Which books are the all-time
bestsellers? Let’s preface the answer
with this: no one really knows for sure.
Why? Sales records are quite poor
and incomplete and generally favor more recent books, where things are recorded
meticulously.
Think about it. Books that were printed say, 150 years ago,
were sold all over the place. We didn’t
have BookScan or some centralized source to identify book sales. In fact, because government records are also
incomplete or get destroyed overtime, and because book sale income taxes
weren’t collected until the past century – there really is no way to know how
many copies of a book were sold.
Unscrupulous publishers would print and sell more copies of a book than
they told an author – dependent on royalties – had sold. Some books where copyrights don’t cover them,
such as those of Shakespeare, The Bible, or Ben Franklin, allow for multiple
publishers and multiple nations to print and sell books and no one is adding
them all up. Let’s also not forget
pirated book sales that continue today in places like China. No one is adding
them up either. And what of books published under pseudonyms, where the
author’s identity was never uncovered?
So, having said all of the above, there
are some noble attempts to gather up sales figures and estimated sales of the
all-time bestselling fictional books.
One such effort was undertaken for an entry in Wikipedia.
An entry entitled "List of best-selling fiction authors" tries to gather up numbers for
authors – not specific books – and it includes all languages.
The list looks to be vastly incomplete,
as too many authors listed were ones who publish in English, while a few are
sprinkled from Russia, France, Spain, China or Japan. I’m sure many nations and languages have
authors who should be on this list.
The list included authors that are
believed to have sold at least 100 million copies of their books, based on
approximate numbers repeated by reliable sources. However, this list didn’t include EL James,
author of the 50 Shades of Grey series, who has been publicly linked to sales
of 125 million copies. Such an omission makes you realize that the list is not
complete by any means.
Still, the list identifies at least 85
authors whom have each sold 100,000,000 copies of their books. Who has sold the most? William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie are
each credited with a range of book sales from two billion copies to four
billion copies. Barbara Cartland (500M
to 1 billion), Danielle Steel (500M – 800M) and Harold Robbins (750M) round out
the top five. Some names are still
seeing soaring sales, such as Dr. Seuss, JK Rowling, Dean Koontz, Stephen King,
James Patterson, Dan Brown, Anne Rice, and David Baldacci.
We’re a nation of numbers and lists, we
like to recite factoids and want them to be accurate. Unfortunately, trying to compile sales figure
lists globally, of all-time, is an impossible taste. But to know – or believe – that at least 85
authors each had 100M copies sold – is interesting. Collectively, they’ve sold billions of books
and have influenced countless numbers of people.
In a world of 7.2 billion people, it
still amazes me that so few authors can crack 100 million copies sold. If any author publishes books for 30 years
and is successful, he or she should sell millions of copies each year. The more
prolific you are, the likelier you’ll get to 100 million copies.
On the other hand, even the most
successful writers have to keep on putting out quality books for a sustained
period of time. They can’t just rest
with one wildly popular book. But, over time, authors will rack up millions of
copies sold each year just of their backlist titles.
One day there will be an author that
will overtake the sales numbers of Shakespeare and Christie simply because the
population will grow so large that it’ll require only a tiny percentage of it
to buy in.
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Brian
Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and
not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email
him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in
the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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