Nicolas Sarkozy is an eternal competitor. Voters having invited him to leave the political field, it is on the editorial level that the former President of the Republic now measures his performance. The book sales rankings no longer hold any secrets for this best-selling author who likes to see his name ahead of those of François Hollande or Alain Juppé.
The sixty-year-old, once tipped for the presidency of Hachette, owned by his (close) friend Arnaud Lagardère – and soon by his (very close) friend Vincent Bolloré –, even prides himself on having become an expert in the world of editing. He is, after all, a director of the Lagardère group, parent company of the Hachette group, on which the Fayard publishing house depends… This means that the fate of the Fighting time (Fayard, 592 pages, 28 euros), his new issue of Mémoires, published on August 19, is important to him.
Two months after the release of the book, the All-Paris publishers laugh under their breath in the face of what is described, at the very least, as ” counter performance “. The most severe even evoke – with more or less good faith – a “industrial accident” or one “terrible broth”. Normally, an author would be delighted with the 60,000 copies sold since the end of August, according to data from the independent GfK institute. A very good performance, especially for a political work.
However, in this area, Nicolas Sarkozy suffers from comparison with himself. The previous opus of his Memoirs, The Time of Storms (Les Editions de l’Observatoire, 2020), had in fact sold, over a similar period,… 165,000 copies. It had reached a total of 185,000 sales. One year earlier, Passions (Les Editions de l’Observatoire), another book where he mixed intimate and political memories, had recorded a record of 210,000 copies sold.
A potential financial pit
The former head of state does not seem ready to revisit these summits right away. The sales curve of Fighting time is seriously decreasing, at 2,000 copies per week, according to GFK. At this rate, Nicolas Sarkozy can hope, at best, to accumulate 80,000 sales at Christmas, before gradually disappearing from booksellers’ shelves. Far, far from the ambitions displayed by Fayard, who announced the release of the book with a print run of 200,000 copies.
Returning unsold items will cost the publisher dearly. Above all, the author’s remuneration represents a potential pitfall for the house. Because Nicolas Sarkozy sells his talents at prices that are rare on this market. Muriel Beyer, the director of Editions de l’Observatoire, had granted him 30% rights on each copy sold for The Time of Storms, in 2020. An exceptional amount, when these rates are usually negotiated between 8% and 14%.
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