Prince Harry’s memoir Spare is most traded-in biography for second year running
The Duke of Sussex’s autobiography Spare broke many records, including being the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time.
But the estranged royal now has another milestone to add to his list of literary accomplishments. His controversial memoir, which was released in January 2023, has become the most traded-in biography for the second year running, according to We Buy Books.
A spokesman for the website, which buys unwanted second-hand books, said: “Prince Harry’s Spare is the most traded-in biography of 2024. This year, we purchased a total of 567 copies.”
Although Spare originally retailed at £28, We Buy Books is now offering users £3.38 for a second-hand copy of the original hardback edition and 50p for the paperback version. Last year, it paid £2.40 to 459 customers who traded in their hardbacks.
On Amazon, the hardback edition is currently selling for £14, but it can still be found for its original price of £28 at Waterstones, where the paperback version is discounted to £8.99.
We Buy Books, which gives instant valuations of books from their ISBN numbers, bought more than five million books in 2024, with Julia Donaldson, the Gruffalo creator, being the most traded-in fiction author.
Total sales of Spare, including audio and e-book editions, were around 400,000 copies on the day of its release, making it the UK’s fastest selling non-fiction book ever.
More than 1.4 million copies were bought across the US, Canada and Britain on the first day, described by Penguin Random House as the largest first-day sales total for any non-fiction book it had ever published.
It beat Barack Obama’s 2020 autobiography, A Promised Land, and went on to become the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time. Its success was partly fuelled by many booksellers including Waterstones, WHSmith and Amazon offering it to customers at half price.
In its first week alone, 467,183 print copies and 750,000 copies across all different formats were sold in the UK. This made it the fastest-selling non-fiction book in the UK since Nielsen BookData began recording official printed book sales in 1998.
The figure easily surpassed that of Kay Allinson’s Pinch of Nom cookbook, which sold 210,506 copies in its first three days of release in 2019.
In the book, ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer, Prince Harry details how he played second fiddle to his brother Prince William as the “spare to the heir” and reveals the trauma he suffered as a result of the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.
He describes being “assaulted” by Prince William, reveals how the King begged his sons not to “make my finals years a misery” and details losing his virginity with “an older lady” in a field behind a pub.
He also revealed that he had killed 25 “enemy combatants” while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan.
The book, which accused his stepmother Camilla, now the Queen, of leaking stories to the press and suggested the Princess of Wales was insulted after Meghan made a comment about her having “baby brain”, received mixed reviews.
