As an addendum to our earlier report on how much impact having a television show associated with a novel series can have, we were very interested to read Andrew Wheeler’s 2009 genre bestseller review which provides some hard numbers to go with the figures.
The enormous sales of Stephanie Meyers works are, of course, duly noted. Of particular interest to HBO and Game of Thrones fans, however, would be Charlaine Harris’s works. In 2009 she released not one, but two, novels. The first of these became the 25th biggest hardfback fiction seller, with half a million copies sold, while the newest one had sold 270,000 copies by the time the list was compiled, despite an October publication. More notably, in terms of paperback sales, she had nine notable works and sold just shy of 6 million copies in the course of the year.
Compare to 2007, where Harris’s All Together Dead sold just over 105,000 copies in the year (May publication date) and you can see the quadrupling of interest in new release, hardcover fiction from the author. As noted in the previous article, the impact on sales of A Song of Ice and Fire will probably be not quite so noticeable even if it’s a runaway hit, simply due to the already-high sales of the series and the greater commitment involved in reading them compared to the lighter, episodic Stackhouse novels. Still, the gains (especially in paperback) could be quite considerable.