Books & Art

There are bestsellers in books, and there are epic, mega-bestsellers: books that have sold over one hundred million copies. The authors who have had the distinction of being included among this very elite group, as mega-authors, are few.

The book by author Agatha Christie that was published in 1939,  And Then There Were None reportedly sold over one hundred million copies worldwide; which is no small feat considering the fact the prolific Christie has reportedly sold over four billion books worldwide, making Agatha Christie one of the most prolific authors of all time. Christie wrote only bestsellers in rapid fire motion that would dizzy the average author, in fact, even artificial intelligence (AI) would have trouble besting her enormous output. But back to the world of mere mortals in which authors are enamored by their success if they reach the pinnacle of selling one hundred million copies of anything at all. Of course, the Classics have a defined advantage over contemporary authors because they never go out of style, they sell forever, whereas the contemporary author has a window that closes with  the passing of time.

Classic Books that have sold over one hundred million copies include  The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien and  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; both English authors whose long running sales dated back to the nineteenth century, which of course, gave them both a good head start.

Since the dawn of the second millennium, there have been noteworthy authors who may eventually eclipse the former prolific champions for the prize of mega-authors; to name a few:

Barbara Cartland (1 billion), Danielle Steele (800,000,000), and JK Rowling (450,000,000)
according to  : USA Today ,followed by Dean Koontz, Stephen King (350,000,000), and Louis L’Amour (330,000,000), with a pretty long list of authors who have sold over one hundred million books per volumes of workhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_...; however, there remain two distinct authors who are set far apart from the crowd early in the game: Suzanne Collins and E.L.  E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games topped the list in 2012 of book sales: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by...
AS of 2012 the Hunger Games reportedly outsold JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series with over fifty million copies sold worldwide. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by...
Wow! Now that is a lot of book sales…but wait, Fifty Shades of Grey by Suzanne Collins has sold over seventy million copies, according to the Wall Street Journal in its March 26, 2013 issue:http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/S...
The latter two authors, American author Suzanne Collins and English author E.L. James, are epic mega-authors whose names will live long in the annals of literature; but wait.

Two mega-sellers were just around the bend, amazingly both were memoirists who were married to each other, Barack Obama and Michele Obama, both topping the charts quickly, both memoirs, selling almost a million copies the first day of sales. Becoming by Michele Obama and the eight hundred page A Promised Land by Barack Obama broke records as memoirs and as ‘books’, a powerful combination. Imagine that, nonfiction sells.