London: Prince Harry’s memoir sold 1,430,000 copies on its first day of sale in the US, Canada, and the UK combined.
The book’s publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has stated that the book sold more copies on its first day than any other nonfiction book from the publishing house, even after selling more than a million English language copies globally. A Promised Land by Barack Obama, which sold more than 887,000 copies in the US and Canada in November 2020, held the previous record.
Spare broke the record for the fastest-selling nonfiction book in the country after selling 400,000 copies on 10th January 2023 alone in the UK. The Duke of Sussex’s debut memoir, Spare, gained media interest in the week before its release as a result of information from the book being leaked.
The landmark publication is finally here! Full of insight, revelation, and self-examination, SPARE chronicles Prince Harry’s journey with raw honesty. The official #PrinceHarryMemoir is out today, with the audiobook read by the author. Visit https://t.co/fL1z5atYxi pic.twitter.com/gAAtD8F15u
— Penguin Random House ??? (@penguinrandom) January 10, 2023
The book, which was originally predicted to be a bestseller, saw an increase in interest after reports of Harry and his brother Prince William fighting physically and the brothers requesting their father not to marry Camilla. Based only on pre-orders, Spare was the top selling on Amazon.
Gina Centrello, president and publisher of the Random House Group, puts the book’s success down to it being “the story of someone we may have thought we already knew, but now we can truly come to understand Prince Harry through his own words.” It’s a book that “demands to be read, and it is a book we are proud to publish”, the president added. The publisher is currently reprinting the two million copies that were first printed for US sales.