THE BESTSELLER IN WORLD LITERATURE: PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE

Robert Sheppard, Editor-in-Chief, World Literature Forum

by Robert Sheppard

Editor-in-Chief, World Literature Forum

All literary authors have a love-hate relationship with the institution of “The Bestseller,” ranging in serial mood swings from maddening envy to contemptuous disdain. Do they not belong to that category of “throw-away literature” that the stampeding lemmings “must have” this year and are mercifully forgotten the next? Are not the 80 million copies sold of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code living proof of the devil’s dilemma that bad writing in the dumbed-down demotic idiom of “Bestsellerese” spiced with a little cheap sensationalism will make the hottest commodity?——a fortiori the case of the 90 million copies sold of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, a work whose writing, plot and characters are so vapid as to even leave in despair any hope of rising the level of literary mediocrity? Mephistopheles as a literary agent remains heavily overbooked, and not a few authors of possible talent have exchanged the dream of the “Gadarene marketing moment” for that of the epiphany of the spirit.

Yet many books that proved to be part of the canon of masterpieces also attained remarkable sales: Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities sold 200 million copies, Tolstoy’s War and Peace 40 million, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Orwell’s 1984 achieved 25 million each. That is not to mention the mega-distribution of the great religious scriptures with the Bible printed in over 5 billion copies and the Koran close behind at 4 billion. Such classics, however, rarely made the “Bestseller Lists” as they had rather the long-term staying power of the “slowseller,” the classical tortoise which eventually surpasses the exhausted hare of the bestseller sprint.

In the book publishing trade, however, the notion of the “Bestseller” usually is confined to fiction or non-fiction, with a special focus on the bestselling novel which attains a high volume of sales in a short period, perhaps in the corruption of language better described as a “Fastseller” or “Bigseller” than a single “Bestseller” per se. Indeed, the term “Bestseller” is a corruption in logic, as “best” implies only a single superlative book, whereas in the common idiom of the “Bestseller List” the status is conferred weekly or annually on at least ten books simultaneously.

Yet the phenomenon of “the Bestseller,” despite the common deficit of quality remains a category of great interest, presumed to conceal some long sought for “secret of success,” and moreover a very meaningful “snapshot of public consciousness,” which like the ever shifting Gallup polls gives insight into the shifting life of the public mind over time.  It is a key to the much beloved quest to “get rich quick.” It is also an x-ray or diagnostic photo of the commercial structure of the book industry including its evolving institutions of publicity, promotion, discount selling and pricing, pulp and paperback distribution, the movie-like “star system” of author personal branding,  the concentration of the publishing industry into oligopolistic mega-firms themselves part of diversified media and advertising complexes, and even most recently, with the rise of the Internet, the e-Book and viral marketing exemplified in such phenomena as “Fifty Shades of Gray,” a reflection of the changing core technology, concept and essence of “the book” itself.

THE BESTSELLER: A SNAPSHOT OF MASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN TIME

Of course authors for centuries have sought the key to the puzzle of what makes a bestseller. While there are some recurrk�) patterns the answer remains elusive. Take the year 1923, the date of the emergence of James Joyce’s Ulysses, voted the greatest novel of the last hundred years by critics in 2000, alongside T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. The Number One bestselling novel of that year, however, was far from any of those classics, but rather Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton, a semi-sci-fi tech fantasy account of a women’s rejuvenation through a Viennese scientist’s then cutting-edge X-ray technology. This mythos of the eternally youthful beautiful woman was part of the “Roaring 20’s” cult of “the Flapper” or independent woman cut free from tradition, biology and time, itself a subset of the “Golden Youth” generation epitomized by Fitzgerald’s “be forever young or die now” novel The Beautiful and the Damned of the same year and The Great Gatsby published two years later. It was a forerunner of the later work After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Aldous Huxley’s saga of an ageing California billionaire’s high-tech search for the biological secret of immortality. Black Oxen thus epitomized and gave expression to the “consciousness of the moment” and became “the book of the day” for its camera-flash moment, to be deservedly forgotten as that moment in history faded and passed away.

