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The SFF All-Time Sale List (vol 2) (updated Dec 2018)


Werthead
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58 minutes ago, Ran said:

What is the mechanism by which PW's info from Tor and distributors can be so wildly wrong, then? I cite direct quotes over years where the progression of NA book sales were steadily increasing at the rate of ~780k per year, and then somehow in the decade between the sales tripled.

A massive sales boost in the last decade is absolutely plausible. The influence of the Internet on sales started off very low in the mid-2000s and then grew quite markedly and exponentially through the last decade.  There was also the very significant impact of first LotR and then GoT on other epic fantasy sales. WoT had an unusual sales curve in that Sanderson completing the series also brought a lot of attention and some impact from Sanderson's own (not inconsiderable, even in 2013, and vastly more since then) sales base.

The question is to what degree that boost had an effect, which means we need to establish the base. If WoT had sold 44 million worldwide in 2007 then it selling 90 million by 2021 (doubling) is plausible. If WoT had only sold 30 million by 2007 then selling 90 million 2021 is, whilst not impossible, rather optimistic.

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No one has better sales data on their own books than a publisher, as you noted re: Sanderson. The exact number of books printed and sold are absolutely under their control. Short of them deliberately lying back in the late 90s through the mid-2000s, which seems crazy (why undersell how well the books have done when marketing them?), I can't see how this is possible.

Publishers only have good figures for their own territory's sales. So Tor having good figures for the USA is plausible, them having good figures for the rest of the world is less plausible (something I find to this day to be utterly unfathomable, given this determines how much an author gets paid), until they made a serious accounting effort to find out what was going on.

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Yes. 14 million + 16 million is much more reasonable.

Yes, doubling is more normal than tripling worldwide. The only caveat on that is that WoT is enormously popular in a lot of markets where Western epic fantasy is not usually a thing, and sometimes isn't published at all. I believe the series is reasonably big in Japanese, for example, whereas relatively few epic fantasies even make it into translation there (ASoIaF being another exception). Iran is another market where American epic fantasy doesn't usually show up, but WoT has a Persian translation, and so on.

I'd be happier with that as an explanation if there was a Chinese translation as well to boost sales possibly very considerably, which there is not.

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At which point Jordan had over 30 million, so was firmly the #1 seller for Tor. I don't see the objection. Goodkind, like Jordan, was a NYT bestseller at a certain point, debuting at #1 and all. They were very similar in sales, however bizzare it may seem now, but Jordan was ahead of him.

Sure, but only one SoT novel debuted at #1 on the NYT list, compared to seven for Wheel of Time, starting more than a decade earlier. WoT's success vs SoT's seems to have been much greater than would be indicated by 5 million lifetime sales difference.

Of course, it doesn't help that Tor has never updated SoT's figures since 2007 either. I assume the series has added at least a few million more sales since then.

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Salvatore has done in 50 books what Jordan and Sanderson did in 14. Is this really strange?

30. Salvatore's non-Drizzt book sales are pretty negligible in comparison. But I suppose he only needs to sell 1 million copies per book on average to his total as compared to RJ selling over 6 million each on average. And the early Drizzt books shifted way more than that (not to mention having repackaged omnibus editions), whilst the more recent ones haven't gotten near that.

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That absolutely has to be a global figure for the sales of his books, or at least how many of his books are in print. If we just extrapolate that average backwards, that would suggest 56 million copies  sold/in print worldwide for the whole series. I'd be willing to run with that instead of my lower estimate, but that's still a damned far sight away from 90 million.

I think when looked at over the course of the whole series, The Eye of the World has sold way more than any other book in the series and there's probably diminishing returns as people dropped off at different points in the series, so expanding the sales over an average might not be a true reflection of the situation (I'd bet they are more constant for ASoIaF, with only five books in play and also the ubiquity of discounts of the complete-so-far box sets).

I think a serious problem with the less-than-90 million figure is the suggestion that Tor and Amazon have just flat-out lied about it, which would be a seriously misleading statement, and I'm not sure to what end. Saying the series has sold more than 50 million or more than 70 million copies is still impressive (and they are still proceeding from a vastly larger initial sales base than ASoIaF).

Intriguingly, the French publisher's website is saying "over 80 million" worldwide sales at present.

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@Werthead @Ran

I think both of you are missing or underestimating one important aspect: book splitting. I can only speak for the German (or better German-speaking) market (with roughly 100 million people the biggest SFF market in Europe by quite a margin) but here it is quite common to split Fantasy saga books into two or more parts (for the paperbacks). 
ASOIAF: 5 split into 10 
WOT: 14 split into 36(!) 

