The numbers from booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Powell’s make it clear: Prince Harry‘s Spare, his memoir about his life as a royal, was already dominating bestseller lists by the time it was released Tuesday. The day before its publication, Jan. 10, Spare was first on Amazon’s U.S. bestseller list for books in the U.S. and number one on Barnes & Noble’s “B&N Top 100: Book Bestsellers.”
Spare also made it onto Books-A-Million and Powell’s lists. It was well situated in many ways to end up charting high. The memoir was released around a month after the last three episodes of Harry & Meghan, the six-part Netflix docuseries centered around the Duke of Sussex and his American-born wife, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle. The series clocked 81 million hours of viewership in its first four days alone.
Response to Spare has been an interesting portrait of how the public sees the British royal family. The BBC’s review called it “the weirdest book ever written by a royal,” about “a profoundly odd life, moving suddenly between this lack of [glamor] to time with the international jet set.”
Some, however, take the book very seriously — like royal biographer Angela Levin. She spoke to Euro News about Spare, and called Prince Harry “a real bully” whose memoir “is well over the line.”
While the New York Times noted a number of leaks from Spare as well as revealing articles might affect book sales, the paper also quoted B&N and Waterstones head James Daunt, who said Harry’s book is “clearly going to be an interesting book that’s going to keep on selling and it’s going to keep on being part of the conversation.”
