Prince Harry’s Spare broke sales records in its first weeks and months. Publishing experts had predicted, before Spare was released, that the memoir would need to sell about 2 million copies to “break even” for the publisher, given Harry’s eight-figure advance. Spare sold 3.2 million copies… in its first week. It continued to appear on bestseller lists in North America and across the world for weeks and months. It was the most talked-about memoir of the year (sorry to Britney and Jada). As all of that was happening, the British media was desperately trying to convince their readers that Spare was a flop, that no one in jolly olde England would dare buy a copy. I’ve heard (anecdotally) that everyone in London was reading Spare right after it came out. And that was after the British media waged an unhinged hate campaign – people still wanted to read Harry’s words for themselves. Well, guess what was the best-selling book in the UK in 2023? And guess who is super-salty about it?? From the Telegraph’s sulky piece, “Prince Harry’s Spare most sold book on Amazon this year, but not most read.”

The Duke of Sussex’s memoir was the best-selling book on Amazon this year, but not the most read. Spare, which included explosive allegations about the Royal family and details about their private lives, was published at the beginning of the year.

It has now taken the top spot on Amazon Books’ best-selling titles of 2023, beating Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me, and books by Colleen Hoover, the popular young adult fiction author of This Ends With Us.

It follows a publicity blitz that resulted in the book selling a record 1.4 million copies across the UK, US and Canada on its first day of publication in early January.

However, the Duke’s memoir was only ranked number six on Amazon’s separate most read list, which is measured by the average number of daily Kindle readers and Audible listeners. In this category, Spare was beaten by five Harry Potter novels, with Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix in the top spot.

The two UK-based lists, published by Amazon on Tuesday, come after the 416-page memoir was labelled the most traded-in biography of the year by We Buy Books. According to the books specialist, which “turns unwanted books into cash”, Spare was accepted 459 times. A spokesman said: “We limit how many we accept in a timeframe so chances are if we’d accepted every copy, there’d have been a lot more!”

[From The Telegraph]

One, I love how bitter the British media is about Harry’s massive publishing success. “It’s not the most read book!” Oh, it’s just behind the most popular children’s series of all time, huh? “People traded it in!” Oh, but they still bought it new and then wanted to pass it along so other people could read it second-hand? Which just shows Spare’s ubiquity – Spare occupies the same “everyone has a copy” space as something like John Grisham’s The Firm or Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. “People bought it on sale!” And? Do you have anything against discounted books? For goodness sake. Someone get these people a big bucket of COPE.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.

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