Femi Otedola, the Nigerian billionaire and philanthropist whose business empire spans energy, finance and infrastructure, has broken into the upper ranks of Amazon’s best-selling business memoirs.
His newly released book, Making It Big: Lessons from a Life in Business, published on August 18, 2025, has already reached No. 3 on the retailer’s “Best Sellers in Business Biographies & Memoirs” list.
The memoir, available in two formats, is priced at £14.99 for the paperback edition. That price point positions the book competitively alongside other leading titles in the category.
The ranking places Otedola’s memoir among some of the most influential works in the genre, including Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game: A Confession, currently at No. 1, and Simon Squibb’s What’s Your Dream? at No. 2. His book joins a competitive lineup that also features Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog and Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk.
How Amazon ranks bestselling books
- Amazon’s bestseller rankings, which are updated hourly, reflect what customers are buying in real time. They are based strictly on sales, not reviews or ratings, with more weight given to recent purchases.
- This means a title that generates a sudden surge in sales can quickly climb the charts, even ahead of books with much larger lifetime totals.
- Rankings are also category-specific, so a book may place highly in Business Biographies & Memoirs even if it ranks lower in the overall Books chart.
What we know about the book
For Otedola, the milestone represents more than just commercial success. His memoir recounts his rise from modest beginnings in Nigeria to becoming one of Africa’s most prominent business figures. It blends personal anecdotes with lessons on leadership, resilience and risk-taking themes that have defined his career.
The son of Sir Michael Otedola, a former governor of Lagos State, he carved his own path in business in the early 2000s. In 2003, he identified a gap in Nigeria’s downstream petroleum market and secured financing to establish Zenon Petroleum and Gas Ltd. Within a year, he invested 15 billion naira in storage facilities and shipping vessels, expanding Zenon into a key player in fuel distribution. Over time, his interests broadened to power generation, financial services and philanthropy, reinforcing his reputation as a visionary entrepreneur.
“Making It Big is not simply about my journey,” Otedola wrote in the book’s preface. “It is about the principles and choices that anyone, regardless of background, can apply in pursuit of their goals.”
