10 best-selling fiction book series of all time

It’s amazing when you find a book that sucks you in, deposits you into a new world, and weaves a story that you can fully immerse yourself in. One book is great, but an entire series of books is always better. 

Readers agree, and book series sell ridiculously well. If you’re wondering what book series have sold the most copies, this list will break down the top 10. Perhaps surprisingly, or not depending on how you look at it, most of the top-selling book series of all time are aimed towards children and young adults.  

It’s hard to argue with a book series that ran without a break for 73 years and consists of 175 novels, and Nancy Drew has cemented her place as a familiar character for children around the world. Throughout the series, the young female detective protagonist changed and evolved to keep up with the times, aged, and became an inspirational icon for young girls. 

There are the 175 original series novels, multiple spinoff series, six feature films, a whopping 34 video games, multiple TV series, and a long list of other adapted media. 

Noddy is a wooden boy living in Toyland alongside Big Ears. The Noddy books were published in 1949, and he is still a beloved children's character to this day through the TV series that I watched as a child myself, before the times of CGI. He’s cute (in a wooden kind of way), he teaches good lessons, and he makes children laugh. 

It’s not hard to figure out how the Noddy books became so popular and stood the test of time. There are 24 books in the original series, and countless spin-offs and reboots have been created through the years. 

Perhaps better known as “Thomas the Tank Engine”, The Railway Series was originally devised by Rev. W. Awdry as a distraction for his son when he was suffering from measles. That original intention soon spawned a world filled with anthropomorphized trains and stories inspired by real-life events, familiar to children everywhere. 

The original TV series is, again, my main memory of this series, with Ringo Starr providing the narration as Thomas and friends go about their daily lives on the Island of Sodor. After Rev. W. Awdry stepped down from writing the tales, his son was inspired by a 1983 visit to Nene Valley Railway in Peterborough, England (my hometown, as an aside) to continue his father’s work.

Published between 1983 and 2003, the Sweet Valley High series was never one of my particular favorites, but it’s hard to argue with 250 million copies sold to date. During those 20 years, 400 books (if you include the long list of spinoff series) were published thanks to an entire team of ghostwriters working under Francine Pascal. 

These books are definitely aimed at teenage girls, and the drama within very much reflects the target audience, with stories that very much reflect the torture that is high school. With inspiration pulled from a myriad of literary genres, including regency romance, detective fiction, and even sci-fi, there is at least some variation in the mountain of titles. 

There is something special about the concept of a book that changes depending on the choices you make. They’re the precursor to games like Life is Strange, where every choice matters and will change the outcome. The first Choose Your Own Adventure book was published in 1979, and 184 titles were published as part of the series before 1998. 

You become the main character in whatever tale you pick up, choosing what paths to take, and those choices decide which page you should turn to so that you can continue the story. There are spin-off series with Disney characters, one inspired by Indiana Jones, and even one inspired by Goosebumps. 

Ah, the Berenstain Bears, beloved childhood characters and subjects of a particularly convincing Mandela Effect conspiracy. As a Brit, I have to admit that I have never been overly familiar with the Berenstain Bears, because they are very much an American phenomenon, or at least they were when I was a child before the age of the internet. 

However, with over 260 million copies sold since 1962 and 400 books in the line-up, it’s hard to argue against their place in children’s literary history. The original book series has been adapted into multiple TV series, a long list of video games, and the family even had a stint on Broadway in the early 2010s. 

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is, to many, a true coming of age story. It chronicles the life of Greg Heffley as he goes through adolescence and faces a many familiar situations that we all remember from that time in our lives, as well as some more far-fetched ones involving moldy cheese. 

Because Diary of a Wimpy kid only began being published in 2004, the number of copies sold is all the more impressive, beating out series that have been in the works for decades. There are multiple movies and TV series, plus a musical adaptation as part of the franchise. 

The Perry Mason series is arguably the only series on this list that isn’t aimed at a younger audience, which makes it stick out like something of a sore thumb, but doesn’t diminish the impressive achievement of more than 300 million copies sold since the first book was published in 1933. It’s also the series that’s been out of publication for the longest, with the last book published in 1973. 

There are 84 novels in the series, and every single one of them stars Perry Mason as a brilliant criminal defense lawyer trying to get a murder suspect off the hook. His detective abilities are astounding, and while it’s hard to believe that there are so many wrongfully accused murder suspects for him to protect, that’s exactly what he does. 

As an adult with a love of horror movies and the macabre, I wholly blame R.L. Stine for shaping my childhood with the Goosebumps books and the subsequent TV adaptations of the 62 books in the original series. It’s like an introduction to the most traditional horror concepts, done in a way that both scares you but also somehow doesn’t give you nightmares. 

The first Goosebumps book was published back in 1992, so many people in my generation grew up reading them, making the entire series a trip down a very creepy, nostalgic lane. There have been multiple spin-off book series within the Goosebumps franchise, and Disney recently rebooted the whole series with two more grown-up series that are perfect for nostalgic 30-somethings. 

If you’ve worked your way through this list and somehow didn’t see this coming, then I’ve got no idea what to tell you. The world of Harry Potter is a cultural phenomenon and, regardless of your personal feelings towards J.K. Rowling (trust me, I get it), you have to agree that Harry Potter has become a figurehead in the world of young adult fantasy. 

Sure, none of the concepts are original, with some of them being outright questionable, and the writing is simplistic, but none of that matters somehow. The books and the Wizarding World as a whole are a gateway to the wider world of fantasy, and to anyone who read them growing up, the world offers a huge amount of comfort. 

With the multi-billion dollar movie series and the upcoming (admittedly worrying) reboot in the works, the world of Harry Potter shows no signs of being knocked off the top spot.

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