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The exact global gross revenue Penguin Random House earned from the Obama book deal has never been publicly disclosed by the publisher. However, industry sales figures indicate the deal grossed hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. [1, 2, 3, 4]
The financial performance of the historic deal is broken down below:The Record-Breaking Advance
- Penguin Random House paid a reported $65 million advance in 2017 for the joint, worldwide rights to two separate memoirs from Barack and Michelle Obama.
- At the time, it was the largest advance for a non-fiction book in publishing history. [5, 6]
Massive Retail Unit Sales
The deal easily justified its high price tag due to historic sales volumes across print, digital, and audiobook formats: [7, 8, 9, 10]
- Michelle Obama's Becoming (2018): Reached 10 million copies sold within its first five months. By 2023, global sales climbed past 17 million copies, making it one of the best-selling memoirs of all time. [3, 4, 11, 12, 13]
- Barack Obama's A Promised Land (2020): Shattered the company's first-day sales records by moving nearly 890,000 units in the U.S. and Canada alone. It went on to sell over 3 million copies in its first month. [8, 14, 15, 16]
Estimated Corporate Gross
While standard hardcovers retail between $30 and $35, publishers generally gross roughly 50% of the cover price after retailer discounts.
- Across more than 20 million combined books sold globally, the gross sales revenue back to Penguin Random House is estimated to sit comfortably between $250 million and $350 million.
- Parent company Bertelsmann explicitly credited the massive success of the Obama memoirs for driving consecutive, market-defying annual revenue spikes for its entire publishing division. [3, 17, 18]