The SFF All-Time Sales List

[Jussi]

Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn has sold at least six million copies around the world since it was published in 1968

Lloyd Alexander

More than 3 million copies of The Chronicles of Prydain in print!

Adam Roberts' The Soddit

Over 100,000 copies already sold in the U.K.

Michael Gerber

Sales of the individual Barry Trotter titles now at more than half a million

Michelle Paver

The book that started a series that has sold over 2.5 million copies in 30 languages worldwide.

Seth Grahame-Smith

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was GCP's first book with Seth, and marked his highly successful transition into hardcover. It debuted at #4 on the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for fifteen consecutive weeks. It has netted over 240,000 copies to date and has reprinted 5 times. The trade paperback was also a huge success, netting over 121,000 copies. The movie tie-in editions of AL:VH (April 1, 2012) promise to be big hits as well. His previous paperback novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, debuted at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list. It has sold over a million copies and been translated into 20 languages.

[Jussi]

Mercedes Lackey

Lackey is one of the world’s most popular authors with some 20 million copies in print.

James Dashner

James Dashner is the bestselling author of THE MAZE RUNNER series, which has 2.3 million copies in print

Samuel R. Delany

With over a million sales, Dhalgren is by far Delany's most popular book

A. C. Crispin

Tor Books commissioned her to write what is perhaps still her most widely read work, the 1984 novelization of the television miniseries, V, which sold more than a million copies.

William Gibson's Neuromancer

By 2007 it had sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.

[Jussi]

Jerry Pournelle & Larry Niven:

Larry Niven and I have sold six million copies of Lucifer's Hammer.

http://www.yoyow.com...ypournelle.html

and by morning we had an outline for The Mote in God’s Eye and that book has sold like four million copies.

http://wiki.twit.tv/..._223/Transcript

[David Selig]

Sherrilyn Kenyon

With more than thirty million copies of her books in print, in over one hundred countries,

[Jussi]

Greg Bear's books have sold "millions of copies".

Piers Anthony:

Since then eleven of the thirty+ Xanth books have become best-sellers. Exact figures are difficult to come by, but A Spell for Chameleon has sold well over one million copies, and the sales of the overall series are surely in the tens of millions.

http://moongadget.com/xanth/

The latest pun-filled volume in Anthony's Xanth series, the best selling fantasy series in paperback--with a combined in-print figure of more than 2 million copies.

http://www.bookadda....0-9780613033008

[Free Northman]

Great to see such a list, but I do seriously question some of the data.

My favourite author, David Gemmell is listed at 1 million+. Now this is seriously questionable to me. Over his lifetime he published something like 30 books.

Virtually every book was a top seller. If he is sitting at a mere 1.5 million or thereabouts, that means an average Gemmell book only sold around 50,000 copies? Is that realistic? Is 50,000 per book a good sales figure for a popular novelist?

[Jussi]

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman:

Initially rejected by 18 publishers, it has since sold over a million copies.

Rick Hautala was one of the 80's horror boom authors.

With more than three million copies of his books in print, Rick Hautala has established himself as one of America's best-loved authors of horror fiction.

Peter Straub

With over 10 million copies of his novels in print

Paul S. Kemp

all in I've sold over a million copies worldwide

[SeanF]

Great to see such a list, but I do seriously question some of the data.

My favourite author, David Gemmell is listed at 1 million+. Now this is seriously questionable to me. Over his lifetime he published something like 30 books.

Virtually every book was a top seller. If he is sitting at a mere 1.5 million or thereabouts, that means an average Gemmell book only sold around 50,000 copies? Is that realistic? Is 50,000 per book a good sales figure for a popular novelist?

Legend and Waylander are still on sale in virtually every bookshop, together with his Troy series, so I'd imagine that's an underestimate.

[Jussi]

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card:

Ender's Game is one of the most popular science fiction epics with seven million copies sold.

http://au.ibtimes.co...phic-format.htm

Orson Scott Card’s book has sold millions of copies and it’s still going: in 2012, it was the bestselling science fiction book with over 100,000 copies sold.

http://blogs.publish...ations-of-2013/

Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern

which have sold over 18 million copies.

David Eddings:

Belgarath, the shape-changing wizard who stars in Eddings's "Belgariad" and "Malloreon" fantasy series - which together have sold more than seven million books

http://ls2content.tl...0345373243&upc=

Combined sales of the six Sparhawk books have reached over 1.5 million copies, and they keep selling.

http://www.bokkilden...produktId=81837

[Jussi]

Robert A. Heinlein

They’ve sold over 30 million copies in the U.S. and 100 million worldwide.

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth

Twenty-five years after first publication, writing in The Way The Future Was, Pohl estimated that it had sold perhaps ten million copies in twenty-five languages.

[SeanF]

While it's not SFF, I was most impressed to learn that Pride and Prejudice sold 110,000 copies worldwide in 2012, 200 years after it was written. If Jane Austen was alive today, she'd be a multi-millionaire.

[Jussi]

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber

with between three and four million copies of the series sold.

