Bestselling authors of the decade

From The Telegraph:

JK-Rowling-002 The top 100 authors dominate sales. As The Bookseller has explained, some 100,000 titles are published every year, but these authors account for £1 in every £6 spent on books and a fifth of revenue. J K Rowling, who has seven of the decade’s top 10 bestsellers, sold 29 million books with a sales value of £215 million, but Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was the bestselling book of the decade, selling 5.2 million copies to 4.4 million for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Nielsen has also charted the top 100 books of the decade. After Rowling and Brown, Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, two million copies) was the most successful author, followed by Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 1.75 million), Robert Atkins, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the highest book selected by Richard and Judy. Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves was in the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers and Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat outsold Jamie Oliver’s highest seller.

Author Volume sold Value

1 J K Rowling 29,084,999 £225.9m

2 Roger Hargreaves 14,163,141 £26.6m

3 Dan Brown 13,372,007 £74.1m

4 Jacqueline Wilson 12,673,148 £69.9m

5 Terry Pratchett 10,455,397 £77.2m

6 John Grisham 9,862,998 £65.9m

7 Richard Parsons 9,561,776 £49.2m

8 Danielle Steel 9,119,149 £51m

9 James Patterson 8,172,647 £53.8m

10 Enid Blyton 7,910,758 £31.2m

More here.