Britney Spears’s Memoir Sells 1.1 Million Copies in U.S. in First Week

Britney Spears’s much-anticipated memoir, “The Woman in Me,” sold 1.1 million copies in all formats in the United States in its first week on sale, the book’s publisher, Gallery Books, announced on Wednesday.

The early sales number puts Spears’s book in the ballpark of some of the best-selling celebrity memoirs in recent years. In the same time frame, Prince Harry’s memoir sold 1.6 million copies in the United States, while that of Mary Trump, former president Donald J. Trump’s niece, sold 1.4 million when it debuted in 2020.

Spears and her team took an atypical approach toward promoting the book, in which Spears recalls her rise to fame as a teenage pop sensation, followed by her years spent in a strictly controlled conservatorship. Unlike Prince Harry, who participated in a series of high-profile interviews to promote his book’s release — including appearances on “60 Minutes” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” — Spears did not do any face-to-face interviews. She instead provided People magazine with sneak-peek excerpts and emailed quotes and promoted the book online to her millions of social media followers.

As has been the case with other recent big sellers, the 1.1 million sales figure for Spears’s memoir included purchases of the audiobook. It was read by the actress Michelle Williams, though Spears herself read a short introduction.