The noughties was definitely Harry's decade. In almost every way that matters, Rowling and Potter are in leagues of their own, selling twice as many books as their nearest rival
he noughties are dead! Long live the teens. Or is that the teenies? The years 2000 to 2009 were quite something in the book world. Think back to millennium night. How many readers knew of Harry Potter or J.K. Rowling, much less what they did for a living? What, you might have wondered back then, is an e-book or a Kindle? And told to describe Amazon, most book buyers would probably have answered a river in South America.
Now is a good moment to review the decade and identify the winners and losers of this rapidly changing literary landscape. Thanks to Nielsen BookScan, which registers the sales of books through most major outlets, one can accurately assess who were the most popular authors of the past 10 years.
The best-selling authors of the past decade based on sales were Rowling, Dan Brown and Roger Hargreaves.
Once one has recovered from the shock of seeing Rowling and Brown in the first and second places, one can admire the sheer scale of their individual and combined success. Together the pair sold more than 40 million copies, a figure that accounts for a breathtaking 2 per cent of all the books sold in Britain over the past 10 years.
The noughties was definitely Harry's decade. In almost every way that matters, Rowling and Potter are in leagues of their own, selling twice as many books as their nearest rival. What other industry boasts such a disparity between its top two performers? In another sense, however, Brown isn't all that far behind. Rowling's vast fortune was based on almost twice as many publications as those of Brown: her ISBN count is 210 against Brown's 92. Book for book, then, they run almost neck and neck.