Prince Harry Might Have Gotten Very Rich After the Success of His Memoir 'Spare'

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Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, might have been controversial for U.K. royalists, but that didn’t stop people from buying his book in 2023. The publication has been so successful that Penguin Random House is sticking with the hardcover edition because fans are still scooping up the book.

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The Duke of Sussex’s memoir success has likely impacted his bank account in a big way, according to fellow best-selling author Richard Osman. On his podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment, he speculated how much he believes Prince Harry netted after having the largest first-day sales total for any nonfiction book that Penguin Random House ever published. Osman did what he called “envelope calculations” to estimate what the royal earned last year, thanks to the continued success of his memoir.

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“I know what you get paid per book. Got a $20 million advance. Thing with an advance is, you get paid in advance, $20 million in that case, you do not make a penny until your publisher makes back their $20 million,” Osman explained. “And once they’ve made back their $20 million, and there’s all sorts of sliding scales about how that works, what they get, what you get, once you’ve made the $20 million, then you get your royalties.” Osman believes from the hardcover book alone, “he’s made $26, $27 million.

What’s astonishing about this number is that it likely doesn’t include “rights to other things and audiobooks and what have you. He has earned that out already. When the paperback comes out, it’s just money rolling into the Sussexes.” The Daily Mail also confirmed with Penguin Random House that they are sticking with the hardcover book only for now — the sales continue to be strong in this category. And for critics who don’t want to hear this news, Osman’s claim might be a hard pill to swallow. Spare is the “biggest hit of the last ten, 20 years” and has “made everybody an enormous amount of money.”

The next time the British tabloids write headlines about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle going broke, they might want to listen to Osman’s words carefully. “He sells a lot in America. In America, the royalties are absolutely insane because they pay a lot of money for books in America,” he summed up. “So he has made a huge amount of money out of that book. So he’s got money coming in.”

Before you go, click here to see all the wild and heartbreaking details from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare.

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