The Bookseller has put out the UK's 100 bestselling writers of the past 10 years, drawn from Nielsen BookScan data.
I've taken the liberty of scouring out all the boring mainstream fiction, and here are the representatives from sf/f fiction:
1. JK Rowling (27.5m copies, £215m, 210 ISBNs)
6. Terry Pratchett (8.6m copies, £64m, 304 ISBNs)
21. Philip Pullman (5.3m copies, £34m, 168 ISBNs)
23. J.R.R. Tolkien (4.9m copies, £47m, 235 ISBNs)
25. Stephenie Meyer (4.6m copies, £27m, 58 ISBNs)
30. Stephen King (4.2m copies, £31m, 372 ISBNs)
66. Dean Koontz (2.5m copies, £15m, 176 ISBNs)
92. Eoin Colfer (1.8m copies, £12m, 94 ISBNs)
Thoughts after the jump.
I've left off the mainstream thriller & mystery writers (Rankin, McNabb, Cussler, James, etc) as opposed to the horror ones.
More breakdowns are coming over the next few weeks. I'd love to see a genre one. Even by publisher, I'd be interested to know the top-sellers at Gollancz, for example.
Unsurprisingly, the cross-over into young adult fiction proved immensely successful in the past decade. Savvy marketers realised that adults would read a book with dragons on the cover - as long as it was a children's book with a dragon on the cover. The best-selling authors (Rowling, Pullman, Meyer) are those that managed to straddle young adult and mature themes - in a way that publishers could easily package for both audiences.
