This morning, Barack Obama announced on Twitter that he’ll release a new memoir called A Promised Land on November 17, explaining in the tweet that he’s “proud of this one” (that’s good) and that in it he tries “to provide an honest accounting” of his presidency as well as “the forces we grapple with as a nation and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody.”
The New York Times adds that this is the “first of two volumes” of Obama’s memoirs and that a second volume will be coming at some unknown future date, meaning this could be the start of an exciting new book series about a politician who actually knows what he’s doing and isn’t just trying to fleece as many people as possible while his cronies and idiot followers worship him like a god-king. Now, it may seem unusual for Obama to tease that this one is an accounting of his presidency even though it’s the first of two books, since—no offense to him—he hasn’t done enough stuff in the four years since his presidency ended to fill another book, but apparently this first volume doesn’t actually cover his whole presidency. According to the New York Times story, it just goes up to the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, giving the whole second book room to cover Obama’s second term and any particular thoughts he may have about his successor’s presidency (assuming he has some… maybe he hasn’t followed politics much lately).
The Times story also goes into the extensive measures that publisher Crown is going through to ensure that there are enough copies of A Promised Land to meet what will probably be a pretty high demand, saying the first edition will include 3 million copies, with 1 million of them being printed in Germany and brought across the ocean on “three ships, outfitted with 112 shipping containers.” Now, we don’t generally follow the actual book-making industry close enough to know if that’s a lot, but it certainly sounds impressive. Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, sold 10 million copies over a span of five months, so A Promised Land is going to need seven more ships and 784 additional shipping containers full of books if it wants to live up to that. (Writing about Barack Obama instead of that orange shitbag we normally write about has inspired us to be better people, so we’ve included some unnecessary math in this story.)