Morrissey’s ‘Autobiography’ Breaks Sales Records As It Debuts Atop The UK Book Charts

Last Thursday, Morrissey finally released his Autobiography in the UK and to no one’s surprise, copies of the memoir flew off the shelves of bookstores all around Europe. Today we learn that Moz‘s book will debut in the #1 stop atop the UK Book Charts after it sold a record-setting 34,000+ copies in just the past 4 days. Morrissey‘s autobiography sold more first-week copies than Keith Richards did when he releases his autobiography in 2010 making Moz‘s Autobiography one of the fastest-selling memoirs in UK history. Despite the fact that the blatantly Moz-hating publication The Guardian printed an unfavorable review of the book last week, the newspaper had to report today that Moz‘s book is a record-breaking best seller. Love it!

Morrissey’s Autobiography, a book “as maddening as the man himself”, has shot to number one in the UK book charts in its first week on sale to become one of the fastest-selling memoirs ever, shifting 34,918 copies and overtaking Keith Richards’ 2010 book Life, which was the previous record holder for first-week sales of a musician’s biography, at 28,213 copies. Morrissey’s insistence that his book be published as a Penguin Classic means that it went straight into paperback, making it cheaper than the average price of a hardback release of a celebrity autobiography.

You will note that The Guardian is trying to imply that the book sold better because it was printed in paperback, which may be true but is something the publication would typically say about anything having to do with Morrissey‘s success.

Simon Key of the Big Green Bookshop in north London, which held a midnight opening to mark the book’s publication last week, said that paperback binding was unlikely to have made a difference to the purchasing decisions of “obsessive” Morrissey fans. “It wouldn’t have made much difference if was out in hardback. Morrissey fans are obsessives, there are very few people quite as obsessive as Morrissey fans,” said Key. “I’m delighted that they’ve published in paperback. I don’t like hardbacks, they make bookselling elitist. It makes it unique, too – a book like this hasn’t been done as a Penguin Classic before” … Sales of Autobiography were ahead of the first full week’s sales for David Jason’s My Life, which topped the hardback non-fiction chart, with 27,210 copies. Since records began in 1998, the only other memoir to have shifted more copies in its first week than Autobiography was Kate McCann’s Madeleine (2011), which sold 72,500. A publisher for Autobiography in the US, where Morrissey has a committed following, has yet to be revealed, and the Big Green Bookshop has been asked to ship UK copies out to customers there. The Penguin Classic edition is available in the UK, Europe and Commonwealth countries. “People have been getting in touch by email and Twitter. It is unusual, as an independent London bookshop. We don’t generally sell a lot of books in America,” Key said.

Clearly, everyone was dying to get their hands on Moz‘s autobiography (me, included) so I’m not surprised in the least that the book sold so well early on. Now, it remains to be seen if the book will continue to sell well but I suspect that another massive number of books will be sold once the book is released here in the US domestically (even tho I know of many rabid Moz fans who couldn’t wait and had copies of the book shipped here to the US from the UK). I’m about halfway done with the book and I’m loving it thus far. Congrats to Morrissey on another well-deserved success. Have any of y’all read the book yet? If so, what do you think?

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