I wouldn’t wonder if for example the total quantity of ASOIAF or WOT „books“ sold in Germany is much higher than in the UK. We are a SFF translation market anyway. 

For WOT: are let’s say 500k (more or less) complete sets of WOT in the German speaking market plausible? Absolutely, given the time span. That would translate into more than 15 Million „Books“! 

Edited by Arakan
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12 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I think both of you are missing or underestimating one important aspect: book splitting. I can only speak for the German (or better German-speaking) market (with roughly 100 million people the biggest SFF market in Europe by quite a margin) but here it is quite common to split Fantasy saga books into two or more parts (for the paperbacks). 
ASOIAF: 5 split into 10 
WOT: 14 split into 36(!) 

I saw a bit of this in Russia and over here in Australia, where it seems some of the early ASOIAF books were split into two parts. 

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4 hours ago, Arakan said:

@Werthead @Ran

I think both of you are missing or underestimating one important aspect: book splitting.

I actually raised this point in the other thread, before digging into it further. I do think it is a potential factor, since WoT in particular has had a lot of splitting and a lot of volumes.

What we can say is that in 2007 Tor offered the figure of 14 million copies in NA and 30 million "world wide". IF you assume "world wide" includes NA, then it's 14 NA and 16  million not-NA respectively, which fits the "rule of thumb" that popular series with many translations tend to sell as many outside of NA as they do inside NA. How does that work with the foreign situation? 

Either Tor counts "books sold" as being complete sets of each novel (doubtful, of course marketing wil l be happy to inflate numbers while being technically correct), or the fact that buying a big series is simply more expensive because of the split volumes situation that it actually greatly reduces total readership -- you don't get an equal number of outside-of-NA readers as you would if one book = one book on both sides of the pond, and this negatively impacts sales.

OR

The 14 million NA and the 30 million "world wide" -- where "world wide" means "not-NA" -- means 44 million copies sold. This would mean that Tor counts just plain books -- 3 sales of the 3 volumes of Lord of Chaos in Germany = 3 books sold -- and then the "rule of thumb" doesn't quite work for Big Fat Fantasy Series that get split up into lots of volumes overseas, and instead it makes more sense that for every 1 book sold in NA it's ~2 books sold overseas.

In which case, the "12 million" sold of the Jordan-Sanderson books as of 2018 must be 4 million NA and 8 million non-NA,  assuming those books got similar splitting treatment to its predecessors. Which means we can now account for 56 million books sold in total. And so I'm left wondering where the other 34+ million are. That would mean that between 2007 and 2018, the first 11 books sold on average 280,000 per year each, which is either ~140k or ~93k NA per book per year depending on how we factor in the foreign portion of sales.


But... the problem with this is, PW's end of year lists of who sold over X amount each year doesn't list any of these books outside of the year they were published, and it goes down in some categories to 50k+ sales getting you on the list. (Of course, one would not get an even distribution -- as Wert says, you should see substantially more copies of The Eye of the World showing up to make a larger fraction of that average, but this actually makes the lack of it appearing on PW's end-of-year lists even more notable if we're to believe it's a strong perennial that's selling many tens of thousands of copies per year.)

 

Edited by Ran
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9 minutes ago, Ran said:

The 14 million NA and the 30 million "world wide" -- where "world wide" means "not-NA" -- means 44 million copies sold. This would mean that Tor counts just plain books -- 3 sales of the 3 volumes of Lord of Chaos in Germany = 3 books sold -- and then the "rule of thumb" doesn't quite work for Big Fat Fantasy Series that get split up into lots of volumes overseas, and instead it makes more sense that for every 1 book sold in NA it's ~2 books sold overseas.

I really think that‘s the way they do the counting. And technically they would be correct. A book is a book, even if it’s just a third (or a fourth as in many cases of WOT) of the original book. As I said in Germany that is quite common for epic fantasy series (perfect cashcow market here) and Germany (Austria, Switzerland) alone would have a significant impact on inflating the numbers as it is the second biggest book-selling market after all (roughly 400 million copies per year). 

But the same is true on the reverse: box sets. Harry Potter is basically all or nothing, i.e. the advertisement is focused on the complete sets. Which means: you buy „one“ but actually 7. At least this is the way it’s done over here. One can easily imagine how this inflated the HP figures. 

