Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson has beaten Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson to become the first author to sell more than one million ebooks on Amazon
31 Jul 2010 05:31:41
The online retailer said yesterday that Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy, had become the first member of its new "Kindle Million Club", for authors whose work has sold over a million copies in Amazon's Kindle store in the US. The crime novelist is likely to be joined by thriller writer Patterson – Amazon said last week that it had sold over 860,000 of his ebooks – while Twilight scribe Meyer, Sookie Stackhouse creator Charlaine Harris and queen of romantic suspense Nora Roberts have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books in the US.
"Larsson's books have captivated millions of readers around the world and ignited a voracious interest in the lives of its main characters Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomqvist," said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content. "It's been exciting to have been a part of introducing so many people to these great books."
The novelist's three books – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest –currently top Amazon's Kindle bestseller list, and are also in the top 10 bestselling Kindle books of all time, according to the retailer.
The books have also topped Amazon's UK Kindle chart for "a good few months", said Iain Millar, marketing manager at Larsson's UK publisher Quercus, and are currently at the top of Waterstone's ebook bestseller list.
But Millar said that UK ebook sales for Larsson were "nowhere near the million mark, which is indicative of the extent to which the US ebook market is ahead of ours
