Obama's highly anticipated memoir 'A Promised Land' sold 890,000 copies on its first day alone

Former President Barack Obama is well on his way to becoming the best selling author of the year (nothing like some healthy competition with his wife Michelle Obama, is there?). His highly anticipated memoir, A Promised Land, has already sold almost a million copies in its first day alone, CNN reports. The newly released book is making records for its publisher, Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Ahead of its Tuesday release date, hundreds of thousands of folks pre-ordered the book. With those orders, in addition to all the units that were sold on the first day of the memoir's release, Obama has managed to sell 887,000 copies.

The numbers are from the sales of A Promised Land "in all formats and editions in the United States and Canada." According to the publishing house, these numbers represent "the largest first-day sales total for any book ever published" by the company. This was, however, not unexpected. The former President's memoir, the first in a two-part series, has been the talk of the book world and beyond ever since it was first announced. The New York Times even stated it was "virtually guaranteed" to be the year's top seller. Evidently, folks simply could not wait to get their hands on Obama's honest account of his two-term Presidency.

The book, which concludes with the events of the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, covers "the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody," according to a tweet posted by Obama two months ahead of the release date. It has already been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Memoir & Autobiography. Crown has printed 3.4 million copies of the hardcover edition for the United States and Canada, and 2.5 million copies have been printed for readers located across the globe.

Alongside the original English version of the book, it will also be published in 24 different translations, including: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese. Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt said in an interview with Publishers Weekly earlier in the year, "This will be a book of rare consequence. That it will sell as no other book has done since July 21, 2007, is immensely cheering to booksellers." Daunt was referring to JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

A Promised Land has thus outperformed the former first lady's own memoir by selling over 100,000 more copies. Michelle Obama's Becoming sold 725,000 copies in its first day. One bookstore in Washington, D.C., even opened their store up at midnight on Tuesday morning in order to sell copies of the highly anticipated book. With the holidays right around the corner, booksellers expect that A Promised Land will remain a top seller.