Larsson, Meyer and Brown were Europe's top authors in 2009

25.01.10 Philip Jones in The Bookseller

Authors Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, and Dan Brown made the biggest impact on European book buyers in 2009, according to an analysis of the top 10 international fiction bestsellers published by book trade magazines, including The Bookseller, Germany's Buchreport, and France's Livres Hebdo, over the past 12 months.

Larsson takes the stop spot from Khaled Hosseini, who drops out of the top 50 list after dominating in 2008. The Swedish writer's Millennium trilogy scored bestseller status in five countries—UK, Spain, Netherlands, France and Italy. Meyer moves to second spot, thanks to the global success of her Twilight series, which hit the bestseller charts of five of the countries measured: Germany, Spain, UK, Sweden and Italy. Brown outranked his two rivals in terms of reach, as he made the bestseller lists in each of the seven markets tracked, but with The Lost Symbol not arriving until the autumn only made it into third place in the ranking overall.

The ranking shows the continued dominance of English writers, with 21 of the 50 strongest performers having been written in English. In the top 20 alone, 10 of the authors write in English.

It also reveals the relative difficulty of crossing into other international markets. Only 20 of the 50 writers featured had hits in more than one country, only nine had hits in more than two countries, and only four (Larsson, Meyer, Brown and Carlos Ruiz Zafon) had bestsellers in more than three of the seven European countries that produce the chart data.

The ranking picks up on authors who have featured in at least one of the European fiction charts, and gives them a score dependent on their chart position. The full top 50 list will be published in The Bookseller next Friday (29th January).

Top 10 ranking of fiction writers in Europe in 2009

1 Stieg Larsson
2 Stephenie Meyer
3 Dan Brown
4 Paolo Giordano
5 Carlos Ruiz Zafón
6 Camilla Läckberg
7 Herman Koch
8 Tatiana de Rosnay
9 Henning Mankell
10 John Grisham

The ranking analysed chart data, between January and December 2009, from seven of Europe’s largest book markets, attributing points for every month that a title has stayed in the top 10 bestselling lists of Buchreport/Der Spiegel in Germany, Livres Hebdo/Ipsos in France, Informazioni Italiani in Italy, Boekblad/GfK in the Netherlands, El cultural in Spain, Svensk Bokhandel in Sweden, and The Bookseller in the UK. Compilation and analysis by Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting