Tag: What Happened

Posted on

Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened” Sells More Than 300,000 Copies In First Week

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton’s new memoir What Happened racked up huge first week sales according to publisher Simon & Schuster selling over 300,000 copies.

Hardcover sales of the book topped 168,000 – the biggest nonfiction release in five years.

Additionally, What Happened set a company record for digital audio sales in a single week, and sales of e-book editions was the highest for nonfiction in six years.

These numbers beat her 2014 book, Hard Choices, by 100,000 copies.

But her all-time opening was for 2003’s Living History, which offered Clinton’s first expansive comments on the affair of her husband, President Bill Clinton, with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Released in the days of Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores, Clinton sold over 600,000 copies of the highly anticipated memoir in its first week.

Clinton’s detractors have suggested that perhaps it’s time that Clinton stand down and be quiet. But I’d suggest these sales – and her 65.8 million people who voted for her – indicate that people are still very interested in what Hillary has to say.

Posted on

Video: Ezra Klein Talks To Hillary Clinton About “What Happened”

Everyone I know has shared this really frank, insightful interview with Hillary Clinton regarding her new memoir, What Happened.

Ezra Klein of VOX asks really thoughtful questions, not the same “four minute” interview queries you see all the time.

Hillary is relaxed and very candid about what went wrong for her during the 2016 campaign, and she doesn’t hold back in being accountable for her own mistakes.

From Ezra Klein:

On Tuesday morning, I sat down with Clinton for an hour on the first official day of her book tour. It is a cliché that stiff candidates become freer, easier, and more confident after they lose — see Gore, Al — but it is true for Clinton. Jon Stewart used to talk of the “buffering” you could see happening in the milliseconds between when Clinton was asked a question and when she answered; the moments when she played out the angles, envisioned the ways her words could be twisted, and came up with a response devoid of danger but suffused with caution. That buffering is gone.

In our conversation, she was as quick and confident as I’ve seen her, making the case for her politics without worrying too much about the coalitional angles or the possible lines of offense. And she says plenty that can, and will, offend. In our discussion, she lit into Bernie Sanders’s single-payer plan, warned that Donald Trump is dragging us down an authoritarian path, spoke openly of the role racism and white resentment played in the campaign, and argued that the outcome of the 2016 election represented a failure of the media above all. This was Clinton unleashed, and while she talked about what happened, it was much more interesting when she talked about what she believed should have happened.

I highly recommend you watch below.

Also, if you’re a podcast kinda person, check out her very relaxed and unscripted chat with Pod Save America here.