Former Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Wiltern on Monday, Sept. 29, as part of her book tour promoting “107 Days,” her new book about her short sprint of a presidential campaign in 2024. The memoir bowed to strong sales.
Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Kamala Harris’s highly anticipated new memoir 107 Days had a blockbuster first week in release. Simon & Schuster announced that the memoir about Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, put into overdrive after presumptive nominee Joe Biden abruptly pulled out of the race, had the fourth-best memoir debut since 2023.
Her book sold 350,000 copies in its first week following its September 23 release. That figure includes pre-orders and sales of print books, ebooks, and e-audiobooks, prompting the publisher to order a fifth printing of the book that will bring the number of available copies to 500,000.
It also gave Harris the bestselling memoir of the year with three months to go until 2026. Her first-week sales trailed only memoirs by Prince Harry, Taylor Swift and Britney Spears since 2023.
“In addition to being one of the most interesting books ever written about the experience of running for President of the United States, the success of 107 Dats proves what a galvanizing and inspiring cultural figure Kamala Harris is,” said President and Chief Executive Officer of Simon & Schuster Jonathan Karp.
The Kamala Harris book tour has been a popular ticket, with stops in New York City, Los Angeles and other major cities.
Kamala Harris Memoir Presents Highly Anticipated Behind-The-Scenes Look At Her Campaign
It’s become the norm in recent years for political figures to release tell-all (or tell-most; they are never going to spill all the dirt) books following a contentious race. Hillary Clinton’s 2017 memoir, What Happened, sold 300,000 copies in its first week of release, similarly detailing a female politician’s loss to President Donald Trump.
Of course, Harris was in a very different position than Clinton. She came off the bench barely three months before the election after then-President Biden’s weak performance at the first presidential debate left Democrats apoplectic over his chances of defeating Trump again, four years after beating him in the 2020 election.
Harris’s team had to figure out how to position the nation’s first female vice president for an already contentious election amid a chaotic setup that gave her little time to truly introduce herself to the American public, given the vice president’s traditional behind-the-scenes role.
107 Days goes into detail about Harris’s relationship with Biden, which of course was not as cozy as it seemed in public. In the book, she accused Biden of making the election all about him during crucial times when she needed to concentrate.
Before the Kamala Harris memoir’s release, she previously wrote a children’s illustrated book, Superheroes Are Everywhere, that saw a bump after the 2020 election.