Taylor Swift‘s The Eras Tour Book is following in the footsteps of her record-smashing global tour of the same name. According to the Associated Press, Circana BookScan reported that the $39.99 Target exclusive book chronicling the career-spanning outing moved an eye-popping 814,000 copies over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
That made it the biggest publishing launch of 2024 according to Circana, which tracks around 85% of the print market. The numbers were a bit easier to crunch because Swift only sold the book through her frequent retail partner Target, which made the book launch part of its Black Friday specials.
The AP reported that the impressive sales put Swift in rarified air, with the only bigger non-fiction launch ever being the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs, A Promised Land, which moved 816,000 copies during its first week in 2020. For context, the sales figures for Obama’s book — which was available at all traditional retailers — reflected a full week of sales. Circana’s figures for the Swift 256-page book only covered two days of sales before their reporting week ended Saturday, meaning that the final first week tally could be much higher.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the retailer and Swift’s team had high expectations for the book, with a person familiar with the roll-out saying the first print run was two million copies. For further publishing context, the Journal also said that the biggest selling book of 2023, Colleen Hoover’s novel It Ends With Us, sold almost 1.3 million print copies, again through a variety of traditional retailers.
The good book news came on top of another sales triumph for Swift, who this week learned that the Recording Industry Association of America announced that her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department has gone 6x Platinum. It marked the singer’s sixth album to sell a million U.S. units six times over, following her 2006 self-titled debut, 2008’s Fearless — her only LP to reach Diamond certification (10 million units) — 2010’s Speak Now, 2012’s Red and 2014’s 1989.
Swift will kick off the final run of Eras Tour dates on Friday (Dec. 6) in Vancouver at BC Place.
