William Shakespeare (April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616), an English playwright, poet, and actor, is largely recognized as the greatest writer in the English language and the greatest dramatist in the world. He is known as the "Bard of Avon" and England's national poet (or simply "the Bard").

Between 1589 and 1613, Shakespeare wrote the majority of his known works. His early plays were mostly comedies and histories, and they are often considered to be among the greatest in both genres. Until 1608, Shakespeare mostly authored tragedies, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all of which are considered among the best works in the English language. His surviving writings include 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three lengthy narrative poems, and a few additional verses, some of which are contested authorship. His plays have been performed more than any other playwright's and have been translated into every major living language.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 2 billion

Max. estimated sales: 4 billion

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Plays and poetry e.g.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet

Number of books: 42

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English author best known for her 66 mystery novels and 14 short story collections, many of which featured fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also penned six books under the name Mary Westmacott, including the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which has been played in the West End since 1952.

For her services to literature, she was named a Dame (DBE) in 1971. She is by far the most individual author, according to Index Translationum. With over 100 million copies sold, her novel And Then There Were None is one of the best-selling books of all time. The Mousetrap, a theatrical play by Agatha Christie, holds the world record for the longest first run. Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, according to Guinness World Records, with more than two billion copies sold.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 2 billion

Max. estimated sales: 4 billion

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Whodunits including Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series

Number of books: 85

Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland, DBE, DStJ (9 July 1901 – 21 May 2000) was a prolific publisher of both current and historical romance books, the latter mainly set during the Victorian or Edwardian periods. Cartland, along with her contemporary Agatha Christie, is one of the best-selling novelists of the twentieth century globally. Many of her books have been made into films, including A Hazard of Hearts and Duel of Hearts for television.

Cartland's English-language books have been translated into a variety of dialects, and she is the sixth most translated author in the world. Her prodigious production of 723 novels has earned her a place in the Guinness World Records for the most novels produced in a single year (1977). Although she is most known for her romantic novels, she also penned biographies, dramas, music, poems, theatre, operettas, and various health and food books.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 500 million

Max. estimated sales: 1 billion

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Romance

Number of books: 723

Danielle Fernandes is a model and actress. Dominique Schuelein-Steel (born August 14, 1947) is a romance novelist from the United States. With over 800 million books sold, she is the bestselling novelist alive and the fourth-bestselling fiction author of all time.

Steel has spent most of her career in California, where she has published multiple novels each year while managing up to five projects at once. Despite "a resounding lack of critical appreciation" (Publishers Weekly), all of her novels, even those published in hardcover, have been bestsellers. Her formula is quite similar, depicting wealthy families in perilous situations, typically containing dark aspects like incarceration, fraud, blackmail, and suicide. Steel has also written and published children's literature and poetry, as well as established a foundation to support mental health groups. Her works have been translated into 43 languages, with 22 of them being adapted for television, two of which have been nominated for the Golden Globes.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 500 million

Max. estimated sales: 800 million

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: General Fiction, Romance

Number of books: 179

Harold Robbins (May 21, 1916 – October 14, 1997) was a prominent novelist in the United States. He published over 25 best-sellers and sold over 750 million copies in 32 languages, making him one of the best-selling authors of all time. Harold Robbins sold more novels than J.K. Rowling, made and spent $50 million throughout his lifetime.

Never Love a Stranger was his debut novel (1948). The Dream Merchants (1949) was a fast-paced novel about the American film industry from its beginnings through the sound era, in which Robbins combined his own personal experiences with history, melodrama, sex, and glossy high society in a fast-paced plot. His novel A Stone for Danny Fisher, published in 1952, was transformed into the 1958 film King Creole, starring Elvis Presley. Where Love Has Gone was No. 1, The Carpetbaggers was No. 3, and The Dream Merchants was No. 6 on the British paperback bestseller list in March 1965.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 750 million

Max. estimated sales: 750 million

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Adventure

Number of books: 23

Belgian novelist Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (13 February 1903 – 4 September 1989). Simenon is most known for creating the fictitious investigator Jules Maigret. He was a prolific novelist who authored approximately 500 novels and several short works.

