Memoirs by politicians and officials appear remarkably soon after the events they describe, on schedules that ordinary publishing could not meet. The compression is deliberate and expensive.
The value of the book decays fast
Interest in a political account is highest while the events are contested and the participants are still arguing about them.
A year later the argument has moved on, other accounts have been published, and the same manuscript sells a fraction of what it would have.
Publishers who pay heavily for these books are buying a moment, and missing it destroys most of the value they paid for.
Competing memoirs from other participants make the timing sharper still, since the first account to appear sets the terms the later ones must answer.
Production is rearranged around the date
Normal publishing runs its stages in sequence over a year or more, with editing completed before design and printing are scheduled.
For these titles the stages are compressed and overlapped, printing capacity is booked in advance of a finished manuscript, and editorial work continues while earlier sections are already being set.
Legal review runs alongside rather than after, because the books concern living people and contested events and cannot wait for a final draft to begin.
Secrecy is part of the schedule
Publishers restrict the manuscript to a small group, delay sending proofs, and rely on strict embargoes to protect the release.
The reason is that a book's news value can be spent entirely by a leaked extract, leaving the publication itself with nothing left to reveal.
Serialisation in the press is negotiated as part of the launch precisely so that the disclosure happens on terms the publisher controls.
Collaboration makes the pace possible
Political figures rarely have the time to write at this speed, so the work is usually done with a collaborator working from interviews and papers.
That arrangement is standard in the category and is what allows a manuscript to be produced in months rather than years.
Official papers, diaries kept in office and the recollections of former colleagues supply the raw material, so the writing task is one of shaping rather than research.
What the speed costs the book
Compressed schedules leave little room for the checking and reconsideration that improve a manuscript, and errors are more likely to survive to print.
The accounts are also written before their consequences are known, which is why political memoirs are read as evidence about their authors more often than as reliable history.