 

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@Werthead Found these figures Here

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Meistverkaufte Bücher: Romane

  1. Eine Geschichte aus zwei Städten (Charles Dickens, 1859), 200 Mio verkaufte Bücher.
  2. Der Herr der Ringe (John R.R. Tolkien, 1954-55), 150 Mio.
  3. Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen (Joanne K. Rowling, 1997), 107 Mio.
  4. Der Hobbit oder Hin und Zurück (John R.R. Tolkien, 1937), 100 Mio.
  5. Der Traum der roten Kammer (klassischer chinesischer Roman, Cao Xueqin, 18. Jh), 100 Mio.
  6. Und dann gabs keines mehr (Agatha Christie, 1939), 100 Mio.
  7. Der König von Narnia (C.S. Lewis, 1950), 85 Mio.
  8. Sie (H. Rider Haggard, 1887), 83 Mio.
  9. Der kleine Prinz (Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 1943), 80 Mio.
  10. Der Alchimist (Paulo Coelho, 1988), 65 Mio.
  11. Der Fänger im Roggen (J.D. Salinger, 1951), 65 Mio.
  12. Sakrileg – Der Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown, 2003), 57 Mio.
  13. Anne auf Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1908), 50 Mio.
  14. Black Beauty (Anna Sewell, 1877), 50 Mio.
  15. Der Adler ist gelandet (Jack Higgins, 1975), 50 Mio.
  16. Der Name der Rose (Umberto Eco, 1980), 50 Mio.
  17. Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Johanna Spyri, 1880), 50 Mio.
  18. Kon-Tiki. Ein Floß treibt über den Pazifik (Thor Heyerdahl, 1950), 50 Mio.
  19. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955), 50 Mio.
  20.  Unten am Fluss (Richard Adams, 1972), 50 Mio.

Mostly in line with your list but I find the listing of single novels of bigger series quite interesting. Helps to put things into perspective. It’s in German but I thinks it’s clear what is what. 

I really think (what @Ran insinuated) that publishers are hurting themselves with these out of control ever larger epic fantasy series, maybe not so much the author himself (but even this is questionable). The longterm prospects of a 5000+ pages saga must get quite worse over time, especially when the hype is gone. The entry barrier is simply too high. It’s one thing to start LOTR (and getting hooked and buying all the other stuff) but starting reading WOT, Malazaan, ASOIAF when you are not sure you might even like it? The huge page count is a negative in that case.

Edited by Arakan
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Another little fact: according to Penguin Random House, in Germany, ASOIAF sold more copies in 2011 alone than in all the previous 13 years since first being published in Germany combined. Whoa…this is actually so crazy and almost impossible to wrap your head around. 

I mean I started the series in early 2003 (inspired by extensive talk and promotion about it on the biggest German-speaking LOTR fansite) and I actually expected the series to already be „well established“ by 2011…guess it shows again what small bubble hardcore SFF book fans really are ;)  

Edited by Arakan
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Macmillan's own website now says that the series has sold "more than 40 million copies sold in North America." That makes worldwide sales in the 80-90 million bracket pretty certain, and somewhat over 90 million reasonably plausible (I'm assuming that if Tor felt reasonably certain they'd passed 100 million, they'd publicise that figure; the TV show might push them to that point).

I agree that Tor might be happy for people to conclude a higher-than-is-actual sales base from other sources, but they're certainly not going to lie about their own figures, as there is a risk of fraud or misrepresentation there. My suspicion now is that the sales figures around the time of Robert Jordan's death became rather confused (either by Tor or more likely the media outlets reporting the 44 million figure) and Tor have been happy to let the misrepresentation stand, and now the actual figures have caught up to where the misrepresentation was in 2007, so have "become" more accurate over time.

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Another little fact: according to Penguin Random House, in Germany, ASOIAF sold more copies in 2011 alone than in all the previous 13 years since first being published in Germany combined. Whoa…this is actually so crazy and almost impossible to wrap your head around. 

Yup. The figures are a bit uncertain, but it seems that ASoIaF had sold ~12 million copies worldwide between 1996 and 2011, but in 2012 alone sold an additional 9 million copies and even more per year for the next several years, until the series had sold over 90 million copies in total by two years ago. A successful TV show or movie has a big sales impact, but this remains unprecedented and unrepeated. LotR sold 50 million extra copies in the period 2001-2004 or so, which is exceptional but not in the same bracket.

House of the Dragon could well restart the phenomena again, and if/when Winds of Winter is released, I'm reasonably certain that will push it over 100 million as well.

