fiction. But he told Stephen Colbert last night that he has “already waved the white flag” in the race to try and catch up with sales of his wife’s book.
According to The New York Times, as of November 2020, Michelle Obama’s Becoming has “sold 14 million copies worldwide, including more than 8 million in the U.S. and Canada”.
Obama joked on the Late Show that shops keep packaging his book alongside hers, “so she keeps on selling more”.
