Domestic sales
Copies of What Happened during Clinton's appearance at the Hill Auditorium in October 2017
The hardcover edition was published on September 12, 2017; it immediately went to the top of the Barnes & Noble, Amazon,[24] and the USA Today bestseller lists.[25]
It debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller List for both hardcover nonfiction and combined print and e-book nonfiction sales where it stayed for 2 weeks.[26][27] It dropped to number two on both lists in its third week.[28] By the beginning of November it had spent six weeks in the top four positions of the list.[29] By the beginning of January 2018 the book had spent sixteen weeks on the list.[30] The following week it fell off.[31]
What Happened sold 300,000 copies in its first week.[32][33] The first-week sales were lower than her 2003 memoir, Living History, but triple the first-week sales of Clinton's previous memoir, 2014's Hard Choices.[32][34]
The first-week hardcover sales for What Happened were 167,000.[32][33] This marked the strongest hardcover debut for a nonfiction book since 2012's No Easy Day.[32] Simon & Schuster also announced that What Happened sold more e-books in its first-week than any nonfiction book had since 2010.[32]
The book debuted at number one of the Publishers Weekly "Top 10 overall" and "hardcover nonfiction" bestseller lists. In its third week on the lists, it dropped to number three of the "Top 10 overall" and to number two of the "hardcover nonfiction" lists with a total of 311,982 hardcover copies sold.[35][36] As of December 10, 2017, the book had sold 448,947 hardcover copies.