Edited by Werthead
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3 hours ago, Werthead said:

House of the Dragon could well restart the phenomena again, and if/when Winds of Winter is released, I'm reasonably certain that will push it over 100 million as well.

Winds of Winter will be a smashing hit I am sure. I know quite a few people who gave up on the series but who are they kidding, when the book is out they will buy it. 

Regarding the sales figures for LOTR and The Hobbit, I think what makes them even more outstanding is the fact that they are basically base stock in every public or school library for decades already (at least here in Germany, I got my LOTR in 1993 from the school library). The same cannot be said about many other SFF series/books, i.e. you need to buy them if you are interested. 

And still Tolkien has very solid sales figures year after year. A true classic of world literature at this point. 

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Brandon Sanderson update:

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2021/

Peter here with a worldwide update! Since Elantris was published in 2005, Brandon’s reach has expanded every year. As of now his books have been translated into 35 different languages and have sold over 21 million copies.

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On 12/22/2021 at 2:41 PM, Jussi said:

Brandon Sanderson update:

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2021/

Peter here with a worldwide update! Since Elantris was published in 2005, Brandon’s reach has expanded every year. As of now his books have been translated into 35 different languages and have sold over 21 million copies.

Hmm. That's odd because it's lower than the figure I got from Brandon's agent direct in 2018 (23 million).

I know the 23 million included the 12 million Wheel of Time books, so I wonder if this figure excludes them (Brandon's team might not have access to up-to-date data for what is effectively another author's books he worked on under a different kind of agreement). So 23 million of his own books and a minimum of 12 million (plus four years' sales) WoT books for ~35 million in total.

That would require a total sales boost of 12 million in under four years though, which even given Brandon's high profile and popularity seems excessive for a non-movie/TV show-boosted rise in sales.

Then again, Sanderson's total sales grew by 8 million from 15 to 23 million in the five years between 2013 and 2016, so a further sharp increase, at a higher rate, is possible given the extra books published since then.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 5 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

From the Edelweiss catalog:

 

BLOCKBUSTER BACKLIST SALES: Over the last 5 years -- since the last Mistborn novel was released in January 2016 -- the Mistborn audience has grown by 100%, growing from 3 million copies sold in North America to 6 million.

EPIC FANTASY JUGGERNAUT: Brandon Sanderson continues to be one of the biggest -- if not the biggest -- fantasy franchise author in publishing, hitting #1 on the New York Times bestseller list 3x in a row, building frontlist and backlist volume with each new book, and cultivating the largest and most engaged audience in the business while publishing multiple new novels in the last decade (unlike certain comp authors who will remain unnamed!).

 

 

Steven Erikson's US numbers, also from the Edelweiss catalog:

 

BESTSELLING AUTHOR: New York Times bestselling author Steven Erikson has sold over 2 million books, including over 1 million books in mass market.

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  • 2 weeks later...

From the Edelweiss catalog

 

Peter V. Brett update:

Peter V. Brett is the internationally bestselling author of the Demon Cycle series, which has sold more than three and a half million copies in twenty-seven languages worldwide.

 

James S.A. Corey update:

The Expanse series has sold over 4.5 million copies in the English language.

 

Brent Weeks update:

Brent Weeks is one of the bestselling fantasy authors of all time, selling over 5 million copies in North America since his first book in 2008.

 

Adrian Tchaikovsky's US numbers:

Children of Time has sold 126k copies while Children of Ruin has sold over 97k in all formats.

 

Pierce Brown update:

OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD IN THE RED RISING SERIES

Edited by Jussi
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Brent Weeks update:

Brent Weeks is one of the bestselling fantasy authors of all time, selling over 5 million copies in North America since his first book in 2008.

 

That's defining the "bestselling fantasy authors of all time" definition past breaking point. It's very healthy, but it's not especially remarkable.

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6 hours ago, Werthead said:

That's defining the "bestselling fantasy authors of all time" definition past breaking point. It's very healthy, but it's not especially remarkable.

True, but it’s several more zeroes than my books have managed so far, so I’d be happy with it :P

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More from Edelweiss

 

Kevin Hearne update:

OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD across all Kevin Hearne titles

 

Victoria Aveyard update:

Victoria’s debut series, Red Queen, has sold over 4 million copies since its release

 

Rick Riordan update:

There are currently more than 100 million Rick Riordan books in print in the US, and his books have been published in 41 countries.

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