First-day sales of Prince Harry's Spare in US and Canada top one million, says PRH

Prince Harry’s memoir Spare sold 1,430,000 copies on its first day in the US, Canada and the UK combined, Penguin Random House has announced.

With Transworld putting UK first-day sales in all editions at 400,000 copies, this leaves US and Canada sales at over one million. The relative numbers for print, audio and e-book sales have not been broken out.

PRH said this was the largest first-day sale for any non-fiction book the publisher had brought out, surpassing the previous record, struck by Barack Obama’s A Promised Land (more than 887,000 copies in the US and Canada) in November 2020.

Gina Centrello, president and publisher of the Random House Group, commented: “While many books by public figures can be fairly categorised as ‘celebrity memoir,’ Spare is not that. Vulnerable and heartfelt, brave and intimate, Spare is 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. Looking at these extraordinary first-day sales, readers clearly agree, Spare is a book that demands to be read, and it is a book we are proud to publish.”

PRH, which had an initial print run of two million copies in the US, is now reprinting.