THE HISTORY OF THE BESTSELLER:   INVENTED IN AMERICA

The old Hollywood saw, that “show business” is half “show” and half “business” is equally valid for the literary scene, as the existence of the phenomenon of “the bestseller” is also a reflection of the evolution and pressures of book trade and book market as business as much as a reflection of the collective stream of human consciousness. The existence of any book is half the product of creative art and half the product of business. “Bigness” is synonymous with “Americanness.” In the book trade, it was in America that the market for books first grew to the Brobingdadian proportions which would make the blockbuster numbers of copies sold and the concept of “The Bestseller” possible.

But it was not only the demographics of shear numbers which made huge book sales possible, but also the quintessentially American democratic rise of mass literacy and middle-class incomes, coupled with a highly competitive book market which drove down the price of books to allow the public to make mass-volume purchases.

The dynamics of the literary marketplace and its practices also drive the quest for bestsellerdom. In traditional mass marketing for trade books there is a narrow “window of opportunity” for a new release novel. The practice of “remainder and return” allows book retailers in traditional marketing channels to bulk order, display the new release on the shelves and then, if the book does not sell, return the unsold books to the publisher without cost or for credit. Thus practically speaking a new release must get out of the gate running and “do or die” within a month or two. This encourages the retailer to take a chance on the book but also encourages it to pull the plug on the book. Thus, all new releases are forced to compete for “bestseller status” on penalty of marketing death, a “winner take all” form of capitalism that celebrates the bestseller winners but ignores the death of the much greater number of new releases without as efficient a marketing machine behind them.

Charles Dickens Complained Bitterly That US Law Did Not Protect Foreign Copyrights and His Books Were Mercilessly Pirated in America

AMERICA GETS ITS BESTSELLERS THE OLD FASHIONED WAY:  BY STEALING THEM

The achievements of American capitalism have always been ambiguous. The “Robber Barons” have shown the vicious side of capitalism alongside the “creative entrepreneurs” and innovative enterprisers. For the first one-hundred years of the history of the American publishing industry the “flag of free enterprise” was that of the Jolly Roger. Bestsellers were priced low enough to become accessible to the ordinary middle-class reader in significant part because most of the editions were pirated by virtue of the refusal of the US government until 1891 to join in the relevant international copyright conventions that were beginning to secure authors’ rights across Europe. The dominance of American publishing was built on blatant theft and piracy of famous works by European authors, a condition famously denounced by Dickens on his visits to America and hypocritically forgotten by those wishing to paint America as the eternal champion of intellectual property rights.  The scholar F.L. Mott in his seminal work “Overall Best Sellers in the United States” surveyed the history of book sales in the US for books which sold copies numbering over 1% of the total population in the decade of their publication, his working definition of “bestsellerdom.” He found that from 1776 to 1900 of the 124 “bestsellers” thus defined in America, 74 were of British origin and largely published in pirated American editions which paid no copyright to their authors, while another 15 were by other European authors, leaving native American authors who were protected by American copyright far behind. Thus the “Mother Country” continued to subsidize her rebellious American offspring and underwrite its literature far after political independence. The American book, piratically immune from the cost of copyright evolved as a radically less expensive book sold closer to production cost that ultimately was affordable to the common man. US book prices often being five to ten times less expensive than premium editions of the same book in Britain, a foundational fact which made the rise of the American bestseller possible. This piratical condition persisted until 1891 when the passage of the Chase Act in the US finally brought American law into accord with European copyright by recognition of the enforceability of foreign copyright rights within America.

Robber Barons at Work

ANTI-BESTSELLERISM IN BRITAIN:  CARTEL PRICE-FIXING UNDER THE “NET BOOK AGREEMENT” AND THE “TRADITIONAL MARKETING AGREEMENT” (NBA & TMA)

