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

[Lord Patrek]

My bad, it did make it once and once only after the season finished airing. The Tor Books post came before that and I remember discussing it with Wert back then. But a single week at number 13 is nothing that could explain such a high number of sales.

Just a million books sold (and that's a lot!) would have seen TEotW and other WoT titles across bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Nearly 5M would have seen a boost in sales akin to that of ASOIAF, and that in multiple languages.

[IlyaP]

On 5/28/2023 at 8:43 AM, Lord Patrek said:

My bad, it did make it once and once only after the season finished airing. The Tor Books post came before that and I remember discussing it with Wert back then. But a single week at number 13 is nothing that could explain such a high number of sales.

Just a million books sold (and that's a lot!) would have seen TEotW and other WoT titles across bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Nearly 5M would have seen a boost in sales akin to that of ASOIAF, and that in multiple languages.

It has been nearly, what, 30 years almost, since it was published? Surely that, in conjunction with re-releases/new covers, media tie-ins, etc., would give it the kind of time needed to hit those numbers. 

[Ran]

I've been questioning the WoT numbers for awhile. They don't make sense to me. For instance, in this post I point out that the claimed sales went from 30 million to 90 million in the span of 14 years. If that were true, the series averaged 4 million copies sold each and every one of those years, despite (outside of the Sanderson years) none of these books appearing on PW's lists which tracked books  that sold 50k or more (which you'd expect EotW to be doing at least at times to justify the sales figure)... and if that's a US+Globe figure, we're still talking roughly half of that (~2 million) was being sold in the US alone every year.

But we're being told now that the big Amazon-related boost hast pushed sales to that number of ~2 million a year? It doesn't add up, unless you suppose they are being honest now about the bump... but have somewhere in the past been dishonest about the overall sales figure, such that the yearly sales were under, say, ~1 million per year over that span of time.

I have no problem believing this number they give for the Amazon-related boost, but it's pretty obvious that the global sales number has been grossly inflated somewhere along the line.

[Werthead]

On 5/24/2023 at 11:44 PM, Jussi said:

It looks like Robert Jordan is more popular than GRRM. From Edelweiss catalog:

https://i.ibb.co/cFbmRdR/wot.jpg

 

Also:

EXPLOSIVE SALES POTENTIAL: The Wheel of Time series sold 2.5M copies in 2021, with the release of season 1 in November-December, and followed that up with 2.3M copies sold in 2022 despite a 2-year gap between seasons 1 and 2. This number compares very favorably to sales of the Witcher in a similar time period (about 15-30% higher), and we expect to see renewed sales for season 2 in 2023.

GRRM has sold far more copies per-book, easily, and he was right on RJ's heels. My suspicion is strongly that he has actually overtaken RJ in the last couple of years but the reporting has not yet caught up with the news yet.

As for the sales issues, I think this was covered reasonably well before: when RJ died in 2007, outlets got confused and reported 44 million sales globally as 44 million North American, which some outlets extrapolated to ~80 to 90 million sales globally. Tor/Macmillan were happy to let this misreported error stand. By ~2020 sales of the Wheel of Time series had "caught up" with where they'd been reported to be in 2007 and Tor/Macmillan (who'd been pretty quiet on those numbers in the meantime) started reporting sales going up after that point.

These figures are also global figures, so WoT picking up a lot of sales across the world, especially in territories where the show did very well (WoT-Amazon was a surprise local hit in India, for example) seems reasonably likely. I suspect the series is now also picking up a slow but steady long tail from Brandon Sanderson's rapidly-growing fanbase. The show was more of a damp squib in the USA, so it not rocketing up the bestseller lists there is understandable, but it has always been a very strong-selling series in the UK and across Europe. The giga-explosion in audiobook sales in the last few years, especially with Rosamund Pike reading the books again (and winning an award for it) has also likely played a key role.

Tor/Macmillan just turning around and flat-out lying about the figure would be bizarre in the extreme, outside of the usual "books in print/books sold" distinction, but at this level of sales that distinction is pretty meaningless anyway.

[IlyaP]

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

Tor/Macmillan were happy to let this misreported error stand. By ~2020 sales of the Wheel of Time series had "caught up" with where they'd been reported to be in 2007 and Tor/Macmillan (who'd been pretty quiet on those numbers in the meantime) started reporting sales going up after that point.

