Taylor Swift is ready to break a new record: This time not in the music but in the publishing industry.
Only few days after starting off the second leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour in Miami, she announced a new project which has the potential to rock another multibillion-dollar industry. The megastar announced that before the tour wraps up on December 8, she’ll release a commemorative book about the experience on Black Friday.
And she’s doing it all without the help of a traditional publisher.
Swift will become the highest-profile self-published author in the world. The book, like many of her vinyl releases, will be sold exclusively at Target. The part-memoir, part-coffee table book will cost $39.99, will have 350 pages and include over 500 photos and the superstar’s personal reflections from the tour.
Taylor Swift will be the author of more than 100 pages of reflections and backstage-reports of her memorable Eras-tour – describing her feelings before the concerts, her relationship to her friend Travis Kelce, her thoughts about music and fans, her fear after the terror threats in Vienna and much more.
The book will be out at the weekend after Thanksgiving, on Saturday November 29, at all Target-outlets and will additionally start selling online on November 30 – perfectly timed to sell more than one million copies before Christmas.
T.Swift’s venturing into the publishing realm alone exemplifies her business strategy of keeping creative control and maximizing her cut. She bypassed traditional film distribution channels by self-producing the Eras Tour concert movie, making a deal directly with AMC. While that meant her team had to cover the upfront costs, she got to keep a much bigger chunk of the $260 million the film grossed worldwide.
Now in the publishing business she is expected to keep nearly 20 dollars out of the $ 39-sale-price of each book – that would be up to 20 million dollars when she sells one million copies.
The celebrity memoir has exploded in the last few years. When the pandemic pushed a lot of stars who couldn’t leave home to write a book, the Big Five publishers supercharged the celebrity trauma dump between two hardcovers.
Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Hachette—the major US publishers—keep up a steady stream of celebrity memoirs because they make a lot of money and have a built-in audience.
- Last year, Prince Harry’s Spare sold 1.6 million copies in the US during its first week.
- Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me jumped to the top of the NYT Bestseller list after it sold 1.1 million copies in its first week.
