Melania Trump’s No. 1 Bestseller Is Not Flying Off Bookstore Shelves. Is It Because of the Sticky Goo?

At a rally in September, Donald Trump took a break from talking about Arnold Palmer’s penis and telling various racial and religious groups to get their heads “examined” to plug his wife’s forthcoming memoir. “Go out and get her book,” he said. “She just wrote a book. I hope she said good things about…I don’t know, I didn’t…so busy.” With that ringing endorsement, Melania Trump’s book debuted last week at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. (The former president did acknowledge this, saying, “That’s not an easy thing to do, especially when your name is Trump.”)

The methodology behind the New York Times best-seller list is notoriously secretive, but according to Circana BookScan, Melania closed out its first-week sales with 85,349 hardcover copies. So what do the numbers mean? Fellow former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2018 memoir, Becoming, debuted at number one, selling 636,696 copies.

Melania, who describes The New York Times as a member of the “cancel mob” in her memoir, promptly posted a graphic on X announcing the book’s status, complete with the paper’s signature font. She joins a lineage of conservative personalities who love to trash the paper but are unable to contain their excitement over making the list. When Donald Trump Jr.’s book took the top spot in 2019, he tweeted an Axios report about it. Political commentator Dave Rubin, who published an interview on YouTube titled “Debunking the Great Book-Banning Lie,” supporting the thesis that allowing parents to ban books is good, actually, celebrated his spot on the charts by posting a video in which he burns his own book.

What sets Melania apart is that the New York Times didn’t mark it with the conspicuous bulk-buy symbol known as the dagger that so often marks Trumpworld books. According to the Times, Trump Jr.’s book found its way to the top with the aid of the Republican National Committee’s nearly $100,000 bulk purchase of copies it offered as a campaign-donation perk. (Recent books that have appeared on the list with the help of bulk buys include Trey Yingst’s Black Saturday and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truths.) The Trump campaign doesn’t appear to be hawking Melania via donation emails, either, which is a departure from the norm. According to a search in the Archive of Political Emails, when Jared Kushner published his memoir in 2022, he and Ivanka Trump sent more than 80 messages combined through Trump campaign emails, soliciting donations in exchange for copies (sample subject lines: “I wrote a book,” “I signed my book,” “My husband signed his new book,” and “I want you to have it”). Melania Trump advertised her book with just three preorder emails, in July, August, and one on September 11.

Now that it’s out, who, exactly, is reading Melania? Not necessarily the people included in her five promotional blurbs on Amazon, which hardly engage with the former first lady’s text—in fact, none of them have anything to do with the text. In keeping with much of the book’s content, they instead pull from old press remarks and speeches. (Incidentally, Melania includes an anecdote about that copycat RNC speech, writing that while Michelle Obama’s words “resonated deeply” with her, the plagiarism wasn’t her fault.) Kellyanne Conway’s quote, pulled from this year’s RNC speech, calls her “extraordinary, elegant, beautiful, brilliant.” Nikki Haley’s depicts her as “an intelligent, beautiful, patriotic treasure”; Brigitte Macron says she is “charming, intelligent, and very open”; and Dana Perino promises that “she lights up the room.” Donald Trump’s leads the pack, and begins, “Melania is my rock.”

While LitHub’s review aggregator, BookMarks, lists seven reviews for Melania (mine for VF’s among them) and six other pans, the book is faring better with buyers than critics. On Goodreads, its nearly 800 ratings are hovering at an average of 4.01, and on Amazon, the 1,200-and-counting ratings have hit a 4.5 average. As is often the case with a memoir, fans of the book are fans, first, of the writer: Readers like that she is beautiful, that she loves her son, that it has photographs “of her life,” and that she refers to Donald Trump as “my husband.”

