The Bookseller released some statistics today on the top 100 selling authors in the UK market from 2000 to 2009. I have extracted the fantasy authors from their data to put together the following list:
1 Rowling, J K 27,556,478 units, revenue of £215,876,812.77
6 Pratchett, Terry 8,670,317 units, revenue of £63,979,648.47
21 Pullman, Philip 5,337,773 units, revenue of £34,670,831.34
23 Tolkien, J R R 4,960,414 units, revenue of £47,169,467.51
25 Meyer, Stephenie 4,646,667 units, revenue of £26,971,717.71
66 Koontz, Dean 2,500,606 units, revenue of £14,742,572.68
It’s interesting that fantasy isn’t as dominant a genre as one might be lead to believe with only 6 in the top 100 – and that’s only if we consider Meyer and Koontz as fantasy. SF isn’t placed at all, which is a shame.
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I’m actually surprised there are only 6 out of 100 fantasy / SF authors. I would have expected much more than that. I haven’t looked through the entire list yet. What was the most dominant genre? I’m guessing just plain mainstream?
Also included non-fiction, so a number of UK celebrity chefs were on the list for instance. But yes, thriller and crime writers probably did better than Fantasy or Science Fiction.