It's been a long time coming, but sales of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence, perhaps better known by the name of its TV adaptation, HBO's Game of Thrones, have finally and officially passed the 100 million mark.
The news was buried in The Hollywood Reporter's recent article on Martin, although the main focus was elsewhere (yes, The Winds of Winter still isn't out yet, and yes, the fall-out from Martin's public dissatisfaction with House of the Dragon continues to reverberate).
The series started off a little sluggishly, with A Game of Thrones only doing okay on its first publication in August 1996 (the series turns thirty this year) and it taking until the paperback was released before sales picked up, something Martin attributed to the cover quote from fellow fantasy author Robert Jordan, of Wheel of Time fame. Sales and critical acclaim grew with the release of A Clash of Kings in 1998 and A Storm of Swords in 2000. By the time of the release of A Feast for Crows in 2005, sales of the series had approached or exceeded five million. At least twelve million copies had been sold by the time A Dance with Dragons was published and the Game of Thrones TV series launched, both in 2011.
The immense success of Game of Thrones propelled sales of the novels to insane heights. The books reportedly sold a further nine million copies in the first year of the TV show alone (from 2011 to 2012). Sales hit 70 million in 2016 and are believed to have reached 90 million around the time of the pandemic, coinciding with the - contentious in some parts - conclusion of the TV series. With the franchise off the air and no new novel in the mainline series appearing, sales appear to have slowed, although spin-off books The World of Ice and Fire (2014), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015, collecting three earlier-published novellas) and Fire & Blood (2018) all sold extremely well.
Sales of the series appeared to uptick again after House of the Dragon launched to initial success in 2022, and no doubt there has been another sales boost from the successful launch of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms a few weeks ago.
Crossing the 100 million mark puts Martin in rarefied company. In the secondary world/epic fantasy field, he is just behind Sir Terry Pratchett and Robert Jordan, who have both also crossed the 100 million mark in the last few years, though of course J.R.R. Tolkien continues to rule the roost with at least 300 million sales of his various Middle-earth books (and this figure is highly conservative). Stephen King has over 400 million sales, but only around a tenth of those comes from his epic fantasy or at least epic fantasy-adjacent work, the Dark Tower series and Eyes of the Dragon, meaning that Martin may comfortably be the biggest-selling living epic fantasy author (unless you count Harry Potter as epic fantasy, which most don't seem to).
How long he holds onto that crown will be interesting to see. Brandon Sanderson recently passed 50 million books sold, but Sarah J. Maas recently hit 75 million copies sold and is selling books at a staggering rate.
It should also be noted that book sales are famously sluggish in their reporting, with the reporting sometimes trailing the real figures by many years. Martin's actual sales could be a fair bit higher than this number.
If the books continue to generate hit TV shows, we'll likely see a steady increase in sales. Obviously one thing would blast sales through the stratosphere again, but when those winds will blow remains to be seen.
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