Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Taylor Swift’s Book is a Sales Smash
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour book is far and away the fast-selling book of the year according to Circana, and is the second fastest non-fiction title in their records, outpaced only by Barack Obama’s A Promised Land in 2024. Two notes even on that. First, Swift’s book was only available at Target, and that surely cost Swift some first-week copies. The harder-core folks clearly went to Target, but there are a lot of sales floating around for people in B&N and Wal-Mart and indies, etc. Second, as far as I am aware, there was no pre-ordering available for The Eras Tour. Giant releases like this often bank a significant number of first-week sales as pre-orders, since those pre-orders are not “realized” until the book is actually out. Combined, I wonder what these two factors mean for what the book’s first-week ceiling actually was. Could it have been twice as big? 1.6 million? I think so. Book Riot editor made another interesting point this morning: did this book get rushed out because of all the other non-official Swift books hitting the shelves this fall? Which leads to the second of today’s headlines.
