Here are the bestselling print books for the first half of 2023 released by Publishers Weekly. It does not include audiobooks or e-books.
Perhaps not surprisingly the top spot is taken by Prince Harry with Spare, 1,179,379 books sold.
Colleen Hoover has seven books in the top 20 with almost four million in sales.
I came across an article in The Guardian online that posed the question, “why are biographies so popular?” I could ask, are they?
I like to read biographies. Actually, I prefer the “auto” biography or memoir. I do read biographies, but I am more inclined to go for the account actually written by the individual telling their own story.
I feel that sometimes biography is used as a catch-all word that includes autobiography, biography, and memoir. I quite like the Wikipedia definition of memoir.
2023 has started with a bang in the world of books. Spare is a memoir written by the British Royal who chose to step back from his role, Prince Harry (ghost-written by novelist J. R. Moehringer.) Released on the 10th January 2023, it has caused a stir, and not just in Royal circles.
This is my first blog post, and it is not my intention to review or write about Harry's book, as I have not read it. Instead, I write about it in the context of my own memoir writing experience, which coincidentally meant that my first book, Son of My Father, was more or less published at the same time.
Actually, my book was published as an e-book on Amazon the week before Christmas, 2022.
Now, the first big difference between my book and Spare is that mine was self-published with no fanfare. Self-publishing used to be called vanity publishing and not encouraged. The traditional route, if the book is any good, is to go through a publisher. That can be a lot of hard work. Many a good author has had their work rejected only to eventually find success. Self-publishing was the easy option for me, and Amazon (and others) do make it reasonably easy to do that.
There is one big drawback to self-publishing. Your new book is one of thousands. How do you get it noticed? I did not publicize it at all. It sat there in the Amazon store waiting for someone to take notice and buy it. Compare that with the 400,000 copies Spare sold on the first day. No surprise in that given all the publicity it received and the fact that this was a book spilling the beans on Royal life. The BBC report that it has become the UK's fastest selling nonfiction book since records began.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64226729
I would have been happy with forty copies sold on the first day. Over the moon.
I will have more to write about Son of My Father in due course, but for now here is the Amazon link.
