Jeffrey Trachtenberg’s latest article for WSJ focuses on Jimmy Carter’s self-propelled literary career, examining the “versatile writer and relentless marketer” in action.

“Like other successful scribes in today’s publishing world, Mr. Carter has learned how to play the game. Book retailers love him, in part because he works so hard at book signings and understands the ‘retail politics’ of the publishing business. Disdainful of ‘handlers,’ the former president is all business and insists on sticking to a tight schedule. Once, he almost left a late-running publicist behind in a store.”

President Carter is so dedicated to getting everything just right that he posed with a muzzle-loading rifle and then painted a portrait based on the photograph for the cover of his first novel, 2003′s The Hornet’s Nest. But his industriousness appears to have paid off, as an anonymous source pegs the windfall for his latest book, Our Endagered Values, at over $5 million.