Half of the top 20 best-selling print books of 2012 were Fifty Shades or Hunger Games titles, and only one book not written by e.l. James or Suzanne Collins, Jeff Kinney’s latest wimpy children’s title, surpassed the one million-copy-sales mark for the year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks 75%-80% of print sales. Multiple best-selling authors also outperformed James and Collins: For print, Kinney and Bill O’Reilly each had two books in the top 20; for ebooks, george r.r. Martin and Sylvia Day had two books in the Amazon Kindle top 20, further demonstrating readers’ preference for fiction when reading electronically (No Easy Day was the only nonfiction book to make the Amazon Kindle top 20). kindle).
What this means is that in 2012, books that weren’t part of a successful series or brand fared much worse, at least at the top of the bestseller lists. Even best-selling author books didn’t fare as well as best-selling series books, as Fifty Shades and The Hunger Games topped big-name authors like John Grisham and James Patterson, the latter of which did not appear on any list of the Top 20. One book that bucked that trend was Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which crossed 700,000 copies sold on Bookscan just before the year was out. flynn sold more than 100,000 more copies than j.k. rowling’s the casual vacancy, and was only a few thousand copies behind rick riordan’s athena brand, to make his book the number 14 best-selling print book of 2012. discrepancies between nielsen’s top 20 and Amazon’s top books (both print and Kindle) held up according to PW’s 2012 Book Sales Midpoint Analysis: Reference and self-help books see a large percentage of their sales on Amazon. The Official Satellite Study Guide, Strongsfinder 2.0, and The Official Handbook of the American Psychological Association cracked Amazon’s print top 20, but fell short of Bookscan’s top 20. Another Amazon anomaly is Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, which snuck into the top 20 in print, despite first being published in 2010.
You are reading: Best selling fiction books of 2012
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unbroken’s long-tail success is part of a larger trend evident in best-seller lists: that just because a book is a best-seller in 2012 doesn’t mean it was published in 2012. In fact, eight of Bookscan’s top 20 books were published before 2012, including Sarah Young’s Call of Jesus, which was published in 2004. Another non-2012 release, Stephen King’s 11/22/63, ended up as the 19th best-selling Kindle of the year, thanks in part to its discounted price of $3.99. but for kindle, there was no bigger success story than helen bryan’s war brides, which was first published in 2007 and republished on amazoncore in june 2012, taking just over six months to become the number 14 in kindle sales of 2012.
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