Florida governor Ron DeSantis received a book advance of $1.25 million from HarperCollins for his book The Courage to be Free, according to a state financial disclosure.
The income from the book, which was released in February, helped raise his net worth to more than $1.17 million, an increase of roughly $319,000 from the year prior, according to an annual financial disclosure form the governor filed with the Florida Commission on Ethics on Friday. He earns more than $140,000 per year as governor.
The book advance is the first form of income DeSantis has reported outside of his government salary since becoming governor in 2018. He notes in his book that he stopped trading stocks before he became a member of Congress in 2013 to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.
The book, which debuted at No. 1 on Amazon’s Top 100 list and rose to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list in March, paints DeSantis, a Yale University and Harvard Law grad, as an everyman who was raised in a working-class home with family ties to steel-country Ohio and Pennsylvania that made him “God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.” He describes summers spent working at a local electric company to help pay for college and feeling like a working-class outsider at Yale.
DeSantis went on a nationwide tour after the book’s release and announced his presidential bid in May.
The Florida governor has consistently polled at second place behind former president Donald Trump. Trump is currently leading the crowded Republican field with 52.4 percent support, followed by DeSantis at 21.5 percent, former vice president Mike Pence at 5.7 percent, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley at 3.6 percent, Senator Tim Scott at 3.5, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 2.4 and former New Jersey governor Christie at 2.4 percent, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.
While DeSantis mentions Trump more than 100 times in the book, he is not outwardly critical of the former president, choosing instead to deftly remind readers of Trump’s weaknesses in a GOP primary without making value judgments of his own.