Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, sold 10,000 copies on its first day in Ireland, according to Michael McLoughlin, the managing director of Penguin Random House in Ireland.
Mr McLoughlin tweeted on Wednesday: “Sensational sales of over 10,000 copies of Spare by Prince Harry in Ireland yesterday. It’s going to be close, but it looks like the first week’s sales may beat the best single-week sales of every non-fiction book published in Ireland over the past 20 years!”
At the moment the highest sale for a memoir in Ireland is rugby player Paul O’Connell’s The Battle which sold 17,800 in its first week during Christmas 2016. The success of Spare is all the more remarkable given that the book was released in January, a quiet period for book sales.
The official Nielsen BoookScan figures for Ireland will not be released until next Tuesday.
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The book recorded 1.43 million copies in all formats in the United States, Canada and Britain in its first day, the fastest first day sales for any non-fiction book that Penguin Random House has published.
It beats the publisher’s previous record, Barack Obama’s 2020 memoir A Promised Land, which sold 887,000 copies in all formats on its first day in the US and Canada.
Penguin Random House will have to sell millions of copies to recoup the reported $20 million it paid as an advance to Prince Harry. His ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, is reported to have received a further $1 million.
Mr Moehringer has defended the book against criticism that is includes factual inaccuracies. A claim by Prince Harry that he was in Eton College when the Queen Mother died has been refuted as he was skiing with his father and brother at the time. Harry’s claims to have received an Xbox in 1997 from his mother Princess Diana have also been refuted as the console was not available at the time.
Mr Moehringer shared a few tweets about how memory works. One came from Prince Harry and is included in the book.
“Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past,” he said.
