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The SFF All-Time Sales List


Werthead

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Oh lord, that plagiarist hack Paolini really outsold GRRM?

Hopefully not. The last figure for GRRM was 45 million, closing on 50, which I think puts him ahead.

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Richard Morgan

150,000 copies of Richard Morgan titles in print in the UK market alone

Ben Aaronovitch update

With over 500,000 copies sold



Eoin Colfer update

who has sold over 25 million books



Stephenie Meyer update

The books have sold more than 250 million copies



Deborah Harkness update

With more than two million copies sold in the United States



Ed Greenwood update

have sold millions of copies worldwide



Michael J. Sullivan update

more than half a million copies sold so far

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James S.A. Corey

Expanse series, which has over half a million copies sold worldwide

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (June 2014)

Leckie estimates it has sold 30,000 copies so far

Dune by Frank Herbert

It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies.

Spanish numbers from February 2014

Patrick Rothfuss has sold 800,000 of The Kingkiller Chronicle, and Song of Ice and Fire by G.R.R. Martin (popular thanks to the TV series Game of Thrones) has sold 1,200,000 copies.

Anthony Ryan (April 2014)

2nd ever royalty statement arrived - confirming Blood Song has now sold over 100,000 copies worldwide

self-published sales

Blood Song, the first in Ryan's Raven's Shadow trilogy, was initially self-published in 2011, selling 30,000 e-books, thus causing it to be picked for print publication.

John Scalzi

Old Man’s War has sold hundreds of thousands of copies

Myke Cole (2013)

My books have sold close to 40,000 copies in the Eng­lish speaking world, and that’s not counting audio books in the US and UK and trans­la­tions in Ger­many, the Czech Republic and China.

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It would be interesting to see how much book sales improve over time for an author that sells their novels to become films or TV series.

Based on GRRM, Meyer, Collins, Riordan and Roth, the answer is "Lots." :)

Should be good news for Daniel and Ty then.

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It really depends on how well the adaptation does. Any TV show or movie made off a book is going to be, in just about all cases, far and away the biggest advertisement possible for that product. Of course, people have to know it's an advertisement for to be effective. Everyone I've ever mentioned it to had no idea that the Tom Hanks' movie Road to Perdition was based on a graphic novel and there was very little talk about how Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was licensed off Tim Powers' book. Fortunately, studios right now are being very active about promoting their products as based on books so folks like George R.R. Martin and Charlaine Harris have been making a lot of sales thanks to the TV adaptations. Studios tend to jump on what's hot so it can be hard to distinguish what's a sale due to the movie and what's a sale due to the cultural phenomenon in the first place. The Hunger Games was more than doubling its sales every year even before the movie came out, though there's no doubt that the movies have helped sell a lot of books. Movies on the other end of the spectrum like A Winter's Tale and Vampire Academy that were hardly seen probably didn't provide much of a boost to sells of there respective books.



Probably a good case study would be Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. It was published in 1961 and was released as a film starring Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet in 2008. It made 22,000,000 at the North America box office and was nominated for a few Oscars and Golden Globes. Lots of magazine articles about the film were published because of Kate and Leo reuniting for the first time since Titanic and quite a few of them mentioned the movie was based on a book. Revolutionary Road sold half a million copies that year.


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Brooks ahead of Martin? I am sad!

I also never thought that the likes of Rothfuss, Abercrombie and Sanderson* have sold so low (around 2-3m). While the likes of Hobb, Lawrence, Erikson are even lower.

* On case of Sanderson, it is around 15m but more than 12m are from Wheel of Time which isn't his product.

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