Which King Book Sold The Best?

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Doc Creed

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Which King book sold the most copies? Any guesses? I couldn't find anything definitive from a Google search. Here are my guesses:

1.) The Stand (Complete & Uncut)
2.) IT
3.) Pet Sematary
4.) The Shining
5.) Misery

I didn't include the Dark Tower books. I figured they don't sell as much, despite being popular. I'd love to know the statistics.
 
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Dana Jean

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Doc Creed said:
Which King book sold the most copies? Any guesses? I couldn't find anything definitive from a Google search. Here are my guesses:

1.) The Stand (Complete & Uncut)
2.) IT
3.) Pet Sematary
4.) The Shining
5.) Misery

I didn't include the Dark Tower books. I figured they don't sell as much, despite being popular. I'd love to know the statistics.
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I would say the The Stand also.
 
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DiO'Bolic

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Moderator

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Machine's Way said:
Simple question I would love to know the answer well. Seems like it shouldn't be a hard one to find out but there seems to be no definitive answer as of now. I would bet its The Stand or IT. Maybe Moderator knows?
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No idea. There isn't any one source for sales figures and, to the best of my knowledge, no one has been compiling a composite of all the various publishers and editions to tally a total, so not as easy as you would think.
 
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Machine's Way

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Moderator said:
No idea. There isn't any one source for sales figures and, to the best of my knowledge, no one has been compiling a composite of all the various publishers and editions to tally a total, so not as easy as you would think.
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Thanks for the reply. I really thought there might just be an answer like "Oh ____ Sold the most by far, don't know the exact numbers but that one is the best seller"
Of course its more complicated than that. Do you have a guess Moderator ?
 
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Moderator

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Machine's Way said:
Thanks for the reply. I really thought there might just be an answer like "Oh ____ Sold the most by far, don't know the exact numbers but that one is the best seller"
Of course its more complicated than that. Do you have a guess Moderator ?
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Honestly no idea. IT had a big bump in sales because of the movie tie-in last year but I don't know if it was enough to make it the number one in sales overall.
 
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fljoe0

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Doc Creed said:
Which King book sold the most copies? Any guesses? I couldn't find anything definitive from a Google search. Here are my guesses:

1.) The Stand (Complete & Uncut)
2.) IT
3.) Pet Sematary
4.) The Shining
5.) Misery

I didn't include the Dark Tower books. I figured they don't sell as much, despite being popular. I'd love to know the statistics.
Click to expand...

I think it's kind of odd that there are never any total sales figures for books. You get general figures for a few weeks after a book is released but there never seems to be any total sales figures for older books like there are albums or movies. You'll get some kind of blurb that says Stephen King has sold x hundreds of millions of books in his lifetime but if you go to try and find how many copies of a specific book sold, you can't find that info. What is Stephen King's Back In Black? ;-D

I would think The Shining has probably sold the most copies. I think a book with a big popular movie attached would be the best selling. If a couple hundred million people saw the movie, a certain percentage of those people would want to read the book.
 
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Doc Creed

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fljoe0 said:
I think it's kind of odd that there are never any total sales figures for books. You get general figures for a few weeks after a book is released but there never seems to be any total sales figures for older books like there are albums or movies. You'll get some kind of blurb that says Stephen King has sold x hundreds of millions of books in his lifetime but if you go to try and find how many copies of a specific book sold, you can't find that info. What is Stephen King's Back In Black? ;-D

I would think The Shining has probably sold the most copies. I think a book with a big popular movie attached would be the best selling. If a couple hundred million people saw the movie, a certain percentage of those people would want to read the book.
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Exactly. I thought a publisher would keep some sort of record on how many copies each book sold. Wouldn't they know by necessity each time they went to print again? But that's okay, I was just curious what fans thought.

I placed The Stand at number one because, even though it's essentially one book, it has two versions and it had a movie adaptation, too, which temporarily bumped up its sales. Also, fans consistently rank it as their favorite.
 
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