This figure is from 1988.

[David Selig]

Heinlein selling 70 mln. outside of US (compared to 30 mln. in it) seems hard to believe to me, I've always thought he's much more popular in his own country than abroad.

[Jussi]

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

20 million copies sold in 40 languages.

Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley

One of the most famous and popular series of all time, with over 5 million copies in print

Andre Norton

A voice for the Andre Estate told me once that they were pretty sure Andre's works have sold over 90 million copies in 67 countries. As a dedicated fan of Andre's this site and I shall attempt to prove it.

Christopher Golden

There are more than eight million copies of his books in print.

[Werthead]

I went with the 2 million figure for Piers Anthony. It seems a little low, but the BS he was speaking about Tolkien elsewhere in the interview (he had to pay someone to publish LotR? Er, no) doesn't fill me with confidence about his own claims. Anthony is also pretty much unknown outside the United States and he'd need a substantial international audience to hit tens of millions of sales like he claims.

My favourite author, David Gemmell is listed at 1 million+. Now this is seriously questionable to me. Over his lifetime he published something like 30 books.

Virtually every book was a top seller. If he is sitting at a mere 1.5 million or thereabouts, that means an average Gemmell book only sold around 50,000 copies? Is that realistic? Is 50,000 per book a good sales figure for a popular novelist?

Gemmell's total sales appear to between 1 and 1.5 million. Gemmell never made enough from his books so he could stop writing, and lived from book to book. I think he had quite a nice house and lived quite well, but to support that he needed to keep writing. The main reason for his low sales is that he never cracked the USA and got a good US publisher behind him (same problem Banks has, or used to have before Orbit US took off, actually). If he had, his sales would easily by a lot higher.

And yes, 50,000 copies per book is actually very good. Some authors stay in print selling only 10,000 copies or so per book.

Heinlein selling 70 mln. outside of US (compared to 30 mln. in it) seems hard to believe to me, I've always thought he's much more popular in his own country than abroad.

That seems an implausible figure. Heinlein is a giant of SF in the USA, but he is nowhere near as popular outside of it. Most of his books have been out of print in the UK for years, for example, with only Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress staying in-print for a long time (even Stranger in a Strange Land tends to go in and out of print). There is no way he's sold as many copies as Clarke worldwide, or even close. OTOH, the 20-30 million range for worldwide sales does seem very believable.

If Jane Austen was alive today, she'd be a multi-millionaire

Billionaire, easily.

[Jussi]

Markus Heitz

Heitz's four Dwarves novels have been best-sellers in his native Germany and have moved some 1.5 million copies worldwide.

Elizabeth Moon

The Paladin's Legacy series is set in the same world as Moon's Paksenarrion series, which has sold close to one million copies worldwide

I found some figures for Iain M. Banks:

1.1 million figure is only for the Culture series in the UK. Banks wrote SF novels outside the Culture, and his worldwide sales must be higher.

Iain M. Banks's Culture series is the most popular in the SF genre, having sold 1.1 million books through UK BookScan

Surface Detail was a Sunday Times bestseller in hardback and has so far sold nearly 100,000 copies in the UK in all formats

http://www.littlebro...gue_aut2012.pdf

[Jussi]

Glen Duncan

The Last Werewolf was a national best seller and has more than 140,000 copies in print across all formats. Talulla Rising was a regional best seller and continues to broaden Glen Duncan’s audience.

Dan Abnett

He is the fan-favourite author of over thirty Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 novels, and has sold nearly three million copies in over a dozen languages.

Dan Simmons

Hyperion has been translated to about 20 languages and has sold well over a million copies worldwide

Brian Lumley

In America alone Necroscope has sold more than 3 million copies.

[Darth Richard]

Tangent! The B&N by me doesn't even CARRY any Gemmell.

[3CityApache]

Jussi, have you ever found any data for Matthew Wooding Stover sales? I was wondering if his absence on Wert's list is only an oversight.

[Jussi]

Sorry, I haven't found.

Maybe Stephen Donaldson should be higher on the list. He believed in 2004 that Lord Foul's Bane has sold ten million copies alone.

You mentioned in your Essay on Modern Fantasy that Lord Foul's Bane had sold 5 million copies. As that was many years ago, I was wondering if you could tell us what the current sales totals are for your works.

I don't have anything like reliable figures. I do get US and UK royalty statements; but information from other countries is sketchy at best. However, I think we can safely say that LFB is up around 10 million copies worldwide, with the rest of the "Covenant" books not far behind. Beyond that, who knows?

(09/06/2004)

Donaldson's essay Epic Fantasy in the Modern World was published in 1986.

My first book, Lord Foul's Bane, has now sold close to 5 million copies around the world. In 1983, l out sold every writer in the world except Wilbur Smith - in New Zealand. I was the best-selling author in Alice Springs, Australia, for six months, and in the U.S. my last "Covenant" novel, White Gold Wielder, was on the N. Y. Times bestseller list for 26 weeks, selling close to two hundred thousand copies.