President Obama's memoir 'A Promised Land' set to release in November

Former President Barack Obama's long-awaited presidential memoir is finally coming out this year, just days after the November election. While recent weeks have seen a flood of hot-selling political books hitting the shelves in anticipation of the presidential election, Obama's memoir A Promised Land will release on November 17. Publisher Penguin Random House on Thursday announced the release of the 768-page book which will be issued around the world in 25 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Czech, Finnish, and Vietnamese. A Promised Land will be the first of two volumes and will cover parts of Obama's early political life, 2008 presidential campaign, early years in the Oval Office, and conclude with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

According to The New York Times, demand for the presidential memoir is expected to be extraordinary, in anticipation of which Crown—an imprint of Penguin Random House—has ordered a first printing for the U.S. edition of 3 million copies. It reportedly plans to print about 1 million of those books in Germany to accommodate such an enormous order and has arranged for three ships, with 112 shipping containers, to transport the copies to the United States.

"There’s no feeling like finishing a book, and I’m proud of this one. I’ve spent the last few years reflecting on my presidency, and in A Promised Land I’ve tried to provide an honest accounting of my presidential campaign and my time in office: the key events and people who shaped it, my take on what I got right and the mistakes I made, and the political, economic, and cultural forces that my team and I had to confront then—and that as a nation we are grappling with still," Obama said in a statement on Instagram.

"In the book, I’ve also tried to give readers a sense of the personal journey that Michelle and I went through during those years, with all the incredible highs and lows. And finally, at a time when America is going through such enormous upheaval, the book offers some of my broader thoughts on how we can heal the divisions in our country going forward and make our democracy work for everybody—a task that won’t depend on any single president, but on all of us as engaged citizens," he continued. "Along with being a fun and informative read, I hope more than anything that the book inspires young people across the country—and around the globe—to take up the baton, lift up their voices, and play their part in remaking the world for the better."

According to an Obama spokesperson, although most of the biggest books of the year usually release in the fall, no thought was given to releasing A Promised Land before the election as Obama wanted to focus on helping his former vice president Joe Biden with his presidential campaign. Michelle and Barack Obama sold their memoirs to Crown as a package deal for a record-smashing $65 million in 2017 and it has proven to be a successful deal for the publishing house. The former first lady's memoir, Becoming, has sold over 8.1 million units in the United States and Canada since it's release in the fall of 2018.

The former president took longer with his memoir although he started working on it shortly after leaving office. Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father, was published in 1995 by Peter Osnos at Times Books. Osnos said he paid a $40,000 advance after the author's original contract with Simon & Schuster was canceled due to him taking too long to deliver the book. "That has to be the single biggest arc in the history of publishing," he said of Obama's journey from a $40,000 book deal to a $65 million one. The US hardback edition of A Promised Land will cost $45, reports CNN, while the digital edition will cost $17.99.