Barack and Michelle Obama have signed book deals believed to total $60m (£48.5m) to write about their time in the White House.
Publishers have been fighting to secure the rights to the couple's memoirs, which are all but guaranteed to top the bestseller lists, the Financial Times reports.
While HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster were in the running, the top bid came from Penguin Random House imprint Crown, whose hopes for the books are understandably high.
Chief executive Markus Dohle said: "We are very much looking forward to working together with president and Mrs Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance."
A source told the Chicago Tribune that the former president's book will be "a straightforward memoir" about his time in office, while his wife plans to write an "inspirational work for young people that will draw upon her life story".
The precise financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, says ABC News, but Barack Obama's advance is thought to be the largest received by an ex-president, outstripping the $15m Bill Clinton secured for his 2004 autobiography, My Life.
Obama is already the author of two bestselling non-fiction works: Dreams from My Father, a 1995 autobiography covering his childhood and college years, and 2006's The Audacity of Hope, a series of essays on his political convictions released when he was a senator in Illinois.
He also, as president-elect in 2008, penned the children's book Of Thee I Sing, which tells the tale of 13 inspiring Americans. All proceeds from the book's sale went towards college scholarships for the children of dead or disabled military personnel.
The former first couple have already indicated they intend to donate a "significant portion" of the proceeds of their planned memoirs to charity.
Almost two months after leaving the White House, the Obamas are still in Washington DC, where younger daughter Sasha attends high school.
Sources told Politico the family will stay in a rented 8,200sq-ft mansion in the neighbourhood of Kalorama until she graduates.
However, "former presidents rarely remain in Washington after living and working in the US capital," says AFP, and there is speculation the family could return to Chicago, where Obama's political career first began.
"All the strands of my life came together and I really became a man when I moved to Chicago," he once said. "That's where I met my wife. That's where my children were born."
Others think the family would be better suited to a life in the Big Apple.
Professor Peter Slevin, the author of Michelle Obama: A Life, said: "New York has much to offer them at a time when they would like to be a bit more anonymous than it is possible to be in Chicago."