'Fifty Shades,' 'Games' dominate best sellers of 2012

The 'Fifty Shades of Grey' trilogy by E.L. James took the publishing world by storm in 2012.
Denis Poroy/AP
SHARE URL EMAIL
FONT: A A A
Comments
USA TODAY Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:36 AM

Two authors sweep the top six slots in the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list for 2012.

If publishers want to imitate and build on the best sellers of 2012, they might consider a new kind of literary mash-up: erotic dystopian fiction.

Two dissimilar trilogies — E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, an adult bondage romance, and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, starring and aimed at teens and set in a future dictatorship — dominated USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list for the year.

STORY: Authors James, Collins and Kinney had a big 2012

LIST: 100 best-selling books of 2012

James and Collins swept the top six slots among 2012's 100 top-selling titles.

At No. 1 for the year is James' first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, a word-of-mouth sensation that grew into a publishing phenomenon. It was initially published in Australia in 2011 and released in the USA by Random House as an e-book in March and in paperback in April.

But at No. 2, thanks to Hollywood, is The Hunger Games, the first book in Collins' trilogy — four years after it was published. It got a big boost from the hit movie, starring Jennifer Lawrence, released in March. James' other books are Nos. 3 and 4, followed by Collins at Nos. 5 and 6 for the year.

James broke another record: 20 consecutive weeks at No. 1. She passes Collins, whose 17-week streak ended in April.

In a year when the news was dominated by the presidential election and the struggling economy, publishers had a tough time attracting attention for non-fiction. The most popular non-fiction title, at No. 12, is No Easy Day by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer, an inside account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

USA TODAY's list is a ranking of titles selling well each week at a broad range of retail outlets and reflects combined sales of titles in print and digital format, if available. The list began in October 1993.

Contributing: Anthony DeBarros

► Join the DiscussionView/Add Comments  »

Posting a comment to our website allows you to join in on the conversation. Share your story and unique perspective with members of the azcentral.com community.

Comments posted via facebook:
► Join the Discussion

azcentral.com has switched to the Facebook comment system on its blogs. Existing blog comments will display, but new comments will only be accepted via the Facebook comment system. To begin commenting, you must be logged into an active personal account on Facebook. Once you're logged in, you will be able to comment. While we welcome you to join conversations, readers are responsible for their comments and abuse of this privilege will not be tolerated. We reserve the right, without warning or notification, to remove comments and block users judged to violate our Terms of Service and Rules of Engagement. Facebook comments FAQ

Back to Article
Comments posted via facebook:
open
Enjoy a limited number of free articles over the next 30 days.
20
free articles remaining this month.

We hope you have enjoyed your complimentary access.

Become a subscriber today to enjoy these benefits:

View subscription options

Are you currently a subscriber? Set up your digital access now.
 
http://archive.azcentral.com/thingstodo/arts/free/20130117fifty-shades-hunger-games-best-sellers2012.html?from=global
archive.azcentral.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-09
77646
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:IMVYTMHTTKK5JOWWOQDBVA23YOBLPQSS
<urn:uuid:aae8eecf-8218-428d-918b-348872f1c9b9>
2017-02-26T01:16:30Z
23.216.7.170
sha1:JB2GWM5Y3U7UGAQUCQP4EIG7GW6HD6EV
<urn:uuid:e19cee66-be46-46a0-b9cc-c64730102cc6>
http://archive.azcentral.com/thingstodo/arts/free/20130117fifty-shades-hunger-games-best-sellers2012.html?from=global
response
<urn:uuid:3a321150-22b8-45bd-8db7-03d19a494cf1>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-09
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf