All that unites them is that each has sold more than one million copies, with all of them set to be honoured with the publishing world’s new equivalent of silver, gold and platinum discs.Īre there any trends among the top few? To sell a million, it helps to be a woman – with a man’s name. There are only two Booker prize winners – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – sitting alongside the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, The Atkins Diet and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
A curious mix of unrelated titles, it ranges from bonking and bondage in EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey – the only “sextuple platinum” bestseller, having sold 6.5m copies – to Eric Carle’s ravenous larva in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, placing Arthur Golden’s The Memoirs of a Geisha alongside Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