While freewheeling piratical capitalism drove down the price of books in the US and nurtured a book-buying middle class mass market, monopoly capitalism and price-fixing cartels in the UK drove the price up and resulted in a middle-class book-borrowing public who subscribed to commercial and public lending libraries to deal with the artificially high cost of books. A principal reason for this was the price-fixing system known as the “Net Book Agreement” whereby the top British publishers formed a cartel and a system of contractual controls over retailers and distributors forbidding “discounting” of books, or lowering the price below the high price fixed by the publisher—-forbidding any “sale” or promotion. Free market-minded violators would be subject to industry boycotts, reprisals and law suits and generally driven out of business by the ruling cartel. Adam Smith, often quoted as the father of the “free enterprise system” was nevertheless a canny enough observer of actual market capitalism to observe and warn: “Put any three members of the same profession in a room for fifteen minutes and you are sure to generate a conspiracy against the public.” In this the British publishing industry proved true to form in enforcing a high cost of books to the general public for their private profit through both the Net Book Agreement (NBA) and its twin pillar of monopoly cartelization, the Traditional Marketing Agreement (TMA). The results of this anti-competitive system were not all bad however, as protected publishers had the extra resources to develop new authors and talent as well as means of compensating authors well with royalties. The system also subsidized the smaller “highbrow” market for quality literary works with profits derived from the low and middle-brow mass markets. The system militated, however, against large “bestseller” sales comparable to the American market and encouraged library borrowing rather than individual consumer purchasing of high-priced books. The absence in Britain of the American practice of publishers accepting returns of unsold book inventories without cost to the retailer also discouraged bulk stocking and buying for resale and hence impeded large-volume bestseller marketing. The cartelized price-fixed structure of the British market under the Net Book Agreement continued until 1995 when it was abolished as incompatible with the free market and anti-monopoly principles of the European Union. Thereafter, under the pressures of free and fierce competition the American and British markets tended to merge into one Transatlantic market whose larger scale increased the scope for “bestsellers,” and indeed encouraged the movement towards Mergers & Acquisitions in which the large publishing houses swallowed up one another to become global conglomerates such as HarperCollins, often attached to larger media and multi-national marketing complexes. Such mega-firms looking to global markets increasingly raised the stakes in search of “blockbusters” or super-star global bestsellers, often squeezing out or buying out smaller rivals in a “winner takes all” literary marketplace.

The “Traditional Marketing Agreement” (TMA) was a parallel system for dividing the English-language publishing market into protected “spheres of influence” grounded in the geographical division of copyright rights transferred by authors to publishers. If you are an author who has dealt with a literary agent and publisher you may wonder why the copyright rights are divided into “American Rights” and “British & Commonwealth Rights” and sold separately. This derives from an imperial division of the global English-language book market between the American publishers and the British publishers after the accession of the US to international copyright protection in the 1890’s. That development might have resulted in global competition across national borders in a free for all that might have lowered the cost of English-language books for consumers worldwide. But, the big players in the industry had a “better idea.” Instead a delegation of British publishing magnates crossed the Atlantic and in New York negotiated the “Traditional Marketing Agreement” whereby the two publishing communities, American and British, agreed not to compete head to head but to confine themselves to protected spheres of influence. Copyright rights for the same book were negotiated separately for the American sphere of influence and the British sphere of influence, and if successful the book was sub-contracted for publication in the other’s sphere of influence to a leading status quo publisher there, rather than opening up head-to-head Transatlantic direct competition. The result was a global condominium of profits controlled by the big publishers in their respective domains. Like the Net Book Agreement these price-fixing and cartelization regimes continued until challenges from anti-trust authorities in the US and EU along with competitive and technological pressures resulted in their breakdown towards the end of the 20^th Century, ushering in an era of globalized market competition and global industry consolidation.

In fact, the culture of the British publishing industry for the hundred years from the 1890’s to the 1990’s was hostile to the idea of the bestseller, with the more genteel and upper-class disdain for the “consumer stampede” by the masses in their millions for a mass-commodity. Even the practice of compiling “Best Seller Lists” as exemplified in the US by the New York Times Bestseller List, the “Bookman” List from 1895, the “Publisher’s Weekly” List from 1912 and others, was frowned upon in the UK as an American barbarism of Babbitian proportions, and it was only in the 1970’s  and the increasing Americanization and Thatcherization of the British publishing industry including the rise of the chain stores that “Bookseller” began to assemble such statistics for the UK trade and the Sunday Times began to make them available for the reading public.

