Photo Credit: Taylor Swift by Paolo Villnueva / CC by 2.0
Taylor Swift’s Target-exclusive Eras Tour tie-in book sells over 814,000 copies in its first weekend, becoming the biggest publishing launch of 2024.
Taylor Swift only needed one retailer for her Eras Tour tie-in book to snag the crown for the biggest publishing launch of 2024. The Target-exclusive book sold 814,000 copies over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Those numbers put Swift in a unique category — not that she’s a stranger to being in rare company. The only bigger non-fiction launch to date, according to data from Circana, was Barack Obama’s presidential memoir, “A Promised Land,” which sold 816,000 copies in its first week on the shelves in 2020. Circana only tracks the print market, and does not include audio and ebook sales.
Sales of Swift’s $39.99 book skyrocketed during the Black Friday shopping weekend, even as some fans complained about the Target exclusivity and the book’s apparent typos and factual errors. Neither Swift nor Target have yet responded to media requests for comment on the subject.
Taylor Swift’s exclusive and non-traditional releases don’t stop at print, either. Her Eras Tour concert film, which released last year, bypassed Hollywood studio middlemen and saw Swift working directly with AMC Theatres and Cinemark Theatres for the release. The film made over $200 million at the box office and became the highest grossing concert movie in history.
Another top selling book this year, according to Circana, is Wendy Loggia’s “Taylor Swift: A Little Golden Book Biography,” designed in the tradition of other Little Golden Book children’s classics like “The Poky Little Puppy” and “The Little Red Hen.” Swift has also inspired her own mini-genre in the publishing industry, with coloring books, romance fiction, and even a cocktail recipe collection, “Shake It Up.”
Taylor has announced she plans to take a year-long hiatus from working after her exhaustive Eras World Tour, focusing on her personal life and her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce.