But the good news for Melania — whose 198-page book is selling for various prices ($250 for a collector’s edition, $150 for a signed copy and $40 for a regular copy) — is that she potentially can earn even more.

Depending on how you define “memoir” — must it be a coherent narrative, or does a posthumous collection of diary entries suffice? — roughly a dozen first ladies of the United States have penned a total of more than 20 accounts of White House life ( Hillary Clinton, who simply will not be stopped, is responsible for four on her own).