Simenon was a prolific writer of the twentieth century, averaging 60 to 80 pages each day. Nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, many autobiographical works, several essays, and hundreds of pulp books produced under over two dozen pseudonyms make up his work. Around 550 million copies of his writings have been printed in total. However, he is most known for the 75 novels and 28 short tales he wrote about Commissaire Maigret. Pieter-le-Letton, the first novel in the series, was serialized in 1930 and published in book form in 1931; Maigret and Monsieur Charles, the final, was published in 1972. The Maigret books have been translated into every major language and turned into films and radio plays.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 500 million

Max. estimated sales: 700 million

Original language: French

Genre and/or major works: Detectives, Maigret, Romans dur

Number of books: 570

Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was an English children's author whose novels have sold over 600 million copies worldwide since the 1930s. In 1922, she released her debut book, Child Whispers, a 24-page collection of poetry. Following the commercial success of her early novels, such as Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (1937) and The Enchanted Wood (1939), Blyton went on to establish a literary empire, publishing up to 50 books per year in addition to her frequent contributions to magazines and newspapers.

Her writings have been translated into 90 languages and are still very successful. Blyton was the fourth most translated author as of June 2018. She published novels on education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical stories, but she is best known for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, and Malory Towers series.

Detailed Information:

Max. estimated sales: 600 million

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Children's literature, Noddy, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven

Number of books: 800

Sheldon (February 11, 1917 – January 30, 2007) was an American writer, director, and producer. He was well-known in the 1930s, first on Broadway and later in movies, most notably penning the hit comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), for which he won an Academy Award in 1948.

Sheldon's debut novel, The Naked Face, was published in 1969 and received a nomination for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. His second novel, The Other Side of Midnight, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller List, as did numerous others that followed, some of which were turned into films or television miniseries. He began authoring best-selling romantic suspense novels when he became 50, including Master of the Game (1982), The Other Side of Midnight (1973), and Rage of Angels (1976). (1980). In 51 languages, his 18 novels have sold over 300 million copies. Sheldon is often included among the top ten best-selling fiction authors of all time.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 370 million

Max. estimated sales: 600 million

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Suspense

Number of books: 21

Joanne Rowling (born 31 July 1965) is a British novelist, philanthropist, film producer, and screenwriter who goes by the pen name J. K. Rowling. She is the author of the Harry Potter series, which has received several honors and has sold over 500 million copies worldwide as of 2018, making it the best-selling children's book series in history. Under the pen name Robert Galbraith, she also writes mystery novels.

For the Harry Potter series, Rowling has received various awards in the categories of general literature, children's literature, and speculative fiction. Rowling received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for contributions to children's literature in 2000, and the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award for Concord three years later. Over the span of the Harry Potter series, she earned the British Book Awards Author of the Year and Outstanding Achievement awards. Rowling was chosen a runner-up for Time's 2007 Person of the Year after the publication of Deathly Hallows, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she gave her fans.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 500 million

Max. estimated sales: 500 million

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Cormoran Strike, fantasy, crime fiction

Number of books: 15

William George "Gilbert" Patten (October 25, 1866 – January 16, 1945), best known as the creator of the Frank Merriwell stories under the pen name Burt L. Standish, was a dime novelist. Patten published 75 books and an unknown number of short stories. He estimated that as a novelist, he had written 40 million words. His works have sold over 500 million copies worldwide, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.

He was a novelist who specialized in dime novels. The Diamond Sport; or, The Double Face of Bed Rock, published by Beadle in 1886, was his first published dime fiction. He authored westerns under the pen name Wyoming Bill, but his sporting stories in the Frank Merriwell series, which he wrote under the name Burt L. Standish, are his most well-known works. Patten began writing the Merriwell stories for the publisher Street & Smith in April 1896, and for the next twenty years, he delivered one per week, totaling 20,000 words. The serial, which ran in Tip-Top Weekly, was hugely successful, selling over 135,000 copies a week, and the Merriwell brothers became icons of All-American sportsmanship, with their names appearing in sports commentators' lingo.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 125 million

Max. estimated sales: 500 million

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Adolescent adventures

Number of books: 209

Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American children's author, political cartoonist, artist, poet, animator, and filmmaker who lived from March 2, 1904, until September 24, 1991. He is most recognized for his work as Dr. Seuss, for which he wrote and illustrated more than 60 books. Many of the most successful children's books of all time were written by him, and by the time he died, his work had sold over 600 million copies and been translated into more than 20 languages.

