You’ve got to be fairly tough to win in The Hunger Games, but the franchise may have to soon accept defeat, at least as a best-seller.
Granted, it’s difficult to compete with an erotic novel, and according to reports, Fifty Shades of Grey may soon pass the Games up.
Now for those who want to be authors themselves, please always remember that for books to come out of nowhere and transform themselves into a phenomenon is a very rare occurrence indeed.
As we’ve previously discussed, penning a book on the level of a Harry Potter is like winning the lottery twice. The Hunger Games was the big best-seller practically nobody had heard of before it became a huge cultural event, and before anyone even knew what Grey was, word of mouth spread like wildfire, and put its sales through the roof.
According to a report in Entertainment Weekly, author E.L. James is making $1.4 million a week on sales of Grey. Of course, most of us would probably be lucky to see earnings like that writing for a lifetime. And according to the Grey Wikipedia page, it’s also the fastest selling paperback in history.
The Hollywood Reporter now informs us that Grey is “neck-and-neck” with Games for best-seller of 2012. Scholastic, publisher of Games, has announced that the Games series of three books has hit fifty million copies, with twenty-three million copies of the first Games book in print, fourteen million copies of Catching Fire, and thirteen million copies of Mockingjay. (This also reportedly boosted Scholastic’s profit margins with sales up 109% from last year).
Meanwhile, Grey just hit twenty million copies, and there’s no signs of slowing down. In fact, with a film version currently in the works, it should only boost interest even more. Obviously, the Hunger Games will just keep building and building audiences with the upcoming DVD release on August 18, while Catching Fire wraps up casting before kicking off a planned September shoot.
