Meet the writers who still sell millions of books. Actually, hundreds of millions.

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From The Washington Post:

Reading, contrary to previous reports, is not dead. In fact, it’s very far from it.

Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has legions of readers. His best-known book, “The Alchemist,” the story of a young Andalusian shepherd on a personal quest, spent almost eight years — two presidential election cycles — on the bestseller lists. It was translated into 81 languages.
But “The Alchemist” is only one of Coelho’s more than 30 works. “The Spy”came out in November. All told, the writer has sold an estimated 350 million books.

Yes, books, those word-filled works that people were supposed to have long ago abandoned for videos, blogs and podcasts.

And Coelho has company.

Horror master Stephen King, with more than 50 titles, has also sold an estimated 350 million books. Dan Brown has millions of readers as well. “The Da Vinci Code” — possibly sitting on your bookshelf — alone sold 80 million copies.

Books like John Grisham’s “The Whistler,” now topping bestseller lists, and King’s “End of Watch” will no doubt be stacked under Christmas trees nationwide this year, or paperbacks of the writers’ earlier works stuffed in stockings.

There are best-selling authors, and then there are mega-best-selling authors — writers who have sold 100 million copies or more. Writers like Ken Follett, Nora Roberts, James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer. And there may be more of them now than ever.

We live in a time of disruption in entertainment, when many people no longer go to the movies or buy CDs or watch television on television, and younger generations seek amusement largely through their phones. Yet there are still people who buy countless books, often by authors who don’t so much visit the bestseller list as dwell there.

Mega-best-selling authors don’t just have readers. They have fans, the way rock stars have fans. Their readers are collectors, determined to own every title. They make pilgrimages to author events — often, as in the case of Nicholas Sparks, in tears.

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Their astonishing sales are, in part, due to improved technology — e-books and the speed of printing and distribution. Not so long ago, booksellers and readers often had to — gasp — wait for additional printings of a runaway hit novel. Today, if you want a copy of Patterson’s “Cross the Line” or Sparks’s “Two by Two” and the local bookstore is out of stock, you can download an e-book in minutes or order a hardcover from Amazon to grace your doorstep the next day. Or your neighborhood bookseller can generally get a copy by week’s end.

The success of these works can also be attributed to the cumulative power of the international marketplace, although because of multiple foreign imprints and varying publishing formats (hardcover, paperback, e-books) total worldwide sales can only be estimated.

The mega-sellers’ ranks include romance writers (Roberts, Danielle Steele, Debbie Macomber), a goosebumpy spinner of creepy stories for children (R.L. Stine), a laureate of love (Sparks, who eschews the romance label), a Muggle of British wizardry (J.K. Rowling, selling more than an estimated 450 million books), a provocateur of shades of kink (E.L. James) and, more than any other genre, practitioners of suspense and thrills (Grisham, King, Brown, Dean Koontz, Jeffrey Archer, David Baldacci and Mary Higgins Clark).

Elite readers may scoff at consistent best-selling writers, few of whom will ever win coveted awards or land on best-of-the-year lists. But tent-pole authors are the powerful engines that keep publishing houses profitable and able to float authors who win acclaim but not necessarily large sales.

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How do you get to be a blockbuster author? Typing is not enough, though some of these novels certainly read that way. The writing quality and storytelling vary tremendously, but there are some similarities among hit writers.

Chiefly, they’re extraordinarily productive. They publish with Swiss-clock regularity — once a year, twice a year, monthly if it’s Patterson, who’s an industry unto himself, with a stable of writers working for him. Or Robert Ludlum, who continues to publish his “Bourne” series and other books long after his death in 2001, thanks to multiple authors writing under his name.

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Most of all, though, the top sellers deliver a terrific story. In their novels, especially thrillers and science fiction, plot is paramount. The heroes tend to be relatable — shy, clumsy, anxious, myopic, in recovery, short-tempered, middle-class, broke — but their stories are fantastic, over-the-top, a wild ride and a welcome escape from a reader’s quotidian life. In romance, the love is for the ages, destined, the opposite of casual. The story does not bog down with the challenge of dirty dishes or tax audits.

“You can’t underestimate the value of entertainment that these guys are delivering,” says Suzanne Herz, executive vice president of Doubleday, which publishes Grisham and Brown. “There’s usually a David-versus-Goliath theme. You want the hero to come out on top.”

Link to the rest at The Washington Post