A Special Relationship

THE UK-USA SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

Winston Churchill once famously quipped that America and Britain were two nations “divided by a common language.” That Churchill had an American mother and partnered with Franklin Roosevelt in saving the world from Fascism in WWII underscores the resilience of the “special relationship” which extends to the present not only in political cooperation but also through a shared literary and cultural community. Before 1776 America was decidedly junior in this relationship. As has been observed above, from 1776 to 1900, abetted by copyright piracy, British authors actually constituted the majority of bestsellers in America. With the loss of Empire and the foundational fact that the US had six times the population of the UK and commercial dominance after 1900 the American side of the partnership gradually became ascendant until the marketplace after the 1990’s merged into a common Transatlantic English-language publishing market. Even with the ascendency of the US the tradition of strong British literary influence and leadership continued, even as America found itself largely parochial and resistant to reading works from non-English outside authors. The bond of a common language and shared culture of ideas has proven resilient. The following table illustrates the continuing strong Transatlantic British literary influence over the past century:

ORIGIN OF BESTSELLERS ON US BESTSELLER LISTS 1900-2000 (%)

Reciprocally, leveraging the huge home market of American publishers along with the rise of globally recognized American authors allowed American books to heavily influence British and Commonwealth literature, just as Hollywood often dominated the English-language film market in Britain, the Commonwealth countries and Europe.

Money: The Supreme Fiction of Our Times

HOW MANY BOOKS DO YOU NEED TO SELL TO BECOME A “BESTSELLER?”

Of course there is no fixed rule for defining “bestseller” status. In any year the “Number One” on the relevant lists may sell from hundreds of thousands to millions of copies. As Einstein is reputed to have observed “everything is relative.” One measure used by the scholar F.L. Mott cited above was the criterion that the book sales attain 1% of the total population of the relevant market in the decade of publication. In an America of 300 million persons that would require sales of at least 3 million, with at least 1 million in the first year of publication. Just as movie box-office ticket and revenue numbers are constantly increasing with increased population and globalized markets over the years, so the quantitative definition of bestsellerdom is in constant flux. Nonetheless, in modern times first-year sales in excess of one million have become unexceptional for big-name authors and titles, a considerable shifting of the goalposts from a century before:

By the 1990’s first print runs of 1 million or more were routine for novelists such as Jean Auel, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, John Grisham and Danielle Steele. From 1986, the year that the hardcover went mass market Auel’s The Mammoth Hunters, Michener’s Texas and Garrison Keilor’s Lake Woebegon Days all sold more than one million expensive hardback copies in the first year. A first year sales volume of more than 1,000,000 in today’s enlarged market is far from exceptional for the “A-Listers.”

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE BESTSELLER

Tom Paine’s Common Sense Sold One Book for every Five Men, Women and Children in 1776 in America

In America perhaps the first acclaimed “bestseller” was not a work of fiction but rather the political tract “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, a British author turned American citizen at the time of the American Revolution. In 1776 this book reportedly attained sales of over 500,000 copies at a time when the total population of the 13 American colonies totaled only 3 million, ensuring that distribution effectively reached every American family. This revolutionary work truly influenced World History as few have ever done, and is credited with turning the American people decisively towards the Declaration of Independence in 1776, as well as being a key document in catalyzing the French Revolution in its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the abandonment of the institution of monarchy in 1789. Indeed, many bestsellers connected with key social issues are intimately connected with the rise of democracy upon a tide of public consciousness, as for example the immense success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin upon the upsurge of the Abolitionist Movement and the rise of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath upon the upsurge of the Democratic Party and Roosevelt’s New Deal following the Great Depression.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin—Bestseller of Social Conscience

In Britain, Sir Walter Scott developed the mass market with his historical romances such as Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and the Waverly novels, a development that had worldwide influence. James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels such as The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer were an Americanization of Scott’s formula, shifting the venue to the American frontier. So great was the influence of Scott’s historical romances that Mark Twain, in riposte to Abraham Lincoln’s famous greeting of Harriet Beecher Stowe with the observation “So you are the little lady that started the big war” blamed the excessive Romanticism in the pirated editions of Walter Scott, particularly in the American South, for the beginnings of the American Civil War.

Mass publishing developed further with the close nexus between novels and newspapers both in America and across Britain and Europe. One of the problems with estimating the extent of “bestsellerdom” from the 1830’s onward was the fact that many novels were first serialized either in newspapers or in pulp literary magazines before the chapters were bound together and published as complete books. Thus Dickens’ major novels such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist achieved massive serialized publication that dwarfed the later sales of the books. In essence the serialized chapters were the equivalent of modern television series and dominated popular consciousness to such an extent as illustrated by the classic anecdote of the longshoremen in New York calling up to the British sailors on deck of the arriving oceanliners and asking on the gangplanks “Is Little Nell dead?” Similarly in France Dumas’ works such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo had immense serialized newspaper and magazine circulation in addition to the bound book sales. From the 1840’s in America many novels were given away or sold serialized as “Extras” or supplements within newspapers. Bestseller statistics often overlook this form of mass circulation of novels.

