List of best-selling books

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by it with reliably sourced entries.

This page provides lists of best-selling single-volume books and book series to date and in any language. "Best-selling" refers to the estimated number of copies sold of each book, rather than the number of books printed or currently owned. Comics and textbooks are not included in this list. The books are listed according to the highest sales estimate as reported in reliable, independent sources. This list is incomplete, since there are many books such as Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the individual Harry Potter books which are commonly cited as "best-selling books" yet have no reliable sales figures. There is a separate section on this page for books known to have sold over 10 million copies, yet do not have figures for their final sales data.

The Bible, the Qur'an, The Communist Manifesto and Quotations from Chairman Mao, are widely reported as the most-printed and most-distributed books in the world, with hundreds of millions of copies believed to be in existence of each of them. Exact print figures for some such books may also be missing or unreliable since these kinds of books may be produced by many different and unrelated publishers, in some cases over many centuries. All such books have been excluded from this List of best-selling books for these reasons.

List of best-selling single-volume books

[ ] More than 100 million copies

Book	Author(s)	Original language	First published	Approximate sales
A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	English	1859	200 million [1]
The Lord of the Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	English	1954–1955	150 million [2]
The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince)	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	French [Note 1]	1943	140 million [3]
The Hobbit	J. R. R. Tolkien	English	1937	100 million [4]
Hong Lou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber)	Cao Xueqin	Chinese	1754[5]–1791	100 million [6]
And Then There Were None	Agatha Christie	English	1939	100 million [7]

Between 50 million and 100 million copies

Book	Author(s)	Original language	First published	Approximate sales
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe	C. S. Lewis	English	1950	85 million [8]
She	H. Rider Haggard	English	1887	83 million [9]
The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown	English	2003	80 million [10]
Think and Grow Rich	Napoleon Hill	English	1937	70 million [11]
The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger	English	1951	65 million [12]
O Alquimista (The Alchemist)	Paulo Coelho	Portuguese	1988	65 million [13]
Steps to Christ	Ellen G. White	English	1892	60 million [14]
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	English	1955	50 million [15]
Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi's Years of Wandering and Learning)	Johanna Spyri	German	1880	50 million [16]
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care	Dr. Benjamin Spock	English	1946	50 million [17]
Anne of Green Gables	Lucy Maud Montgomery	English	1908	50 million [18]
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions: The autobiography of a horse	Anna Sewell	English	1877	50 million [19]
Il Nome della Rosa (The Name of the Rose)	Umberto Eco	Italian	1980	50 million [20]
The Eagle Has Landed	Jack Higgins	English	1975	50 million [21]
Water ship down	Richard Adams	English	1972	50 million [22]

[ ] Between 30 million and 50 million copies

Book	Author(s)	Original language	First published	Approximate sales
The Hite Report	Sheer Hite	English	1976	48 million [23]
Charlotte's Web	E.B. White; illustrated by Garth	English	1952	45 million [24]
The Ginger Man	J. P. Donleavy	English	1955	45 million [25]
The Tale of Peter Rabbit	Beatrix Potter	English	1902	45 million [26]
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [27]	J. K. Rowling	English	2007	44 million [28]
Jonathan Livingston Seagull	Richard Bach	English	1970	40 million [29]
A Message to Garcia	Elbert Hubbard	English	1899	40 million [17]
Sofies verden (Sophie's World)	Jostein Gaarder	Norwegian	1991	40 million [30]
Angels and Demons	Dan Brown	English	2000	39 million [31]
Как закалялась сталь (Kak zakalyalas' stal'; How the Steel Was Tempered)	Nikolai Ostrovsky	Russian	1932	36.4 million copies in USSR[32]
Война и мир (Voyna i mir; War and Peace)	Leo Tolstoy	Russian	1869	36.0 million copies in USSR[32]
Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio)	Carlo Collodi	Italian	1881	35 million[33]
You Can Heal Your Life	Louise Hay	English	1984	35 million[34]
Kane and Abel	Jeffrey Archer	English	1979	34 million[35]
Het Achterhuis (The Diary of a Young Girl, The Diary of Anne Frank)	Anne Frank	Dutch	1947	30 million[36]
In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?	Charles M. Sheldon	English	1896	30 million[17]
To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	English	1960	30 million[37]
Valley of the Dolls	Jacqueline Susann	English	1966	30 million[17]
Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell	English	1936	30 million[38]
Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)	Gabriel García Márquez	Spanish	1967	30 million[39][40]
The Purpose Driven Life	Rick Warren	English	2002	30 million[41]
The Thorn Birds	Colleen McCullough	English	1977	30 million[42]
The Revolt of Mamie Stover	William Bradford Huie	English	1951	30 million[43]
Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)	Stieg Larsson	Swedish	2005	30 million[44]
The Very Hungry Caterpillar	Eric Carle	English	1969	30 million[45]