To while away a wet Saturday afternoon I investigated the bestsellers of all time. Wikipedia provides such a list.  It starts out with the great books, The Bible, The Koran, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao and a Chinese dictionary.  Between 2.5 million and 6 million Bibles may have been produced.  Some 6.5 billion copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao are said to have been produced – more than two thirds of them languished in factories and warehouses and were not distributed.

Outside this list, we reach household names. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens has sold more than 200 million copies since first publication in 1859. Since publication in 1954 over 150 million copies of Lords of the Rings have been sold. The Agatha Christie title And Then There Were None has sold over 100 million copies.

The Da Vinci Code, The Catcher in The Rye, The Alchemist, Anne of Green Gables, Black Beauty and The Name of the Rose are all titles that have sold in excess of 50 million copies.

Some famous books that I enjoy are in a lower league. The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird have both sold about 30 million copies. The Wind in the Willows and Animal Farm have sold 25 million copies each. Some 16 million copies of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy have been sold since it was first published in 1979.  Moving lower in the league, just over 10 million copies of Catch 22 and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory have been sold respectively.

Having established the number of copies sold for these titles I turned my attention to the famous serials. This research revealed the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter Books. Over 400 million Harry Potter books have been sold.  This places the James Bond books by Ian Fleming with their sales of over 100 million copies firmly in the second division. Household titles such as the Thomas the Tank Engine series with cumulative sales of 90 million copies and the Winnie the Pooh titles with sales of 70 million copies are in a lower league again.

My next task was to look at the list of best selling authors. This is also available from Wikipedia. Agatha Christie, Barbara Cartland, Harold Robbins, Georges Simenon, Enid Blyton, Danielle Steel and Dr Seuss rank as the best selling authors of all time. When I looked at this list I was struck by just how prolific some authors could be. John Creasy wrote 600 crime novels, Barbara Carland wrote 723 romances, Enid Blyton wrote 800 books for children while the Spanish lady, Corín Tellado, wrote a staggering excess of 4,000 romances.

My next investigation looked at the average number of copies sold per book by the prolific writers. Some authors such as J.K.Rowling, Harold Robbins, Agatha Christie and Lewis Carol have achieved very respectable average sales of over 20 million copies per book.

I list a few of the average sales per book for some well known authors below.

 Information is derived from Wikip

edia Best Selling Authors

 In future articles I am hoping to look a little more into the business of writing.

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