Add best-selling author to Taylor Swift’s seemingly ever-expanding list of accolades.
The performer’s self-published The Eras Tour Book has chalked up one of the best-selling debuts on record for a nonfiction work, selling 814,000 print copies in the week ending Nov. 30.
The only book that has done better, according to Circana BookScan, was Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, which sold 816,300 copies. Swift, though, would easily have bested that number had she chosen a more traditional publishing route.
Unlike most authors, Swift opted to sell her book without the aid of Amazon, Walmart, or Barnes & Noble, selecting Target as the exclusive distributor. (That not only drives people into the big-box store, which likely encourages Target shareholders, it puts more money in the pockets of Swift and Target, as there is no need to discount the book from its $39.99 list price.)
By the end of December, Swift and Target are hoping to more than double that sales number. The first printing of The Eras Tour Book was 2 million copies. If that sells out, it will dwarf the numbers of the year’s best-selling title. Right now, Colleen Hoover holds the top spot with her novel It Ends With Us, which has sold 1.3 million copies.
It has been a huge couple of years for Swift. In April, she dropped a surprise double album, The Tortured Poets Department, which has sold nearly 3 million physical copies, more than the rest of the Top 10 albums combined. The Eras tour, meanwhile, grossed over $1 billion and set numerous records. Last year alone the tour sold 4.3 million tickets, which is more than the number Elton John sold cumulatively on his five-year farewell tour. A movie about the tour quickly became the biggest concert movie ever.