Perhaps my google-fu is weak, but I can’t seem to find it.
Is it private info?
Thanks in advance.
I man has sold, dammit.
Earlier thread with some answers.
Normally that information is private to the publisher and author. As a matter of policy, never believe figures made public.
There are services that report on book sales, like BookScan, but all of them have limitations, and all of them are so expensive that authors usually can’t afford them. Some larger organizations, like authors groups, may buy in and make info available to members.
You can sometimes get figures on bestsellers from news articles, but remember that books come in multiple editions and it’s usually never clear whether those figures includes all possible editions or not.
The near-total lack of information on book sales has historically been one of the weirdest things about the entire publishing industry, which has been stuck in the 19th century for 115 years.
If you want to know about the best-selling books of all time, here’s a list of the estimated numbers. Obviously, there are a lot of problems with this list. Some of the problems are mentioned in the article:
And that information probably came from a press release or PR person, so while I’m not saying it’s inaccurate, it may not represent a full picture either, For example, does “more than a million copies sold” include foreign translations? Not that it matters to most people - a million copies is an impressive figure regardless of whether the book is in English, Spanish, French or Swahili.