The Obamas are estimated to have a net worth of more than $240 million. Serving the people pays well. Upon their leaving office, Penguin Random House’s Crown Publishing Group awarded the Obamas a joint $65 million advance for their respective memoirs.
I'd like for you to tap into your common sense and logic for a moment. Authors generally get up to 20% in royalties for their books. This means that Random House made it appear that they were expecting over $300 million in book sales to offer the Obamas the $65MM that they did. Was this a smart move by Random House? Let's take a look.
Getting an accurate account of book sales can be a bit difficult because the industry isn't that big into transparency. But, from what I'm able to gather, the Obama's did well when compared to a lot of other books in this genre, but the roughly 5 million book sales between Barak and Michelle's books, would've generated about $42 million in revenues considering how much discounting goes on with book prices. My calculations shows that Random House would've lost $23 million on the deal.
I find the above strange and I must wonder if the money given the Obama's had to do with more than publishing books. The CEO is a fan of the Democratic Party, and the publishing company has been engaged in liberal politics for decades.
Keep in mind, even when Senator Obama wasn't well known, his book reached The New York Time's Best Sellers List. Just who exactly would've been reading his memoir when he didn't really have one? He hadn't done anything worth reading about at this point in his life. The publisher was asked about the purchases, and they wouldn't release any information. Why?
Maybe because they didn't want anyone to know about how much of the sales came from block purchases from corporations and organizations instead of individual readers. They propped up his book to help prop up his candidacy. Pretty much everyone in their world knew what was being done, it's been an accepted practice for working around campaign laws to reward politicians for what they've already done or what they intend to do. As usual, it's a case of them believing the end justifies the means.