Britney Spears’s much-anticipated memoir, “The Girl in Me,” bought 1.1 million copies in all codecs in the US in its first week on sale, the e-book’s writer, Gallery Books, introduced on Wednesday.
The early gross sales quantity places Spears’s e-book within the ballpark of among the best-selling superstar memoirs in recent times. In the identical time-frame, Prince Harry’s memoir bought 1.6 million copies in the US, whereas that of Mary Trump, former president Donald J. Trump’s niece, sold 1.4 million when it debuted in 2020.
Spears and her crew took an atypical strategy towards selling the e-book, by which Spears remembers her rise to fame as a teenage pop sensation, adopted by her years spent in a strictly managed conservatorship. Not like Prince Harry, who participated in a collection of high-profile interviews to advertise his e-book’s launch — together with appearances on “60 Minutes” and “The Late Present With Stephen Colbert” — Spears didn’t do any face-to-face interviews. She as an alternative supplied Folks journal with sneak-peek excerpts and emailed quotes and promoted the e-book on-line to her thousands and thousands of social media followers.
As has been the case with different latest huge sellers, the 1.1 million gross sales determine for Spears’s memoir included purchases of the audiobook. It was learn by the actress Michelle Williams, although Spears herself learn a brief introduction.
A information launch from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, asserting the gross sales numbers quoted Spears as saying, “I poured my coronary heart and soul into my memoir, and I’m grateful to my followers and readers around the globe for his or her unwavering help.”
(Printed figures put the worth tag for Spears’s memoir between $12.5 million and $15 million.)
In its 275 pages, “The Girl in Me” consists of Spears’s recollections of her childhood rising up within the small Louisiana city of Kentwood, her early years on “The Mickey Mouse Membership” and her laborious work within the recording studio to provide her first album after touchdown a file deal at 15 years previous. Its most talked-about revelations heart on her relationship with Justin Timberlake — throughout which, she writes, she obtained an abortion after he mentioned they had been too younger to be dad and mom. The e-book steadily returns to the challenges of residing below intense public scrutiny, significantly when it got here to her physique, her sexuality, her relationships and her parenting of her two sons.
The e-book is Spears’s first full account of her 13 years below a conservatorship, which her father, James P. Spears, was granted in 2008 amid a custody battle and Britney Spears’s collection of public struggles. A decide terminated the authorized association in 2021. Within the memoir, Spears describes an maturity by which safety personnel distributed her medicines and put parental controls on her iPhone.
Kristen McLean, an trade analyst for Circana BookScan, which tracks e-book gross sales numbers, mentioned on Wednesday that Spears’s memoir appeared as if it had a superb probability of surpassing a million in print gross sales in the US this yr. Just one grownup nonfiction title — Prince Harry’s “Spare” — has reached that peak up to now.
McLean mentioned the success of Spears’s e-book was a powerful indicator for a sturdy vacation e-book market, pushed partly by a string of in style nonfiction titles together with Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, Michael Lewis’s e-book in regards to the FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Jada Pinkett Smith’s memoir.
“It feels just like the grownup nonfiction market is waking up,” McLean mentioned.
Elizabeth Harris contributed reporting.
