William Shakespeare
He was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of the uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He is called the legendary bard of Avon. No matter loving or hating him, we can’t deny that the author of “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the bestselling writers of all time.
With an estimated 4 billion copies of his work in circulation, there are almost enough copies of Shakespeare’s work for each and every person on earth.
Agatha Christie
She was an English writer who is called the Queen of mistery. She is known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around her fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Christie also wrote the world’s longest-running play, a murder mystery, The Mousetrap, and, under the pen name Mary Westmacott, six romances. The undeniable queen of the mystery novel, Agatha Christie has duped, confused, and surprised millions of readers. Over the course of her career, Christie wrote such classic novels like “And Then There Were None” which have become classics now taught in many schools.
She has got a sale count biting at the heels of Shakespeare’s estimated 4 billion. Her website claims her as “the best-selling novelist of all time.”
Barbara Cartland
She was an English novelist who wrote romance novels, one of the best-selling authors as well as one of the most prolific and commercially successful worldwide of the 20th century.
She wrote more than 700 books, as well as plays, music, verse, drama, magazine articles and operetta, and was a prominent philanthropist. She reportedly sold more than 750 million copies. Other sources estimate her total book sales at more than two billion copies.
Barbara Cartland wrote 723 novels that are translated into 38 different languages. She is referenced in the Guinness World Records for publishing the most novels in a single year. It is estimated that Cartland has sold over 750 million copies of her work.
Harold Robbins
Harold Robbins was born in Brooklyn, New York and eventually worked his way up from an errand boy to an executive at Universal Studios. His novel “A Stone for Danny Fisher” was actually adapted into a film starring Elvis. With around 750 million copies of his work sold, Robbins is easily one of the bestselling authors of all time.
Georges Simenon
Georges Simenon wrote over 400 novels and numerous short works of fiction. He is a non-English-writing author whose works has a common theme of detective fiction. Simenon’s most notable works feature Jules Maigret, a detective that featured in over 75 of his novels. Estimates put his book sales around 700 million.
