Barack and Michelle Obama sign book deal with Penguin Random House

Penguin Random House signs a bumper book deal with Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly for an insane amount.

Barack Obama and Michelle Obama are selling two books as part of a package deal — and the bidding has reached $US60 million ($A78m).

New York based publisher Penguin Random House has won the industry’s most coveted contract: a two-for-one deal to produce the memoirs of former president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.

“The company has acquired world publication rights for two books, to be written by President and Mrs Obama respectively,” the publisher said in a statement. Financial terms were not disclosed

However, bidding for the high-profile double book deal topped $US60 million ($A78m), a record sum for US presidential memoirs, according to The Financial Times, which is an insane amount of money.

That’s the equivalent of roughly 17 Lena Dunham book deals, six Amy Schumer book deals, or four Bill Clinton book deals.

Clinton got $US15 million ($A2m) for My Life, perhaps the dullest book ever written; George W. Bush got $US10 million ($A13m) for the almost as boring Decision Points. The point is that books by former presidents sell copies, even though they’re rarely very good.

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Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs are the gold standard, and they’re only good because he was dying and broke and needed to make sure his family had money after he died, which he did shortly after he finished writing.

But Obama’s track record as a writer — his previous books were both bestsellers — suggests that his book could get a boost from actually being good. Similarly, people are nostalgic for Obama’s presidency already and his book will tap into that energy as long as it comes out in the next three and a half years.

Barack and Michelle Obama.

The Financial Times notes Obama’s book earnings: “Mr Obama earned $US8.8 million from The Audacity of Hope, a 2006 bestseller, and the children’s book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, according to a report by Forbes. Sales of his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, published in paperback in 2004, brought in a further $US6.8 million in royalties, according to Forbes.”

Though the FT seems to be suggesting this is an indication that the Obamas are being overpaid, his hefty royalties in fact suggest his sales record is strong enough to maybe kind of sort of justify paying $US60 million.

Still, sixty million dollars sounds like a lot! But it’s for two books and it includes world rights — so you can figure that one book is going for $US15 million for North American rights. If the books are sold for $US30 each at a standard 50 per cent discount, the two books would have to sell four million copies worldwide to hit $60 million in revenue. (Obviously there are production and other costs, so the number is probably slightly — but not significantly — higher.) That’s a lot of copies, but it’s not an outlandish number of copies.

The money is not the most important thing about this deal. The most important thing is that it is definitely exponentially more money than Donald Trump got for Crippled America, or any of his other books. And that means that this deal will make Donald Trump extremely mad.

The New Republic