NEW YORK — Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened” had a big debut.
Clinton’s book about her stunning loss in 2016 to Donald Trump sold more than 300,000 copies in the combined formats of hardcover, e-book and audio, Simon & Schuster told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The book’s hardcover sales of 168,000 was the highest opening for any nonfiction release in five years.
“The remarkable response to ‘What Happened’ indicates that, notwithstanding all that has been written and discussed over the last year, there is clearly an overwhelming desire among readers to learn about and experience, from Hillary Clinton’s singular perspective, the historic events of the 2016 election,” Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy said in a statement.
Clinton had promised to let her “guard down” for her first book to come out when she was neither in government nor seeking office. Responses to “What Happened,” as with so much of Clinton’s political career, have varied widely. “What Happened” has been called everything from boring and self-serving to revelatory and poignant.
According to Simon & Schuster, the book set a company record for weekly digital audio sales and sold more e-book editions in a single week than any nonfiction release from the publisher since Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs in 2011.