JK Rowling the best of the decade!
When USA TODAY began its Best-Selling Books list 10 years ago, books weren't sold on the Internet, J.K. Rowling was a struggling, unknown writer, and Oprah Winfrey had yet to become publishing's darling.
A decade later, USA TODAY's book list reveals a different world. Rowling is the decade's most successful author, landing five of the top six spots on the list of the 100 best-selling books of the past 10 years.
The wizard of bookselling. Before Rowling there was J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a best-selling trilogy before it hit the big screen. But Tolkien "appealed more to the college crowd than to kids," says Gayle Feldman, whose study of the book business, Best and Worst of Times, was published last year. Feldman says Rowling "did nothing less than revive the pre-radio, pre-movies, pre-TV tradition of the family-reading book," the kind popularized by Charles Dickens and Walter Scott that were "both classic best seller and best-selling classic."
Rowling also "showed us that children appreciated complicated story lines," says Fitzgerald of BookReporter.com. "They live in a world of 15-minute television programming where a story unfolds and warps, often with complex detail. It's changed how they want to read from the moment they get started."