The Top Five Children’s Books of All Time…
(according to Scholastic Parent and Child)
Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
Goodnight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown)
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle)
The Snowy Day (Ezra Jacks Keats)
Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak)
The Top Five-Selling Books of All Time…
(according to Wikipedia and since sales figures were recorded)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) 200 million copies sold
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) 200 million copies sold
The Hobbit (J.R. Tolkein) 150 million copies sold
And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie) 100 million copies sold
Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin) 100 million copies sold
Five Weird Writers’ Habits…
Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea standing up in front of the typewriter. He wrote from dawn to noon and then spent the rest of the day drinking at his favorite bars.
To the contrary, Truman Capote could only write when he was horizontal. He wrote in bed or while sprawled on the couch with a cigarette and coffee during the day and a cigarette and martini at night.
TV writer Aaron Sorkin always reads what he has written aloud using different voices and poses while looking at himself in the mirror. If it doesn’t sound right, he rewrites it.
Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables in the nude. He made his valet hide his clothes so that the procrastinator wouldn’t be tempted to stop writing and leave his house.
Some authors hide out in hotels to accomplish serious writing. Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, checks into a hotel early in the morning to get a dozen pages done before late afternoon, when she checks out. She writes in long-hand and demands that all distracting items, such as televisions and telephones, be removed from her room.
Top Five Banned Books…
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) John Steinbeck
Lolita (1955) Vladimir Nobokov
Slaughterhouse (1969) Kurt Vonnieut
The Satanic Verses (1988) Salman Rushie
American Psycho (1991) Brett Eason Ellis
What about the latest trends: digital publishing & eBooks?
The sales statistics I have found are too contradictory to include. I did, however, find this interesting factoid provided by The Association of American Publishers:
E-book Sales Continue to Break Records with +164.4 Percent Gains for 2010
Given that 6 million Kindle Fires were sold during the fourth quarter of 2011, when available the latest figures will be much higher! And this doesn’t include other e-reader devices or even other Kindle models!
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