Prince Harry dealt bitter new blow as book ‘fail’ is revealed

Calculations reveal a bleak picture for the Duke of Sussex who has seen one of his biggest projects slammed as a “financial fail”.

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King Charles has done it, six times. Prince Philip too. There was Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, of course. Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York on 45 occasions. The Duke of Windsor, when money got tight. The Duke of Kent in 2022. Princess Michael of Kent has had a crack. Princess Alice, the late Duchess of Gloucester, did hers at the age of 90.

The British royal family might hardly be better known for their love of slaughtering small birds and extramarital shagging than an abiding yen for great literature but, somehow, the House of Windsor’s various members have managed to put out nearly 60 books in the past 70 years, and only some of them have pictures.

The biggest name on that list? The one who managed to storm the charts, make it into the Guinness World Records in 24 hours and whose sales figures had more zeros than a Nigel Farage meet and greet? I mean of course Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex.

Prince Harry’s book Spare. Picture: Penguin

When his memoir Spare debuted in January, 2023 it almost immediately broke records faster than Usain Bolt after sculling several Red Bulls, seemingly ensuring that Harry’s heart-on-his-sleeve tell-all was a ring-a-ding success.

Until now, that is, with a new report labelling the book a “financial fail”.

Paula Froelich, a former longtime Page Six deputy editor, now writing for the fast growing US cable network News Nation, did a deepdive into the highest selling autobiographies of the year.

Taking into account the hardcover price of the book, the number of hardcovers sold and how much the duke was reportedly paid upfront by his publisher, Froelich calculated that King Charles’ younger son “would have had to sell more than twice the amount of books … than he did to earn back his advance.”

The Duke of Sussex’s title sold 1.2 million hardcover copies, according to Nation, however it would have had to sell 2.7 million hardcover copies for Penguin to come out even.

(According to Froelich, “hardcover sales account for 80 per cent of book sales, so it’s a good determinant of whether a book did well or not.”)

Reports vary as to how much Harry might have been paid as an advance for Spare, however Nation takes the number to be $13- 14.8 million ($USD9 – 10 million dollar), that is one quarter of the $51- 59 million ($USD35 to $40 million) that Entertainment Tonight says is the value of the duke and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s reported four-book deal.

Prince Harry promoting his book Spare on 60 Minutes in January 2023. Picture: CBS via Getty Images

Even working with this estimated advance figure, which is much lower than many other reported estimates such as the $29.5 million ($USD20 million) figure cited by the Times and the Telegraph, he did not sell enough hardcover copies for the publishing giant to recoup the cost of the advance, according to Nation’s calculations.

“Penguin Random House overpaid,” Froelich writes of the duke’s deal.

Harry can take some solace in that he is good company here, with other bestsellers like Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra and Arnold Schwarznegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools For Life also all constituting failures in terms of various book giants’ bottom lines.

Except that’s not all with other unfavourable numbers coming out for Sussex Inc courtesy of Netflix’s recent massive streaming data dump.

This time last year, right smack bang before Christmas, the Sussexes’ debut TV series Harry & Meghan was all over the streamer. The escapee couple had done it, having made nearly six hours of TV, which the duchess labelled a “love story” (in her interview with The Cut) and others found to be a viewer endurance test, watching two people self-indulgently raking over the coals of a malignant family bust up. Comme ci, comme ça.

Harry and Meghan in their Netflix docuseries. Picture: Netflix

Anywho when the series came out Netflix, like Penguin, wasted no time in doing some very loud gloating, banging out a press releases revealing that Harry & Meghan was the platform’s biggest documentary debut. Even before the Sussexes’ first cheque had cleared or the film crew had removed all the boom mikes from their faux-Tuscan Montecito monolith, I’m guessing, countless stories were running in outlets around the world about just how well the Sussexes’ series was doing. Pip pip hooray!

Here comes the ‘but’ part …

Deadline later reported, based on total viewing minutes, the series was its second most-watched doco with the duke and duchess’ show, them reliving their various travails and having to resort to borrowed private jet flights, being beaten to the most-watched top spot by the Tinder Swindler.

Then came Netflix this week deciding to be all open and honest with their data, putting out a whopper of a spreadsheet revealing the most watched programming between January and June 2023. Brace yourselves: The Sussexes’ series was only the 217th most watched show on the platform, behind something called The Sea Beast and season two of Peppa Pig, despite them having a reported $148 million ($USD100 million) deal with the streamer.

Prince Harry in his Netflix series Harry & Meghan. Picture: Netflix

Wait, I hear you say, Harry & Meghan was released in December 2022 therefore these numbers don’t include all the tens of millions of hours watched then, which is right.

However other shows that were released prior to this year still managed to perform much more strongly than the Sussexes’ show (62 million hours viewed), such as All Quiet on the Western Front (out October 2022, 80 million hours viewed) and Love is Blind season three (also out in October 2022, 68.9 million hours viewed).

In Harry and Meghan’s defence, their Netflix offering was clearly a stratospheric global slam dunk for a beleaguered company whose stock price has tumbled faster than a hens party glugging jugs of Aperol Spritzes at lunchtime.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have proven that they are sensational hires for a company hungry for a huge injection of publicity and a migraine-inducing problem for their bean counters left to juggle profit and loss statements.

What these book and TV numbers reflect is the Sussexes’ content’s lack of staying power. The world is fascinated by the couple and obsessed with them but when they put something out, once the hot flare of interest is over, once all the sound and fury and smoke and all the hubbub in the press and on social media dies down, public interest in reading or watching whatever they have made evaporates.

The same would seem to go for books as Paul Bogaards, the former marketing head of mega publisher Knopf, explained to Nation: “Celebrity memoirs are one-shots (for the most part) – all hardcover sales with no backlist life to speak of. If the publisher doesn’t earn out with the hardcover, they don’t earn out at all.”

That chimes with a report from earlier this month revealing that Spare was the most traded-in book of the year in the UK, according to We Buy Books. “We’ve accepted 459 copies. We limit how many we accept in a time frame so chances are if we’d accepted every copy, there’d have been a lot more!” a spokesman for the company told the Telegraph.

As the new year approaches, it unfortunately looks like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex don’t offer much of a corporate return on investment, aside from in the attention stakes, an unfortunate position for them to be in this era of belt-tightening and inflation. (Spotify, of course, parted ways with them in June after they only managed to get one podcast series off the ground.)

At last Harry can still claim serious bragging rights about being the only royal family member in the Guinness World Records. Well, unless Queen Camilla tries to break the Scotch eggs eaten in under one minute record again …

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.