The Year's Most Prolific

It’s a great feat to land one title on the year-end bestseller list (see the top-selling print books in several categories here), but why settle for one bestseller when you can have a catalogue of them? Here are 13 authors who each had three or more books among the year’s 200 bestsellers (not counting multiple editions of individual titles):

Author # of titles
Jeff Kinney 7
Dr. Seuss 7
James Dashner 4
John Green 4
James Patterson 4
Veronica Roth 4
David Baldacci 3
Suzanne Collins 3
Gillian Flynn 3
Rush Limbaugh 3
George R.R. Martin 3
Rick Riordan 3
Nora Roberts 3

Readin' with the Oldies

The Hardcover Fiction list we run every week is all about frontlist titles—those thathave published in the past 52 weeks. But, of course, there are plenty of titles that have very long lives. As we tallied up the year’s bestsellers, a few of these stood out: literary classics that are still racking up blockbuster numbers decades after publication. Below is a list of the top sellers that have been on bookstore shelves for more than 50 years:

Title Author Year of Publication 2014 Sales
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 382,587
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 287,777
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953 238,111
Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 212,953
1984 George Orwell 1949 211,298
The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger 1951 195,955
Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 1937 180,424

Holiday Movers & Shakers

The 2014 holiday buying season was a good one for the industry, with the usual seasonal surge amplified by highly successful (and highly anticipated) film adaptations of a number of titles. Even as overall print book sales slowed in week 52, books with a box office tie-in kept going. Here are the week’s top movers and shakers, ranked in order of biggest weekly sales bump:

40% 21% 17% 16% 14%
American Sniper (movie tie-in)
by Chris Kyle (Harper)
The Clint Eastwood–directed adaptation lands in theaters January 15.		 Dark Places
by Gillian Flynn (Three Rivers)
Already read Gone Girl?		 Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand (Random)
A Christmas Day film debut helped keep sales climbing.		 Fifty Shades of Grey
by E.L. James (Vintage)
A little heat for those cold winter nights. The film hits February 13.		 Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn (Broadway)
The book that keeps on going.

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 The Long Haul Jeff Kinney Abrams/Amulet 126,787
2 Killing Patton O’Reilly/Dugard Holt 102,330
3 Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand Random 100,759
4 Unbroken (movie tie-in) Laura Hillenbrand Random 85,518
5 41: A Portrait of My Father George W. Bush Crown 64,020
6 Gray Mountain John Grisham Doubleday 59,607
7 Hope to Die James Patterson Little, Brown 50,273
8 Yes Please Amy Poehler Morrow/Dey Street 50,194
9 Guinness World Records 2015 Guinness World Records Guinness World Records 48,634
10 American Sniper (movie tie-in) Chris Kyle Morrow 46,081