I Compared The Bestselling Books Of All Time With The Bestsellers Last Year.

Curious what you think of our collective taste in books.

I got the crazy idea to compare the bestselling books of all time with the bestselling books last year. Curiosity rabbit hole. Well, cripes.

First thing I found was this. According to Guinness World Records, the Bible is the bestselling book ever written. As of 1995, 5 billion copies. Up next are other religious texts. 800 million copies of the Qur'an and 190 million copies of the Book of Mormon. They don’t know how many copies of the Bhagavad Gita have been sold, but they know one publisher alone sold 140 million.

Here’s what I don’t know. How much have sales fluctuated over time? Are the bulk of those sales decades ago?

That’s the trouble with historical sales. Might be interesting to see a graph of how sales are spread out over time. I don’t know if that data even exists, much less how accurate it would be. For example, once you get out of religious texts, the bestselling book of all time was Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities but it hasn’t been on a bestseller list for a very long time.

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Bestselling books of all time…

The Little Prince and Lord Of The Rings are so close they could be interchangeable and are on some lists. Both have sold over 200 million copies. The Little Prince is the second most translated work in publishing history, second only to the Bible.

I wrote about The Little Prince on Medium because I love it so much. In France, they say it’s a book that should be read twice. Once as a child, and once over forty. As an adult, we see entirely different concepts we couldn’t have grasped as a child.

What I love about the bestselling books of all time is how many truly charming books are on the list. Books that still sell today. The Little Prince, The Hobbit. Four of the top ten are young adult fiction. If you didn’t know, Dream of the Red Chamber is a Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet. I don’t know what I think of Dan Brown making the list. It’s a real accomplishment, that’s for sure. He’s the only living author on the list.

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Now... the bestsellers last year

This is not a complete list. It’s the top sellers on Amazon last year. According to Ibis, around 80% of online book sales happen on Amazon but online book sales are only about half of total book sales. So take the list with a grain of salt, okay?

As a side note, it’s nice to know people are buying books offline as much as online.

I’m not going to say too much because I want to know what you think.

I’m hoping the real meat of this post will be the conversations in the comments. I do have some thoughts about Harry and Britney being in the top five. lol.

One other thought... rise and longevity are not the same. Every writer would love to be in the top ten lists. But I think it’s possible for a book to never hit bestseller lists, but keep selling year after year and outlast books that shot to the top and disappeared.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

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