Hillbilly Elegy sales surge after JD Vance joins Donald Trump’s presidential campaign
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Then US senate candidate JD Vance signs a copy of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, during a campaign event in Portsmouth, Ohio, in April 2022.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
NEW YORK - Shortly after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced Mr JD Vance as his running mate on July 15, Mr Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, shot up Amazon’s bestseller list.
It has remained there for roughly two weeks – evidence that, even as Mr Vance has stumbled in his debut as a vice-presidential candidate, joining the ticket has delivered a huge boost to his book sales.
The 39-year-old’s memoir has sold more than 750,000 copies in all formats since he was named Trump’s vice-presidential pick, according to his publisher, Harper, a HarperCollins imprint. Harper is printing hundreds of thousands of additional copies to keep up with demand.
In paperback alone, Hillbilly Elegy sold some 200,000 copies in the week ending July 20, and was the No. 1 bestselling print book across all genres, according to Circana Bookscan, which does point-of-sale tracking for the publishing market.
The previous week, Hillbilly Elegy’s print sales totalled 1,500 copies. Sales for the e-book and the audiobook, narrated by Mr Vance, have also surged.
Mr Vance’s memoir was a hit before he entered American politics. Since its release, Hillbilly Elegy has sold some 3 million copies and was adapted into a 2020 movie by American director Ron Howard.
The memoir chronicles Mr Vance’s path from a rough childhood growing up in Middletown, Ohio, to his success as a graduate of Yale Law School and as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
After Trump’s unexpected political rise, Mr Vance’s book was embraced by some pundits and reviewers as a kind of cultural-political Rosetta Stone that helped illuminate why he drew in white working-class voters.
The memoir also attracted its share of critics, including those who said he had misrepresented the lives and culture of the disadvantaged white Americans he claimed to represent.
It even inspired a book-length anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds To Hillbilly Elegy, which aimed to be a corrective of sorts to the stereotypes about the region and people that were pervasive in Mr Vance’s book. NYTIMES