Gone With the Wind: From Blockbuster Bestseller to Immortal Cinema Classic

FROM BESTSELLER GENRE FICTION TO MOVIES & TELEVISION SERIES

Popular fiction after the Civil War also developed in the direction of “Pulp” or “Dime Novels” with such series as “Deadwood Dick,” “Nick Carter,” “Horatio Alger,” “Ragged Dick” and “Buffalo Bill Cody.” These were forerunners of genre fiction including, Westerns, Romance, Detective Stories, Melodrama and Horror which would sell millions of copies. Many of these fiction genres developed further to become the classical genres of movies and later television series, again exemplified by Westerns, Romance, Crime and Detective fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Thrillers, Gothic, Horror, Action and Adventure Films, Children’s stories and cartoons, Melodrama and “Soap Operas,” and situation comedies. For many of us we are more familiar with the movie and television adaptations than the original genre or bestselling books they are based on: Zane Grey’s westerns such as Riders of the Purple Sage, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason  series, Louis L’Amour’s Hondo, Max Brand’s Destry Rides Again and Doctor Kildare, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place, all of which sold millions of book copies before and after being transformed into movies or televisions series.

The first novel ever to be optioned and rendered as a movie was Thomas Dixon’s Ku Klux Clan epic The Clansman, a bestseller in 1905. D.W. Griffiths paid $2000 for the subsidiary rights to the book and rendered it in his “Birth of a Nation,” which despite its controversial subject matter for many years remained both the top-grossing film in cinema history and a touchstone for the development of the art of cinematic narrative.

“Hard-boiled” detective and private-eye fiction developed millions of readers before being transformed into the “noir” film genre epitomized by such classics as Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade thriller The Maltese Falcon later filmed by John Huston with Humphrey Bogart, Lon Chaney and Sidney Greenstreet. Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlow was introduced in 1938 with The Big Sleep, accompanied by such classics as James Caine’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and others of the noir genre.

Britain also had its parallel tradition, with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes at the forefront, along with Sapper’s upper-class clubland thug Bulldog Drummond, Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, Leslie Charteris’ Simon Templar in The Saint, and of course the Queen of the Whodunit, Agatha Christie.

The Case of Agatha Christie: Over 2 Billion Books Sold But Never a Bestseller

THE CASE OF AGATHA CHRISTIE—NOT A BESTSELLER?

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was never “Number One” on any bestseller list. She only came close in 1975 placing as No. 2 with Curtain and No. 2 in 1976 with Sleeping Murder. Yet her cumulative sales have been credited by the Guinness Book of Records as the very bestselling novelist ever, with a cumulative total, including translations into all major languages, of over two billion volumes—ranking with the Bible and Koran in mass distribution. This highlights an internal contradiction and conundrum in the very concept of “the bestseller” as the best selling genre novelist over half a century never attained the “fastseller” status of attaining the top spot on the lists, as had Margaret Mitchell with Gone With the Wind at over 1,000,000 first year sales or Harper Lee with To Kill A Mockingbird. Tellingly of the “bestseller” category, both Mitchell and Lee only wrote a single novel, a relative “flash in the pan” compared to the decades-long productivity of Christie. Similar conditions recur with genre-prolific writers such as Barbara Cartland and her 600+ romances, Georges Simenon, Louis D’Amour and others.

THE SEX NOVEL AS BESTSELLER

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover

“Sex Sells” is a byword of popular advertising and a genre of the “sex novel” developed to prove its validity. Anita Loos pioneered this in the 20’s with her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, later to be made into a classic movie starring Marilyn Monroe. Erskine Caldwell achieved similar success with steamy Southern sagas as God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road, also rendered as hit films. Similar sexual supersellers include Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers, loosely based on the life of Howard Hughs, and Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s, coupled with the “Paperback Revolution” in lower-cost bestsellers, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover finally overcame legal persecution and suppression to become a bestseller and a popular film. Genre sexuality kept its momentum with Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place along with romances and “bodice rippers” such as Cartland, Danielle Steele and Jacqueline Suzanne’s The Valley of the Dolls (No. 1 in 1966).

