The Trump Book Boom

A wave of Donald Trump-focused books is due to crash upon the American public in 2025.

Jonathan Karl, the ABC News chief Washington correspondent, is working on a book about the former president, due out next year, according to people familiar with the matter. Karl has spoken to Trump via phone on multiple occasions in recent months. He's drawn on those conversations, which have occurred during key moments on the campaign trail, for reporting on ABC News, but will also surely reference them in his forthcoming book for Penguin Random House.

Karl joins a number of other prominent journalists who have inked deals to write about the former president, including: The New York Times' Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan; The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf; NBC News' Jonathan Allen and The Hill's Amie Parnes; and POLITICO's Alex Isenstadt. (It’s not clear when some of these books are due out.)

While there will certainly be plenty of supply, it remains to be seen how much demand there will be from the public for additional Trump books. Bob Woodward's "WAR," which hit shelves earlier this week, is sitting atop Amazon and is sure to debut high up on The New York Times Best-Seller list.

But Woodward's book was also timed well, arriving just ahead of the high-stakes 2024 election, allowing him to capitalize on the wall-to-wall coverage blanketing the public discourse. If Kamala Harris were to be elected into the Oval Office, and Woodward’s book were to have been published after the November election, would it have found the same success?

After commanding attention for nearly a decade, there are signs that interest in Trump has waned. Notably, his interviews and speeches no longer generate the television ratings that they once did. And after he lost the 2020 election, much of the public appeared quite ready to move on and push him out of their brains. The same would likely be true if Harris wins next month.

But if Trump were to win at the ballot box, publishers would certainly be in luck. One person in the book world told me Thursday that they believe publishers "are secretly rooting for Trump to reverse some unimpressive P&Ls."

"A Trump presidency, if it happens, is going to be a jolt in the arm for media," the person added. "And that applies as much to a flagging nonfiction publishing market as it does cable ratings."