O.J. Simpson’s Book If I Did It Hits No. 1 on Multiple Amazon Bestseller Lists After His Death

O.J. Simpson’s controversial book If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer has shot straight to the top of multiple bestseller lists after his death.

Sales for the book in print and audio forms have soared on Amazon since his death from cancer on Apr. 10.

The paperback book currently holds the No. 1 spot in Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Rich & Famous Biographies,” while its audiobook version is No. 1 in “Bestsellers in Criminology.” 

TMZ was first to report the news.

Simpson’s death has re-sparked interest in his infamous criminal case — in which he was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

In his book, which was released in 2007, the former NFL player detailed how he would have “hypothetically” committed the murders of both Brown and Goldman. While the book saw success, the road to publishing it wasn't an easy one.

Publisher Judith Regan announced in 2006 that she would publish a book by Simpson through ReganBooks, a former imprint of HarperCollins, after she claimed she previously received a call from his legal team.

“I received a phone call from an attorney who said that O.J. was ready to confess,” Regan alleged. “The next day, I called him back and he said he was willing to do it, and the only condition that he had was that he didn’t want to call the book I Did It. He wanted to put an ‘if’ in front of it, so he would have deniability with his children.”

The book sold for a reported $3.5 million and was set to publish on Nov. 30, 2006. But outrage from the public and the victims' families eventually led to the book’s publication being canceled. It wasn't until a year later that it would eventually see the light of day.

In 2007, a judge awarded the rights of the book to Ron Goldman’s family to help to satisfy a 1997 $33.5 million wrongful death judgment against Simpson, which had grown to $38 million at the time.

The judge presiding over that case found that Lorraine Brooke Associates, a company run by Simpson’s daughter, Arnelle, with the Simpson children as the main shareholders, had been founded in an attempt to hide the former NFL broadcast’s involvement with the book. This eventually led the judge to award the rights to the Goldmans, according to a CBS report at the time. 

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With the rights secured, the Goldman family published a revised edition of If I Did It in 2007, which not only included Simpson’s original text, but additional commentary from the Goldman family, the book’s original ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves and journalist Dominick Dunne.

The Browns were awarded a 10% cut of the book’s first gross proceeds, while the Goldmans were awarded all royalties from the book's sales.