And it's not like there's a law that mandates accurate reporting of sales, to the best of my knowledge, so at worst, it's bad optics, at best, it can be hand-waved away with claims about leaving mistakes in to catch pirates if someone tries to fix it in an unlicensed e-book or something. 

[Ran]

My own take was that in 2007, the NA+rest of the world sales were ~30 million, that with Sanderson's books completed the global number became something more like ~45 million  and then we have these new figures.

So:

2007: 30 million

2015: 45 million

2020: 50 million

2022: ~55 million. Or, if we believe the new figures are NA only and assume the typical doubling, ~60 million.

 

I still fundamentally believe that that "44 million US figure" (an erroneous understanding of 2007's 14 million in North America and "over  30 million" globally) became doubled by the French publishers in promoting the book as having sold over 90 million copies globally (after all, if they believed the US had sold 44 million copies, it was natural to assume that globally the total was going to be about twice that), and that this number has become a new baseline for marketing, who can just ask how many copies the books have sold since they last quoted the 90 million figure, get the bean counters to tell them they'd sold 5 million copies US in the intervening time, and then they go ahead and double that number, and voila, now it's sold over 100 million copies.

 

[Werthead]

The suggestion that we simply assume publishers are lying about their figures is pretty thin ice to be skating on.

The fact that Tor never once gave a sales update from 2007 until very recently is telling to me that the figures reached in that time - guesstimates from other sources, mostly - were likely erroneous and Tor were happy to let the erroneous figures stand because they sounded better than the actual figures, but they would not personally claim those figures because they would be lying and misrepresenting things outright. The fact that they are happy to now start talking figures (and the fact there has been almost zero growth between the guesstimated/extrapolated figures in 2007 and the much more recent figures, before we started seeing an upward curve again).

If the suggestion is that Tor are simply lying and we can't trust them, well, why should we trust Bantam over GRRM's figures, or Gollancz over Sapkowski's figures or anyone else?

Recall that during 2012 (GoT Season 2) ASoIaF sold 9 million copies within that year alone, still a way before GoT reached the peak of its success and profile. WoT selling a quarter of that off the back of a lower-profile TV series seems pretty reasonable.

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Recall that during 2012 (GoT Season 2) ASoIaF sold 9 million copies within that year alone, still a way before GoT reached the peak of its success and profile. WoT selling a quarter of that off the back of a lower-profile TV series seems pretty reasonable.

I am not questioning that figure, as I said. I think it eminently plausible that the books have sold over 2 million copies per year these last two years because of the show. But to me, this means that the number in years prior to the show must have been substantially lower than these 90 million+ figures suggest.

I am questioning the figures in the past, though, and the overall global sales mark given now. They do not make sense to me. This is a book series that was tracking at an average of 1.3 million a year in the US, when Sanderson came on, and then we're supposed to believe that his book sales for two books alone were on the order of 12.5 million copies -- maybe we halve that for the US, so 6 million, or 3 million per book, more than double the mark of any previous book outside, presumably, EotW and a couple of the other starting novels -- when we have PW's sales data from distributor channels suggesting that none of his books outsold their print runs, selling like 500k copies each in hardcover, and people years after the fact still getting first print first editions of these books when they order them. From personal knowledge, audio books and e-books are not the hidden secret extra sauce explaining all these other editions that are supposed to have appeared. 

You mention some place like India being an expanding market. Maybe, but how expanding is it? EotW there has a Fantasy sales rank of 1752... and TWoIaF has a rank of 790, and TRotD  has one of #970. The difference between them is even larger in the US Amazon, where EotW is like at 8400 in books (paperback edition) and TWoIaF and TRotD are in the 5500-6000 range. I can tell you that these are not numbers that give you millions of books sold in a year, even when extrapolated from my 2 books vs. the Jordan/Sanderson 14 (15 I guess if we add New Spring?). Hundreds of thousands? Yes, but not millions. If that indicates that between seasons sales are returning to the previous mean, it blows a genuine hole in the "100 million sales" news.

 

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

If the suggestion is that Tor are simply lying and we can't trust them, well, why should we trust Bantam over GRRM's figures, or Gollancz over Sapkowski's figures or anyone else?

