I would like to know some statistics about the books. How many books were sold or where Cussler has sold the books in which country and how many books.

Does anyone know about this questions? Do you know any statistics? Please let me know

Thank you.

Greetings, reaphy

Nobody will probably touch this with a ten-foot pole, reaphy because it was (and probably still is) at the heart of Phillip Anschutz's lawsuit against Clive. The contention is that Clive and his agent "padded" the book sales in their conversations/negotiations for Crusader to buy the film rights. You can look up the details on-line by just googling "the clive cussler lawsuit".

Thanks for feilding that one Kerry. I wasn't going to touch it.

:P I'll touch it!! It's obvious that several million books have been sold around the world and quite a lot here in the states, Europe and other english speaking countries. The foreign language translations probably have a good percentage of the sales. Here's my toast to Clive for the great books he has written and the money he so worked hard for since the early 70s. beer:

Does anyone believe that Phillip Anschutz would finance a major motion picture based on guess work? A savvy billionaire could easily research publishing information such as actual books printed for a start. You don't get to the top of the of the heap by being duped.

Thank you for the answer. I know it's a delicate topic. I only wanted to know how many books were sold in Europe. It was for a friend, who wrotes a Cussler Work for school.

I read, that in Italy, 5.5 Millions books were sold.

You'd probably be more likely to know how many books were physically published, since essentially one person or company would control that. To know how many books were sold is far more tricky. It requires each individual store to accurately report copies sold, and someone to track all that reporting. There is far more room for error.

The other problem with Anschutz' case when talking about "copies sold" is that it does not accurately reflect the number of Cussler readers because it fails to take into account copies of books that are re-sold (ebay, garage sales, flea markets, used bookstores, etc), lent to friends, loaned from the library, etc. How many copies in our collections are used copies? Practically my whole bookshelf. That means that I and at least one other person have read or at least owned each book on the shelf.

Conversely, neither # of books published nor # of books sold will accurately reflect the number of readers anyway. How many of us have multiple copies of the same book (different editions), and many even have two or more of the same edition! (Dave has personally deflated the readers/books ratio for Flood Tide). Personally, I have 3 or 4 different copies of Sahara.

Tony's comment about a savvy billionaire risking hundreds of millions of dollars on an inflated estimate, combined with the ludicrous idea that books sold = # of people who want to see the movie, just makes it that much more astounding that Clive lost the case.


Additional note: My paperback copy of Sahara definitely says right on the cover something to the effect of "Over 60 million copies in print!"

ok, thank you for the answer.