At least 24 Amazon customers do not like that the book arrived with what verified buyer Lady Luck describes as “sticky goo all over it.” Wendy agrees, writing that “it arrived nasty.” Writes Marian P., “It was not finger print smudges. I really don’t know what it is.” Nancy P., who was disappointed by the “greasy smears on the dust cover,” seems to suggest a conspiracy. “The same thing had happened to the Rush Limbaugh book I had purchased from Amazon,” she muses. “Coincidence?” Perhaps not: Both dust jackets have matte black covers. When reached for comment about this feedback, Amazon directed those with product concerns to its customer service department. (Melania’s minimalist book design—sans serif white lettering on a black background—bears a striking resemblance to Chanel, from the Yale University Press Catwalk series. Judging from buyer reviews, that book appears unaffected by the cover-goop epidemic. If Chanel: Catwalk “resonated deeply” with Trump or the book’s designer, we’ll never know: Melania’s representatives at Skyhorse, her publisher, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

If readers have also been flocking to their local independent bookstores for copies, this reporter has not been able to track down the phenomenon. The communications manager at Ann Patchett’s Parnassus Books in Nashville wrote that the store has one copy on shelves and has sold two copies total, one of which was a preorder. “That’s not in keeping with other bestsellers,” she wrote. “The market has been saturated with Trump-era nonfiction titles, and most don’t sell very well at our store.” Mitchell Kaplan, who opened the first of his now five Books & Books locations in Florida in 1982, says they sold four. Elsewhere in the state, at Lauren Groff’s The Lynx in Gainesville, operations manager Jackie Davison says that the store didn’t order any copies, and they haven’t received any requests for it: The store sells more literary fiction and environmental nonfiction than political memoirs. “Gainesville is very much a blue bubble in Florida,” she says. “And so even when people are buying political things, they’re more likely to be left-leaning. Similarly, we have a copy of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and it hasn’t sold in several months.”

A bookseller at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston says the store has one copy on shelves but hasn’t sold any yet. A representative at Joseph-Beth in Lexington, Kentucky, says the store has sold 11 copies. The owner of one large bookstore in the Deep South ordered 12 copies, of which they sold seven the first week and one since; they haven’t reordered because they expect a short shelf life. A store in Alabama had one copy on shelves, sold it, and hasn’t ordered more.

Shannon DeVito, senior director of books at Barnes & Noble, says that across the chain’s more than 640 stores, “It’s sold in every store. We’re selling a few thousand per week, so it’s sizable. Some stores have sold over 50 to 60 copies and some stores have sold between one and five.” On the higher end of that spectrum: “[In] Florida, obviously, it’s selling particularly well,” DeVito says, as well as in parts of New York and the Midwest. Those numbers, she says, are “relatively in line” with other bestsellers. “I think a lot of people are coming at this book as more of a coffee table design book rather than a deep dive. So I’ve noticed a lot of memoirs that have seen success in the last few years are the ones where you really get that intimate engagement, a peek behind the curtain in a way that hasn’t happened before.” She says those, like Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died or Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, “are the ones with staying power. This feels much more like a gift book, almost, for yourself, depending on where you lean.” While sales have been steady thus far, “I don’t know if it’ll have the legs of other books that we’ve seen in the space.” (No sign of mysterious goo at Barnes & Noble. “Booksellers are good about merchandising,” she says. “I think that was probably just an Amazon shipping issue.”)

Trump is also selling her book directly to consumers via her website, melaniatrump.com, including $250 signed collectible copies with additional “personal” photographs (of airplanes and the like). The website doesn’t publicize sales figures for this edition, nor for the $90 USA-themed Christmas tree ornament Melania advertised in an email campaign (subject line: “Merry Christmas, AMERICA!,” sent on September 24), nor for the $245 engraved gold pendant that she designed “to honor all mothers,” for reasons best known to herself, in the shape of a three-leaf clover.

In her memoir, Trump writes of her “pride in our proactive adoption of blockchain technologies” which has “positioned us as pioneers in this space.” Several pages in her memoir serve as full-page ads for her “digital collectible” business, directing readers to her website. The Women’s History Month collection comprises three watercolor-esque portraits of Trump in a limited run of 2,600. “Collectors will enjoy an element of surprise because the artwork will be revealed after the purchase,” reads the website copy. “Collectors can make multiple purchases to try to collect all three works of art.” Thanks to the transparency of blockchain, we do have sales information for these. Since August 2023, she has sold 10.