It’s official! Melania’s memoir is a bookstore bomb

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This just in: Melania Trump’s new memoir, appropriately titled Melania, is on track to being the dud pretty much everyone expected it to be.

The sales figures have begun trickling in and, according to Circana Book Scan, the ex-FLOTUS’s book, which dropped October 8, sold a total of 85,000 copies during its first week.

For comparison purposes, Becoming, the first book Michelle Obama published after leaving the White House, sold 1.4 million copies during its first week, approximately 1,315,000 more than Melania.

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Since its 2018 publication, Becoming has sold over 17 million copies and inspired a Netflix documentary, as well as a followup book by Mrs. Obama called The Light We Carry, which also spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Melania’s book seems to be faring slightly better than the average book written by a former Trump White House official, but not by much.

Again, for comparison purposes, former attorney general Bill Barr’s book sold 64,103 copies; former counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway sold 42,273 books; former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham sold 38,249 books; and former defense secretary Mark Esper sold 20,900 books.

But after debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, Melania was quickly knocked from the top spot by Bob Woodward’s War and then Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown.

And unlike most bestsellers, there is no audio version of Melania available, for reasons unknown.

However, for the last month or so, the ex-FLOTUS has been posting 60-second snippets of herself to social media reading passages from the book, in between posts promoting her latest line of Christmas ornaments and $600 gold freedom necklaces.

Recently, Mrs. Trump began plugging the collector’s edition of Melania, which sells for $250 on her website and includes bonus photos taken by the ex-FLOTUS herself, like this one she snapped on her phone from the window of Air Force One en route to China.

Reviews for Melania have been mostly negative, with nearly all critics saying the same thing: that, despite promising to offer “an intimate portrait of a woman who has lived an extraordinary life,” the book reveals almost nothing about the 54-year-old and, in fact, makes her come across as superficial and unknowable as she has always appeared to be.

Per the New York Times:

If there’s a plain truth in Melania, it’s that she loves her son, Barron, and will protect him at all costs; and sincerely cares for imperiled children. She has an aversion to raw fish that was accommodated during an official trip to Japan, and an ongoing correspondence with King Charles III. There’s plenty about her hard-hatted but high-heeled renovation of the White House, including a tennis pavilion, and her design of a flowery new rug for the Diplomatic Reception Room.

And Vanity Fair:

Over the following 256 pages (if you count the photo insert, broad in space and content), Trump details her life in words—too many, some might say, and not quite the right ones—though they coalesce around certain central themes: feuds, cheering and chanting, motherhood, her special ability to communicate with Donald Trump, weird stuff with world leaders, and limousines.

And The New Yorker:

For a woman who has been a close witness to some of this century’s most high-stakes world events, she has little to say about them and is either unwilling or unable to provide a view from within the inner sanctum. 

The Atlantic:

[It] seems likely that she is, in private, a gracious and fun woman who genuinely loves children, finds great pleasure in her own self-presentation, and cares not one single degree about what people think of her. In that sense, she is truly free, liberated from the pains of empathy and anxiety that plague the rest of us. She really doesn’t care, and if we do, that’s our problem.

Aside from one short sit-down interview with Fox News and some posts on social media, Melania has done zero press for the book, which she claims to have poured her heart and soul into.

CNN reported earlier in the month that her publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, demanded $250,000 and a signed NDA in exchange for an interview with Mrs. Trump, which the network declined. The publisher later said the demand was made “by mistake” and blamed the whole thing on an unfortunate “internal miscommunication.”

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