RELIGIOUS BESTSELLERS

Charton Heston as Ben Hur in the Movie from the Bestseller by Lew Wallace

If the attractions of the flesh are always with us, so also is the call of the spirit, especially in religious America. The religious theme seems to be a recurrent niche in the domain of bestsellerdom, with such works as Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, Lloyd Douglas’ The Robe and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps attaining bestseller status and rendition in film. Tim La Haye gave this area a new twist with the Left Behind fictionalization of the Book of Revelation, as did Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code.

Global Blockbuster Bestseller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

THE SPY THRILLER—-FROM ASHENDEN TO BOND TO CLANCY

Author Ian Fleming and His Cinema James Bond Superspy Heroes

Somerset Maugham established the genre of the MI6 spy thriller with his Ashenden in 1928, building on prior classics such as Conrad’s Secret Agent. John Buchan had already made significant headway in this area during the war years with Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, rendered in film by Alfred Hitchcock and Greenmantle.  The genre came into prominence after WWII with the epic James Bond series of Ian Fleming, complemented by Graham Greene and such masters as John Le Carre with bestsellers such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and The Honorable Schoolboy. Tom Clancy rendered the format in the American context of the CIA with his Jack Ryan series including Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October also rendered on the big screen.

Bond Franchise Bestsellers

SCIENCE FICTION BESTSELLERS

ET Bestseller Book & Blockbuster Movie

Ray Bradbury with novels such as Fahrenheit 451, his satire on philistine driven TV culture, broke out of the genre ghetto and began to attract a mass readership and critical acclaim. Epics such as Frank Herbert’s Dune became cult classics, as did Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy.  Michael Crichton’s technothriller The Andromeda Strain was the first Science Fiction work to break into the Bestseller ranks. Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of Stanley Kubrick’s epic film 2001 A Space Odyssey (originally based on one of Clarke’s short stories) leveraged the cinema exposure to attain bestseller status. Similarly, such tie-ins as William Kotzwinkle’s novelization of ET: The Extraterrestrial and The Return of the Jedi Storybook achieved No. 1 Bestseller status.

CHILDREN’S BOOK BESTSELLERS

R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps Franchise—Over 300 Million Copies Sold

Children’s books are often some of the highest selling publications, though not often as year to year bestsellers. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exuperay sold more than 140 million copies cumulatively  while C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sold over 85 million. Anne of the Green Gables, Charlotte’s Web and Black Beauty each achieved sales of 50 million. The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter sold over 45 million copies. Some children’s’ series have achieved prodigious sales, such as R.L. Stine’s child-horror series which has had sales of over 300 million copies, and even such works as Clifford the Big Red Dog have reached sales of over 110 million copies.

FANTASY BESTSELLERS

Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings Trilogy: Over 140 Million Copies Sold

The father of the fantasy genre and a cult classic was J.R.R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings Trilogy, later rendered into Oscar-winning films. Sales of the Tolkien franchise reached over 150 million. That incredible volume was overshadowed by another Britisher, J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter franchise, which sold over 450 million.

J.K. Rowling and the HarryPotter Franchise: 450 Million Copies Sold

WILL MY OWN NOVEL SPIRITUS MUNDI BECOME A GLOBAL BLOCKBUSTER BESTSELLER?

Spiritus Mundi by Robert Sheppard—Reportedly the Next Big Blockbuster!

Yes, Yes, Yes!—–Everyone close their eyes and repeat after me: “I believe, I believe, I believe!” The “Big M”—-Momentum for Spiritus Mundi’s bestseller status is building even as we speak, and shortly, very shortly, the evidence of its sales potential for dwarfing “Fifty Shades of Grey” will become as apparent to everyone as the morning’s rising sun! One would be well advised to get your copy now before the global stampede carries away all available stock! I caution the big Hollywood studios to make their bids for the subsidiary film rights now before they are snatched away by the more farseeing masters of the big screen to whom the future belongs.  Yes, I know some have said Spiritus Mundi is of too high a literary quality and of too great a universal vision to fit into the traditional commercial genres and is really too good to become a bestseller, but remember Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities with 200,000,000 sales and Tolstoy’s War and Peace with 40 million! I would even settle for the 25,000,000 sales of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Orwell’s 1984—-I’m not greedy, really—–You know I write to make our world and our literature richer and something as low-minded as fame, money and royalties hardly enters my mind—————much.  I know that God is just and His Eye watches over our earth and universe noting the fall of every sparrow, let alone the fate of works of genius and suffering writers—–and His loving Invisible Hand is at work as we speak!

