[PhasmaFelis]

It was the best-known and most influental fantasy fiction on Earth before the cartoons. Anyone with more than a passing interest in fantasy was at least aware of Lord of the Rings. I'm sure the cartoons helped, and I also loved the Hobbit movie, but I think you're making your own experience more universal than it really was.

[vidarh]

Yes, but as sales numbers for genre literature will tell you, most people don't read fantasy (or sci fi, or pretty much any genre literature outside of romance and thrillers).

Being one of the best-known genre-work of all genres means the vast majority of people have still not read it.

Estimates worldwide sales were around 50m by 2003, and 150m by 2007.

Figuring out where they were at before the movies is hard, but the US 2001 edition of LOTR alone sold ~2m copies between 2001 and 2003, so it's pretty clear sales in 2001-2003 were far higher than the average for the preceding years of sale.

[bryanrasmussen]

> but the US 2001 edition of LOTR alone sold ~2m copies between 2001 and 2003

do we have stats for sales in the 1980s etc. ? I would expect the 2m was replacement, new generation of readers sales because before extra market opened up by movies (which obviously must have happened) all the people who would buy that book, which was also probably a lot, had already bought one.

[vidarh]

> do we have stats for sales in the 1980s etc.

Not really. The earliest cumulative estimate I've found was the 50m number for 2003.

There are some earlier numbers:

First edition of the Fellowship of the Ring was printed in 1500 copies in the US, 3000 in the UK. Return of the King up to 5,000 in the UK and 7,000 in the US.

It's worth noting that those were good sales number for fantasy hardbacks, and still are. The vast majority of authors can only dream of selling even a few thousands hardbacks for genre fiction.

In the 1960's Ace published an unlicensed paperback copy of LOTR due to an issue with the US copyright that reportedly sold a combined 150k. Ballantine's subsequent authorised paperback supposedly sold at least 100k. Those numbers were astounding for fantasy, and still are.

Someone from Houghton Mifflin said the 2001 edition was their second book ever to sell over a million, with the 1977 edition of The Silmarillion the only other one in decades of publishing. It's pretty reasonable to assume there must have been quite a few million copies of LOTR out for there to be enough of a market for The Silmarillion to sell over a million in a US edition.

So by fantasy standards it certainly was one of the biggest successes ever already at that point.

I really want to know what the worldwide sales were for the last few years before the movie marketing started and from they were launched and until 2003, though. It's clear the movies effect were massive, but it'd be interesting to see just how massive.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Someone from Houghton Mifflin said the 2001 edition was their second book ever to sell over a million, with the 1977 edition of The Silmarillion the only other one in decades of publishing.

Wow. Very strange that The Silmarillion outsold any of the Lord of the Rings books.

[vidarh]

Think multiple editions and multiple publishers. By the time The Silmarillion came out, LOTR had been out for more than 20 years in multiple editions. The individual early editions sold less, but gradually ramped up over the years, and at least two of the biggest selling early editions in the US were not Houghton Mifflin but Ace and Ballantine who were the first to publish paperback versions in the US - Houghton Mifflins earlier versions had been only hardcover as far as I know. The 1965 Ballantine edition alone had been reprinted nearly a dozen times by 1967.