Daniela Elser: Prince Harry's pressing $28 million problem

Harry and Meghan on stage at the Global Citizen festival in New York on September 25, 2021. Photo / AP

OPINION:

JD Salinger took 10 years to write Catcher in the Rye. The first Harry Potter instalment was six years in the making.

Putting pen to paper - or more accurately today, hands to MacBook Air - is no easy feat, even for those who have earned their publishing stripes. Pity then novice scribe Prince Harry, who is currently hard at work on his debut work, a memoir, due out next year.

In July, the news broke that the royal was set to release a book, making him the most senior member of the British royal family to turn writer since the Duke of Windsor, the other famous bolter, published A King's Story in 1951. (Though the former King Edward VIII at least had the tact to wait 15 years to publish his tell-all.)

Harry, reports soon speculated, would be picking up about $28.8 million (US$20m), not bad at all for a wholly untested writer who got a B in Art and D in Geography in his final exams. (His ghostwriter, Pulitzer Prize-winner JR Moehringer, is reportedly getting a cool US$1.3m for his efforts.)

The book news seemed par for the very lucrative course, joining the seemingly ever-growing list of eight and nine-figure deals which he and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex have inked since bolting the royal stable.

Harry will reportedly take home about $28.8m (US$20m) for his memoir. Photo / Dianne Manson

Lost in all the hubbub was the fact that the stakes here are mammoth and that how his book performs, or doesn't, will serve as a pivotal moment and litmus test for just how far the Sussexes have converted US audiences to their cause.

Now new details have emerged about how Harry The Writer is faring as he beavers away, giving the impression that the pressure is being dialled up on the rookie scribe.

For one thing, the royal will not be the only big name putting out a palace tell-all in 2022, with the announcement that former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, the author of the definitive Diana biography, will be putting out The Palace Papers: Inside The House Of Windsor – The Truth And The Turmoil in April.

This will be far – FAR – from another on the list of cash-grab Sussex-adjacent biographies given that Brown is impeccably connected and with the book's publisher promising it will tell the "real story" of the House of Windsor since Diana's death and will "irrevocably change the way readers perceive and understand the Royal Family".

Already, it has been reported that Buckingham Palace is bracing for the book to hit shelves, even this far out. Hatches need to be battened down. The corgis sedated. The priceless Meissen porcelain out of smashing reach.

Brown's release date, months before Harry's, could scupper the success of his book.

Take the as-yet unanswered question of which member of the royal family made racially charged comments about the Sussexes' unborn son's skin colour. This is exactly the calibre of nuclear-grade dirt that Brown has made a name for herself serving up, raising the very real possibility that she could name the Windsor in question.

If this came to pass, it could be a huge blow for Harry and his publisher, Penguin Random House.

This weekend The Sun reported that, per royal insiders, Harry is "under extreme pressure to identify" the unnamed royal in his autobiography. Leaving aside the devastation this might cause to his intra-family relationships and his chance of ever getting back onto the Buckingham Palace balcony, from a purely commercial standpoint, Brown beating him to the revelatory punch would be devastating.

People aren't going to queue up to buy a book whose biggest secret was unveiled months before.

Aside from the 33-minute, one-off podcast they put out in December last year, the Sussexes are yet to release anything they have created. Photo / Getty Images

The publication of Brown's book will come with a wave of global publicity. The danger here for Harry and his team is that by the time his book is slated to come out in "late 2022", a certain fatigue will have set in. Getting the public to part with their hard-earned cash may well be a much harder task if it comes after months of juicy royal revelations sucking up the press and social media oxygen.

Then there is the very sharp double-edged sword situation going on here. Fail to really air some dirty laundry and the book could well end up flopping. After all, no one is spending $30 to read about Harry's daily regimen of activated cashews and the power of compassion or that one time Princess Anne was overly competitive playing Monopoly at Sandringham. Tepid insights into Windsor life are hardly the stuff of sales gold.

Consider too here, $28 million cheques generally very possibly only get handed out in exchange for the promise of dirty laundry-airing chart-topping revelations, not 100,000 words about one's conversion to green juice and the power of meditation.

However, should he satisfy the most prurient cravings of his editors (and let's be honest, all of us too) and really dish the dirt on the inner workings of The Firm, he stands liable to irrevocably damage his already tenuous relationships with his family.

Royal biographer Penny Junor, speaking to The Sun, has said: "He's researching his mother's life so he's going to be talking about his parents' marriage, the break-up, the affairs. That could be incredibly damaging for his father and Camilla."

So, how does Harry appease his commercial lords and masters while not severing the last remaining threads with his father, brother and grandmother in the process?

We also learned this week that if anyone was worried that the duke might not be applying himself, and leaving all the hard literary yards to his ghostwriter, think again. The Sun also reported that "Harry is understood to have been contacting Princess Diana's old friends", and that "Palace sources are 'surprised' at how involved he has become". (Well, that's a bit of a low blow, n'est pas?)

Ask yourself this: why would the 37-year-old be reaching out to his mum's friends?

Harry has reportedly been reaching out to his mother's old friends.

The answer might lie in something which both he and brother Prince William revealed back in 2017. When the brothers were interviewed for the documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, one of the filmmakers later revealed that, "they prefaced their interviews by saying, 'We don't actually have that many memories of our mum.'"

Here's another question worth pondering: who will buy Harry's magnum opus?

Polling done in July found that 67 per cent of Brits were not interested in the book, while in the US, 51 per cent said they "not interested at all". Only a scant nine per cent of American respondents were "very interested" in the work, along with 16 per cent who were "fairly interested".

So much is at stake with this book's success - more so potentially than the Sussexes' Netflix and Spotify deals.

See, aside from the 33-minute, one-off podcast they put out in December last year, the couple are yet to release anything which they have created or made. The book could end up serving as something of an early warning system for the sort of audience reception their other endeavours might receive.

Consider also what it would mean if Harry telling his story, sharing all of his pain and hurt, is greeted by what amounts to a collective global shrug at cash registers. If this heartfelt outpouring does not translate into serious sales figures, then this would augur badly for the bankability of Brand Sussex going forward.

Harry charms the locals at the Viaduct in Auckland on October 30, 2018. Photo / AP

If this literary outing fails to set the bestseller lists on fire, then the chances of more juicy contracts flowing the couple's way seem far less likely.

Which is to say, an extraordinary amount is now riding on the performance of this book, nothing short of the future of his relationship with the royal family and whether he and wife Meghan will be able to continue to parlay their maverick-slash-malcontent status into a bulging bank account.

That is an enormous amount of stress and strain for a first-time writer to have to contend with.

After Salinger published The Catcher In The Rye, and faced with the global celebrity that came with its publication, he would often reportedly plead, "Why can't my life be my own?"

That's a sentiment that Harry might be able to deeply relate to these days. Well, that is, if he has the time, what with all of the typing he needs to crack on with.

• Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles