Spare is the UK’s fastest selling nonfiction book—it sold 400,000 copies across all formats on its first day on sale. In the UK, US, and Canada combined, the memoir sold a total of 1,430,000 units. Penguin Random House said Spare has set a new first-day sales record topping any nonfiction book they’ve ever published, and they’ve already gone back to press after initially printing 2 million copies. (The previous PRH record holder was Barack Obama’s A Promised Land.)
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