We probably shouldn't, to be honest. I've never touted anyone's sales figures outside of what has been published in PW (drawn from distributors), revealed through Bookscan, etc.

I trust the 2007 figure that Tor gave, because it was in line with every figure they gave before that point, that the books were selling a little over a million copies from installment to installment. The immense jump allegedly due to Sanderson, when the actual figures we get from PW are nowhere like them, is where the shenanigans started, and the only source we have on that 12.5 million copies, IIRC, is his agent who transmitted that data to you. That, and the 2007 press release being read to mean 44 million copies sold in the US, are where things have gone awry.

I can't answer for why Tor's marketing department might willfully blinker itself to sustain untrue figures.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Ran

[IlyaP]

5 hours ago, Ran said:

I can't answer for why Tor's marketing department might willfully blinker itself to sustain untrue figures.

Being charitable, I suspect simple human error.

[Jussi]

Peter V. Brett update from Edelweiss catalog:

 

Quote

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

Quote

BESTSELLING AUTHOR: Brett has hit the New York Times list several times—and his Demon Cycle series has sold over 850,000 copies and over 4.5 million copies worldwide.

[Jussi]

Iain M. Banks update from Edelweiss:

Quote

Iain M. Banks was a modern master of SF and Orbit has sold over three million copies of his books

 

Garth Nix update

Quote

More than six million copies of his books have been sold around the world and his work has been translated into forty-two languages.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Jussi
Garth Nix added

[Jussi]

Two updates from Edelweiss catalog:

 

N.K. Jemisin

Quote

Jemisin's popularity has never been higher. Her novels have sold over three million copies globally and Orbit UK has sold over 550,000 copies in our home and export territories

 

Ben Aaronovitch

Quote

Every Rivers of London novel and novella has been a Sunday Times Top Ten HB bestseller, and this is a 3.5 million copy selling series!

[Jussi]

RJ Barker (from Edelweiss catalog)

Quote

this author has sold over 120,000 novels via Orbit UK already

 

Michael J. Sullivan update

Quote

I’ve now sold more than 2 million copies of my books in the English language

[Jussi]

Katherine Arden (from Edelweiss catalog):

Quote

AUTHOR OF NATIONAL BESTSELLING TRILOGY WITH 600K COPIES SOLD

[TerokNor]

In the introductory video of James S.A. Corey's Patreon project, Daniel Abraham says that the Expanse has sold over 8 million copies. Abraham's bio in this Locus talk states the same number.

[IlyaP]

On 9/29/2023 at 5:37 AM, TerokNor said:

In the introductory video of James S.A. Corey's Patreon project, Daniel Abraham says that the Expanse has sold over 8 million copies. Abraham's bio in this Locus talk states the same number.

8 million copies? That's not nuthin'! 

[Luzifer's right hand]

I just want to comment that Wheel of Time was somewhat popular in Germany and that it supposedly hit ~1 million total sales in 2003.

German language article from 2003. https://www.abendblatt.de/vermischtes/journal/article108465049/Literatur-Verloren-im-Rad-der-Zeit.html#:~:text=wheeloftime.com ).,und das ohne teures Marketing.

Same article mentions ~20 million sales across 22 countries(2003).

It's still one of the book series that you can always find in the fantasy section of the big chains in German language countries in my experience.

Not a fiction besteller list topper of course but only the usual fantasy suspects managed that in Germany(Rowling, King, Tolkien in 80 for some reason, Christopher Paolini... ).

Rowling actually managed to top the fiction bestseller list in Germany 4 times with the original version of HP books. Afaik no other author has managed that even once.

Edited September 30, 2023 by Luzifer's right hand

[Jussi]

Interesting information from the Edelweiss catalog entry for The Official Game of Thrones Cookbook:

Quote

GRRM SALES BOOMING: The House of the Dragon series has boosted GRRM publishing sales, including the wildly successful publication of The Rise of the Dragon (10/22). 

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Jussi said:

Interesting information from the Edelweiss catalog entry for The Official Game of Thrones Cookbook:

Still not over the 100 million hump, otherwise I assume they'd have mentioned that.

[IlyaP]

4 hours ago, Jussi said:

Interesting information from the Edelweiss catalog entry for The Official Game of Thrones Cookbook:

There's a...a COOKBOOK?! 

What?!