# Top 18 Best-Selling Authors of All Time

> Two billion copies here, four hundred novels there. Romance, horror, wuxia and children's rhyme all sit on the same shelf in this one.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/top-18-best-selling-authors-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Agatha Christie**
   Guinness World Records lists her as the best-selling fiction writer ever, at roughly two billion copies.
2. **William Shakespeare**
   The English playwright whose collected works rival any novelist's sales four centuries on.
3. **Barbara Cartland**
   The romance novelist who published more than 700 books and sold them by the hundreds of millions.
4. **J.K. Rowling**
   The Harry Potter author, the best-selling novelist of the modern era.
5. **Danielle Steel**
   The most prolific living romance novelist, with a book on the bestseller list almost every year since 1980.
6. **Stephen King**
   The horror novelist whose titles have sold hundreds of millions and been filmed dozens of times.
7. **Leo Tolstoy**
   The Russian novelist behind War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
8. **Enid Blyton**
   The children's author of the Famous Five and Noddy, translated into 90 languages.
9. **Georges Simenon**
   The Belgian creator of Inspector Maigret, who wrote roughly 400 books.
10. **Dr. Seuss**
   Theodor Geisel, whose rhyming picture books taught much of America to read.
11. **Jackie Collins**
   The novelist of Hollywood excess, with 32 New York Times bestsellers.
12. **Harold Robbins**
   The mid-century American novelist whose potboilers sold in the hundreds of millions.
13. **Paulo Coelho**
   The Brazilian author of The Alchemist, one of the most translated books alive.
14. **James Patterson**
   The thriller writer who industrialised co-authorship and dominates airport shelves.
15. **Nora Roberts**
   The romance and suspense novelist with more than 200 titles in print.
16. **Jin Yong**
   The Chinese wuxia novelist whose martial-arts epics sold hundreds of millions across Asia.
17. **Corín Tellado**
   The Spanish romance writer named by UNESCO as the most-read author in Spanish after Cervantes.
18. **Ryōtarō Shiba**
   The Japanese historical novelist whose books sold by the tens of millions at home.

Tags: books, authors, writers