THE FUTURE OF THE BESTSELLER IN THE AGE OF THE E-BOOK AND THE INTERNET

Whither then the Bestseller? Digitization has impacted every aspect of book publishing, even far beyond the rise of the e-Book and e-Commerce marketing platforms such as Amazon.com. The technological revolution has impacted composition, printing, inventory control, POS (Point-of-Sale) monitoring and marketing, generally reducing the cost of books and thus indirectly enabling the mass-volume sales at the heart of bestsellerdom. Even though the physical traditional may look the same the machinery behind it is half a millennium different.

Marketing and publicity channels have also been revolutionized, with author sites, reader networking sites such as Goodreads, publisher sites, e-Commerce sites such as Amazon.com and blogs exercising a profound influence alongside the “e-Word-of-Mouth” or “Word-of-Mouse” that has digitally supercharged the old channels of Word-of-Mouth and reviews that drove the emergence of traditional bestsellers. Viral marketing, the blogosphere, blogcrit, blogbuzz and bloghype magnify the old interpersonal interactions that have always been at the heart of the literary marketplace.

At the same time the rise of the Global e-Book has expanded the marketplace to worldwide proportions and multiplied potential buyers of books by millions across the globe, bypassing traditional distribution channels, customs control, copyright restrictions and logistical delays. All of this magnifies the potential for newer and greater bestsellers and sales volumes.

Some, nonetheless, have predicted that the Age of the Internet would spell the doom of the bestseller. The argument was that the Internet and e-Commerce would fragment the literary marketplace into a myriad of small niches and genre-specific networks, or result in data-mining and consumer profiling which would focus on the individual, precluding the common mass market on which the bestseller is predicated. In short, the argument was that the new e-Publishing marketplace would be less “List-Driven” and more “Web-Driven.”

The case of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” perhaps the first true “e-Bestseller” belies these conjectures and assures us that the stampede mentality and “Gadarene dynamics” are alive and well on the Web as well as in the traditional channels of “word-of-mouth” and consumer social dynamics. “Man is a social animal” as Aristotle is wont to observe, and the herd instinct and its excesses and irrationalities will probably always be with us no matter how digitized and computerized markets such as the literary marketplace or the stock market become. “Fifty Shades” is definitive proof that the e-Stampede of the consumer lemmings is alive and well in the Age of the Web as before it, and quite as potent in driving the public off the cliff of quality and into the abyss of mass-consumed vapidity.

Reading, it is safe to prophesy, will survive and thrive beyond any technological threshold it is called upon to transit in the course of history. The appetite for on-page (digital or print) fiction and imaginative experience looks to be as insatiable as it ever was, even in competition with its transformations into cinema, video and online media. In the Age of Globalization, which is also the Age of the Internet and Digitization, the literary marketplace seems set to go on expanding, and lowered costs of e-Books, along with rising incomes, higher-education and literacy rates and the continuing role of the English language as the international language of the world supplemented by ample resources for translation, augurs well for the rise of the consumption of literature, good and bad, as well as the periodic emergence of bestsellers and blockbusters across all of the new and old media within this vastly expended literary marketplace. The globalization of the literary marketplace also creates new opportunities for people of all nations and cultures to partake of other cultures and literatures as well as participate in the emergence of our emerging World Literature and of global consciousness shared by all citizens of the world generally. In theory, the marketplace and niche for quality literature should also expand as well as that for “e-Pulp and e-Pap.” We only hope that with time the taste and maturity of the reading public will improve and the quality of those future bestsellers along with it.

List of best-selling single-volume books

More than 100 million copies

Between 50 million and 100 million copies

Between 30 million and 50 million copies

Between 20 million and 30 million copies

Between 10 million and 20 million copies

No reliable sales figures

Note: These books do not have reliable sales data; however, there is evidence that they have sold at least 10 million copies, and therefore belong on this list.

List of best-selling book series

At least 100 million copies

Between 50 million and 100 million copies

Between 30 million and 50 million copies

Between 20 million and 30 million copies

Between 15 million and 20 million copies

MOST PRINTED BOOKS: