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Best-selling Fiction Authors Ever Quiz

How well do you know the best-selling fiction authors ever? Floored turns the ranking into a building: floor 1 is the top of the list. We name a floor, you guess what's on it, and the lift rides to whatever you picked so you know to go higher or lower.

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How it works

You get a few guesses per floor. Land it on your first guess for 10 points; a near miss still scores. After the authors round, four more lists from the same topic keep the ride going.

Show the full ranking (40)
  1. William Shakespeare 2B-4B copies
    At 18 he married Anne Hathaway; they had a daughter, Susanna, and twins, Hamnet and Judith.
  2. Agatha Christie 2B-4B copies
    She went missing for 11 days in 1926, prompting a search by over 1,000 police officers.
  3. J. K. Rowling 600M copies
    Twelve publishers rejected her first Harry Potter manuscript.
  4. Eiichiro Oda 600M copies
    At 19 he worked as an assistant to Nobuhiro Watsuki on Rurouni Kenshin.
  5. Barbara Cartland 500M-1B copies
    Her step-granddaughter was Diana, Princess of Wales.
  6. Danielle Steel 500M-800M copies
    She has written all of her novels on Olympia typewriters.
  7. Georges Simenon 500M-700M copies
    From 1921 to 1934 he wrote 358 novels and stories under 17 pen names.
  8. Dean Koontz 500M copies
    Early on he wrote under pen names such as David Axton and Deanna Dwyer.
  9. Leo Tolstoy 413M copies
    He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 but never won.
  10. Enid Blyton 400M-600M copies
    She created Noddy, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Malory Towers.
  11. Jackie Collins 400M-500M copies
    She was the younger sister of the actress Joan Collins.
  12. Corín Tellado 400M copies
    The Spanish romance writer published more than 4,000 titles.
  13. James Patterson 400M copies
    He was a Vanderbilt PhD candidate when he took an advertising job at J. Walter Thompson.
  14. Alexander Pushkin 357M copies
    He died at 37 after a duel with Georges d'Anthes, his wife's sister's husband.
  15. René Goscinny 325M copies
    He created the Asterix comics with illustrator Albert Uderzo.
  16. Sidney Sheldon 300M-500M copies
    He created the TV sitcoms I Dream of Jeannie and The Patty Duke Show.
  17. Stephen King 300M-400M copies
    He threw the first pages of Carrie in the trash; his wife Tabitha fished them out.
  18. Jirō Akagawa 300M-330M copies
    His best-known books are the Calico Cat Holmes mysteries, begun in 1978.
  19. Edgar Wallace 300M copies
    He died suddenly while drafting the script for King Kong (1933).
  20. Janet Dailey 300M copies
    She wrote 50 Americana novels, one set in each US state.
  21. Akira Toriyama 298M-438M copies
    He designed the characters for the Dragon Quest video games.
  22. Takehiko Inoue 283M copies
    He made his directing debut in 2022 with the anime film The First Slam Dunk.
  23. Osamu Tezuka 276M copies
    He graduated from medical school in 1951, the year Astro Boy first appeared.
  24. Jeffrey Archer 250M-330M copies
    He wrote his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, to avoid bankruptcy.
  25. Zane Grey 250M copies
    He trained as a dentist after deciding it was more practical than writing or baseball.
  26. Irving Wallace 250M copies
    Wallace was an Americanized form of his family's original surname, Wallechinsky.
  27. Masashi Kishimoto 250M copies
    He and his identical twin Seishi have drawn manga together since early childhood.
  28. Gosho Aoyama 250M copies
    As an art student he painted backgrounds for Pirates of the Caribbean at Tokyo Disneyland.
  29. Louis L'Amour 230M-330M copies
    Before writing Westerns he worked as a professional boxer and a merchant seaman.
  30. Paulo Coelho 225M-350M copies
    The Alchemist's first print run was just 900 copies, and the publisher chose not to reprint it.
  31. Horatio Alger 200M-400M copies
    His rags-to-riches stories had a formative effect on the US from 1868 until his death in 1899.
  32. Frédéric Dard 200M-270M copies
    He wrote more than 400 novels, many under the pen name San-Antonio.
  33. Stan and Jan Berenstain 200M-260M copies
    Jan made their 1946 wedding rings from spare aluminum from her wartime aircraft factory job.
  34. Roald Dahl 200M-250M copies
    As an RAF pilot in World War II he crash-landed a Gloster Gladiator in the Libyan desert.
  35. J. R. R. Tolkien 200M-250M copies
    He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945.
  36. Kyotaro Nishimura 200M copies
    He is best known for his train series mysteries starring detective Shozo Totsugawa.
  37. Mitsuru Adachi 200M copies
    He is known for baseball manga such as Touch, H2 and Cross Game.
  38. Rumiko Takahashi 200M copies
    In 2019 she won the Grand Prix at France's Angouleme comics festival.
  39. Dan Brown 200M copies
    He taught English at Phillips Exeter Academy, the school he had attended.
  40. Rick Riordan 190M copies
    Percy Jackson began as bedtime stories about Greek heroes for his son Haley.

Source: Wikipedia: List of best-selling fiction authors · as of 2026-11

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