What 20 years of best sellers say about what we read

Bob Minzesheimer and Anthony DeBarros | USA TODAY

When USA TODAY began its Best-Selling Books list 20 years ago, J.K. Rowling was a struggling unknown writer teaching English in Portugal. Suzanne Collins was helping to write a children's TV show for Nickelodeon called Clarissa Explains It All.

And the word "Amazon" brought to mind a river in South America or a very tall woman.

A lot has changed in two decades.

Driven by Amazon.com, about half of all books are now bought online, a click away. More than 20% are downloaded. Some 40% of adults have e-readers, tablets or other devices to read e-books.

And Rowling and Collins? They have a combined total of 225 million copies in print of the books (10 in all) of their two series for children and teens, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.

Two decades worth of data show what's changed — and what hasn't — since USA TODAY began tracking best sellers in October 1993.

The highlights from three distinct eras:

• Self-help and other advice titles were big during the first five years (1993-1998) when most books were bought in physical bookstores.

• Rowling triggered Dickens-like excitement about reading and demolished the conventional wisdom about children's books in the second era (1999-2008), when online sales grew.

• Since 2009, fiction (as a percentage of best sellers) has risen to all-time highs and erotica went mainstream as e-books became the fastest growing part of the market.

Among the trends:

Who reads British kids' books?

Conventional wisdom used to be that "kids books have a limited market, adults won't read them and British kids' books don't do well in the U.S.," says Nora Rawlinson, former editor of Publishers Weekly and co-founder of EarlyWord, a digital newsletter for librarians.

Rowling's boy wizard zapped that.

"Rowling reinvented the idea of a series," says Dick Robinson, president of Scholastic, her U.S. publisher. "Young kids love to read the same stories over and over again and older kids love to read new versions of the characters they know. What J.K. did so brilliantly was to age the characters in her books, so her readers grew up with them as the books became more complex."

Of the 25 most popular books since 2009, 11 are part of series aimed at kids or teens. That includes Collins' Hunger Games, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Of the 25 most popular books between 1993 and 1998, only one was for kids: Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

Whither self-help?

Of the 25 most popular books from the list's first era (1993-98), nine offered self-help or other advice.

John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Woman Are from Venus (No. 1) was followed by Richard Carlson's Don't Sweat the Small Stuff … And It's All Small Stuff (No. 2) and Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen's Chicken Soup for the Soul (No. 3).

In sharp contrast, not one of the 25 most popular titles since 2009 would be shelved in the self-help section. (That is, unless you consider E.L. James' erotic Fifty Shadestrilogy a sexual aid.)

Blame or credit the digital age, says Carol Fitzgerald, founder of the Book Report Network of websites. "There is more and more targeted self-help information readily available online. With keystrokes people are pulling together the information that they typically would seek out in books," she says.

In fact, Gray offers free advice at marsvenus.com.

Paul Bogaards, publicity director of Knopf and Doubleday, cites another factor: "It's harder to get self-help authors on TV. The interest of daytime TV in self-help has eroded as the shows get more and more into celebrities."

Fiction as an escape

In 1998, 56% of the books in the list's top 150 each week was fiction. That's the same year the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex scandal propelled The Starr Report, the investigative account by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, to the top of the weekly best-seller list. (Maybe it was just one of those stories that even a novelist couldn't imagine.)

Since then, fiction is on a roll — up to 68% of best sellers in 2002, 77% in 2010, and to an all-time high of 81% so far this year.

"People today are looking for escape," Fitzgerald says. "Fiction provides that. In the '90s and early 2000s, we were in a different economic time. People were living the dream, not just dreaming it. "

Sex sells

Romance novels, from the PG to the X-rated variety, have always had their fans, but thanks to James, erotica is now mainstream.

Counting Fifty Shades, romance accounted for 25% of the best sellers tracked in 2012 and 22% in 2013. That's in sharp contrast to a much smaller share for romance — ranging from 5% to 9% — between 1994 and 2008.

One explanation: the privacy of e-books that prevents others from knowing what you're reading. How many people read Fifty Shades as an e-book who would not have been caught reading it in paperback — at least in public?

Bogaards says James' sales are split fairly evenly between print and e-books. "It's not just an e-book thing. The jacket became iconic, with an awareness steeped into readers. The book was available nearly everywhere."

Who reads translations?

Rawlinson notes another "old" idea: ''Americans won't read books in translation."

Then along came the posthumously published crime novels by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish reporter. All three of the books in his Milennium trilogy, starting with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, are among the 25 top sellers since 2009.

Hooray for Hollywood

Nothing sells a book like a movie adaptation. Just the release of the trailer in theaters or online will drive book sales. More than half of the best sellers in the list's three eras were adapted as movies in theaters or TV. Novelists like Rowling, Collins, Dan Brown, John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks were best sellers in their own right, but the adaptations gave their books a huge second life.

The Oprah effect

Oprah's Book Club, begun in 1996 and revived last year with more digital features, made a best seller out of its 72 titles. Twenty of the books embraced by Winfrey hit No. 1 on USA TODAY's weekly list, mostly during the club's heyday between 1996 and 2001.

But the impact usually was limited to a few weeks of big sales. Not one of Oprah's picks was the top seller for the year. None appear in the top 25 books of each era.

What hasn't changed

"Readers still want to read what other people are reading and talking about," Fitzgerald says. "When a new name pops onto the list and stays there, there is a lemming effect of sales as readers want to be part of reading a new author early."

That was true for Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, which hit USA TODAY's weekly list at No. 150 in September 1996. Thanks to great reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, it moved up the list to No. 11 three months later. After it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, it reached No. 2.For all sales from 1993 through 1998, it's No. 18.

In an industry where most books lose money (or don't "earn out" the author's advance), best sellers are crucial to publishers' bottom line. But Bogaards says they also play a cultural role:

"A mega best seller works itself into the social fabric of our lives. It becomes part of the American culture. Everyone knows Harry Potter even if they've never read any of the books."