Following WWII, Geisel returned to writing children's books, penning classics such as If I Ran the Zoo (1950), Horton Hears a Who! (1955), and The Cat in the Hat (1957), among others. Throughout his career, he authored over 60 novels, several of which have been turned into television specials, feature films, a Broadway musical, and four television series. In 1958, for Horton Hatches the Egg, Geisel won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, again in 1961, for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. He has won two Primetime Emmy Awards: Outstanding Children's Special for Halloween is Grinch Night (1978) and Outstanding Animated Program for The Grinch Grinches the Cat (1982).

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 100 million

Max. estimated sales: 500 million

Original language: English

Genre and/or major works: Children's literature

Number of books: 44

Eiichiro Oda (born January 1, 1975) is a manga artist from Japan and the creator of the One Piece series (1997–present). With over 490 million tanks on copies in circulation worldwide, One Piece is both the best-selling manga in history and the best-selling comic series printed in volume, making Oda one of the best-selling fiction authors. Oda was considered one of the manga artists who impacted the history of comics because of the series' success.

One Piece debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997 and has since grown to become not just one of Japan's most popular manga series, but also the best-selling manga series of all time. It had 320,866,000 copies printed worldwide by December 2014, 430 million volumes in circulation worldwide as of October 2017, 440 million copies sold as of May 2018, and 450 million in print as of March 2019. The series, together with Kimuchi Yokoyama's Nekodarake Nice, earned the 41st Japan Cartoonists Association Award Grand Prize in 2013.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 490 million

Max. estimated sales: 490 million

Original language: Japanese

Genre and/or major works: Manga, One Piece

Number of books: 100

Akira Toriyama is a Japanese manga artist and character designer who was born on April 5, 1955. He rose to prominence thanks to his renowned manga series Dr. Slump, before moving on to develop Dragon Ball (his most well-known work) and work as a character designer for a number of notable video games, including the Dragon Quest series, Chrono Trigger, and Blue Dragon.

With Dr. Slump, he won the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shonen or shojo manga, and the book went on to sell more than 35 million copies in Japan. It was converted into a popular anime series, with a sequel released 13 years after the manga's conclusion. Dragon Ball would go on to become one of the most popular and profitable manga series in the world. It is the third best-selling manga of all time, with 250–300 million copies sold worldwide, and is credited as one of the main reasons for the peak of manga circulation in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 298 million

Max. estimated sales: 438 million

Original language: Japanese

Genre and/or major works: Manga, Dr. Slump, Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Super

Number of books: 66

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–20 November 1910), also known as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist who is widely recognized as one of the greatest writers of all time. From 1902 through 1906, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909.

Tolstoy, who was born in 1828 to an aristocratic Russian family, is best known for his novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), which are often considered to be the pinnacles of realism literature. With his semi-autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856) and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War, he first gained literary recognition in his twenties. Hundreds of short tales and novellas, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Family Happiness (1859), "After the Ball" (1911), and Hadji Murad, are among his works (1912). He also penned a number of plays and philosophical essays.

Detailed Information:

Max. estimated sales: 413 million

Original language: Russian

Genre and/or major works: War and Peace, Anna Karenina

Number of books: 48

Corín Tellado (April 25, 1927, to April 11, 2009) was a prominent Spanish writer of romance novels and photo novels that were best-sellers in various Spanish-language nations. Due to the strict restrictions of the Spanish government, her books were unlike those of other contemporaneous Western European romance novelists in that they were typically set in the present and did not contain sexuality. Her writing style was straightforward, and her characters were depicted in a direct manner.

She authored over 4,000 novels and sold over 400 million copies worldwide, with many of them being translated into many languages. She was voted the most read Spanish writer after Miguel de Cervantes by UNESCO in 1962, and she was recognized in the 1994 Guinness World Records as having sold the most books published in Spanish.

Detailed Information:

Min. estimated sales: 400 million

Max. estimated sales: 400 million

Original language: Spanish

Genre and/or major works: Romance

Number of books: 4,000