The White House posted the president’s 2009 tax returns online yesterday, revealing that he pulled in about $5.6 million dollars from sales of his two books last year.
Dreams from My Father earned him $3.3 million in 2009, while The Audacity of Hope brought in $2.3 million. This is more than double what the two books earned the Obamas in 2008, about $2.6 million. The Washington Post points out that $1.6 million of this year’s book earnings comes from foreign sales.
Readers will recall that Dreams from my Father secured an advance of more than $100,000 from Simon and Schuster in 1990, when Barack Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. He then missed deadline, and when he did turn in a draft it was rejected for being too long. The book ended up being published by the Times Books imprint at Random House.