Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’ Paperback Goes Head-To-Head in Stores With This Royal Family Member’s Book

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Prince Harry‘s best-selling memoir, Spare, has finally been released in paperback over a year and a half after it was first released. That delayed publication is news in and of itself, but somebody else in the royal family also chose Oct. 24 as the date for their book. It’s a book duel at the palace!

Mike Tindall, who is married to Harry’s cousin Zara, has his own book to promote. The Good, The Bad & The Rugby – Unleashed, co-authored with Alex Payne and James Haskell, talks about “the highs and lows of their podcast, friendship and rugby,” according to the Amazon description. The British tabloids will likely keep tabs on the sales for both books because it will give them another angle to criticize the Duke of Sussex if the paperback edition isn’t a hit. 

What the U.K. press probably won’t report is that Harry already netted millions after everyone scooped up his memoir in 2023. On his podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment, author Richard Osman broke down the math on what the royal family member’s paycheck likely looked like. “I know what you get paid per book. Got a $20 million advance. Thing with an advance is, you get paid in advance, $20 million in that case, you do not make a penny until your publisher makes back their $20 million,” Osman explained. “And once they’ve made back their $20 million, and there’s all sorts of sliding scales about how that works, what they get, what you get, once you’ve made the $20 million, then you get your royalties.”

In the end, Osman thinks that Prince Harry earned “$26, $27 million” from the hardcover edition alone. That’s quite a tidy sum! Still, fans might be curious to hear what Tindall thinks about being married into the royal family — he has a different perspective from Princess Diana and Meghan Markle. “Believe it or not, marrying into the Royal Family was pretty easy for me. They were always nice to me, and I was always nice to them. Simple really,” he wrote, via an excerpt from the Daily Mail.

Tindall has been criticized in the past for using his royal-adjacent status to go on reality shows like I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, but he seems to take the punches well. “I don’t even have access to my Twitter. I just [get] tagged in by anyone who’s talking about anything. It’s so random, what I have to sift through,” he explained to The Telegraph on Oct. 12. “If there’s any story about me or my kids, it will get entangled into a web of something else, and I’m tagged into reading all this crap. That’s the world we live in. Some have got nothing better to do than bag people.”

Now, the real test will be how Tindall’s book fares against Harry’s bestseller.

Before you go, click here to find out which tell-all books expose major royal family secrets.