Topline
Fantasy author Sarah J. Maas has sold almost 5 million print copies from her three popular series—Throne of Glass, Crescent City and A Court of Thorns and Roses—so far this year, making her the bestselling BookTok author of the year to date and topping the combined sales of the year’s 10 most popular new releases.
A portrait of American young adult fantasy author Sarah J. Maas.
Key Facts
Maas, who has credited much of her success to a surge in popularity on TikTok in recent years, and has become a case study in the power of social media fame, sold 4.83 million print books between the start of the year and June 8, according to Circana BookScan data provided to Forbes.
Of those, 536,346 were copies of her 2024 release “House of Flame and Shadow”—the third installment in the Crescent City series—and 4.3 million were sales of her other 15 titles, the first of which was published in 2012.
Maas is the poster child for “BookTok,” a category defined by Circana BookScan as authors and books that are featured prominently on the video app TikTok or those identified by bookseller Barnes & Noble as being popular on the platform.
Maas’s sales so far this year have easily eclipsed those of the second-best-selling BookTok author, Colleen Hoover, who has sold 1.83 million print copies through June 8 despite no new books this year.
Freida McFadden, whose 2024 book “The Teacher” is among the most widely sold of the year, is the third-best-selling author in the category with 1.61 million print copies sold, followed by Ana Huang with 1.47 million and Rebecca Yarrow with 1.28 million sales.
Maas, McFadden and Emily Henry, the seventh-best-selling BookTok author, all have new releases among the bestselling new books of 2024 so far with House of Flame and Shadow (536,346 print sales), “The Teacher” (289,949) and “Funny Story” (300,289), respectively.
This list of bestselling authors counts U.S. print sales from Dec. 31, 2023 through June 8 by Circana BookScan’s TikTok authors.
Top 10 Booktok Authors Of 2024
- Sarah J. Maas (4,829,853 print copies sold)
- Colleen Hoover (1,829,332 print copies sold)
- Freida McFadden (1,616,909 print copies sold)
- Ana Huang (1,474,194 print copies sold)
- Rebecca Yarros (1,281,140 print copies sold)
- Laura Nowlin (824,700 print copies sold)
- Emily Henry (788,388 print copies sold)
- Lucy Score (610,163 print copies sold)
- Hannah Grace (576,113 print copies sold)
- Holly Jackson (556,668 print copies sold)
Big Number
3.14 million. That’s how many copies of the top 10 bestselling adult books released in 2024 have sold so far, 1.69 million fewer than Maas alone has sold. The top-selling adult book this year was Kristin Hannah’s “The Women,” at 829,115 print copies, eclipsing Maas’s “House of Flame and Shadow”—but sales for Maas’s older books more than made up for it.
Surprising Fact
Novels by seven of the top 10 bestselling BookTok authors have film or TV show adaptations in the works. “It Ends with Us” a film based on Hoover’s book of the same name starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, releases Aug. 9. A show of the same name based on Holly Jackson’s young adult novel “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” is set to be released by Netflix later this year. A TV adaptation of “A Court of Thorns and Roses” co-written by Maas is currently in development at Hulu. “The Housemaid” by Freida McFadden has a movie adaptation in the works from Lionsgate and Rebecca Yarros’ fantasy novel “Fourth Wing” is being adapted into a TV show from Amazon MGM Studios. Three of Emily Henry‘s romantic comedy-esque novels—”Beach Read,” “People We Meet on Vacation” and “Book Lovers”—are expected to be turned into movies, according to the Today Show, and Amazon is also working on an adaptation of Lucy Score’s Things We Never Got Over.”
Further Reading
A Bill Gates-Recommended Read Is The Bestselling Book Of The Year So Far (Forbes)
Sarah J. Maas Is The Year’s Top Author As Fantasy And Romance Dominate March Bestseller List (Forbes)
Can BookTok Save Bookstores? Read Between The Lines (Forbes)
TikTok Helped This Woman Become A Best Selling Author (Forbes)
