Talk:List of best-selling fiction authors

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fact from List of best-selling fiction authors appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 8 April 2008.

[edit] reliability of sources

The claim that only 16 of the top 72 best selling fiction authors didn't write in English surprised me. Then I noticed that almost the entire list of sources consists of English language newspapers. Newspapers aren't exactly the most reliable source to begin with (and as you can see the references repeatedly contradict each other), and English language newspapers are bound to focus much more on English books than anything else. Aren't there some better original sources to refer to than newspapers? Where did they get their figures from? There are probably a bunch of non-English speaking authors who have been overlooked by these newspapers.

Matt Oblivioid (talk) 18:00, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

You are more than welcome to add info from non English sources and from sources not available online. The article is not the definitive list, but is a list of what I was able to find online (already added to by other editors). It is exactly because these figures are uncertain that I added a minimum and maximum estimate (based on recent sources, it makes no sense to give a 2001 source for Rowling or a 1950 source for Christie). But for non-English authors: I have found a number of sources claiming that e.g. Karl May and Hermann Hesse are the only german authors with more than 100 million copies sold, and I have also read that there are very few Chinese mega-bestselling authors (fiction, so excluding Mao). I am quite certain that I miss a lot of authors (Spanish, most probably), but I have only added those for which I could find a source. Fram (talk) 19:04, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I see... the "did you know" blurb on the front page made it sound that it was an established fact that "16 of the 72 fiction authors with at least 100 million copies of their works in print did not write in English", but if the list is incomplete that makes more sense. Anyway, good work, shame about its limitations. I'll try and find info on french and spanish sources if i have time... Oblivioid (talk) 22:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC)