Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’ Memoir Set A Sales Record Despite, You Know, All The Overexposure

Even if you don’t care too much about the Royals, you’ve undoubtedly heard a lot about Prince Harry over the past few years. Much of this outpouring is arguably down to that Oprah interview, which introduced plenty of Yanks to the ongoing kerfuffle between Harry/Meghan Markle and the British royal family. That’s especially juicy to some people given the apparent rift between Duchesses Meghan and Kate and the more than apparent feud between Harry and his brother, Prince William. It’s a real soap opera for sure, and whether or not one takes sides, there’s a lot of fatigue on the subject.

Harry’s new Spare memoir has been promoted with an endless stream of scandalous excerpts, including talk of a frostbitten male organ and Harry’s first time (with a woman who spanked him in a field), and what he thought of Meghan’s love scenes on Suits. Even if you don’t have strong opinions on the Harry/William feud, it’s a lot. As someone who watches The Crown but can’t get worked up about royals in real life, I find all sides to be slightly exhausting. Piers Morgan, on the other hand, has the energy to lash out at every blow by blow, and perhaps the overexposure has been a good thing

In other words, despite how Harry’s juiciest revelations may have surfaced in the press and online, people still bought the heck out of this book. Via People, Spare broke a first-day record for Penguin Random House:

“Penguin Random House announced today the English language edition of SPARE, the memoir by Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, sold more than 1,430,000 million units in all formats and editions in the United States, Canada and the UK on the first day of its publication, Tuesday, January 10, 2023,” the statement said.

“The first full day of sales of SPARE represents the largest first-day sales total for any nonfiction book ever published by Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher,” it added.

Importantly, this is a record set for nonfiction, so it would be unfair to compare it to, say, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which cranked out 8.3 million copies in first-day sales for the final book. Still, 1.4 million is impressive. That’s far more than the 5,600-ish number (in an indeterminate time frame) books recently sold by Harry’s biggest critic… Piers Morgan. That will probably make him furious, but he’s also obsessed and even admitted that he neglected to publicly wish is wife a happy birthday while fretting over Harry and Meghan’s recent Netflix show.