The Millionaire Authors' Club - Telegraph When you consider that, at the last count, 118,000 books were published in 2011 alone, of which 21,000 were adult fiction, that's slim pickings indeed. Authors who published their work decades or even centuries ago aren't counted. Within this modern bestselling elite there is an even more exclusive club - those who have sold more than one million copies of more than one book. There are only nine authors who have achieved this: Rowling (eight books have topped a million sales), Dan Brown (five), Stephenie Meyer (four), Stieg Larsson and Philip Pullman (both three), Julia Donaldson, Khaled Hosseini and Fielding (both two). It is perhaps unsurprising that all of these authors have had film adaptations made of their books. Lucy Luck, literary agent of Lucy Luck Associates - who represents Catherine O'Flynn, author of What Was Lost, Kevin Barry, whose most recent work is the short story collection Dark Lies the Island, and Adam Thorpe, author of the new literary thriller Flight - says there's no formula for a bestseller. "It's hard to predict what will sell in large numbers; that's what makes publishing so interesting," she says. Mostly, it's an informed gamble. The public don't like being told what they should read, don't like being taken for granted and, if everyone knew, we'd be in 1984 territory. Or John Grisham, who allegedly did work out a formula and provided his audience with what they wanted. Having said that, most people like a mystery - be it love, murder, or an unreliable narrator - suspense turns the pages, and that's as true in Mills and Boon as it is in The Sense of an Ending. If a book makes you want to know why, generally you will enjoy reading it. And if you enjoy reading it, you will recommend it to others. In many ways this is what makes the "Millionaire's Club" so intriguing. They're commercially successful by definition and therefore easy to dismiss as not "literary," but they're good writers, producing unique, imaginative works that have tapped into something that not only appeals to readers, but makes them want to share the discovery with others. "There are numerous reasons why a book becomes a bestseller," says Philip Jones, deputy editor of The Bookseller, which compiled the list. Branding, timing, publicity, film or television adaptation, sometimes even the writing. What is true, though, is that the biggest factor for the truly big books is that most ephemeral of things, "word of mouth." We've seen this phenomenon make mega-sellers from Harry Potter to Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and of course, most recently the Fifty Shades trilogy. In the digital age, word of mouth, via Twitter and social reading platforms, will become ever more important. We are already seeing readers buying more books from outside the top 5,000 thanks to internet browsing habits rather than being constrained by what is on the front table at their local Waterstones. As readers buy an ever-greater proportion of ebooks, the million-selling novel will surely become even more rare - or perhaps it will simply come from more unexpected quarters. One need only look at the tiny but growing band of self-published Kindle authors such as John Locke who have sold more than a million copies. So is it possible to succeed in publishing without becoming one of the elite? The poet James Fenton is perhaps the closest the literary world has come to Luke, Amis's fictional first-class-flying poet. A former foreign correspondent and acclaimed poet, Fenton was commissioned to write the libretto for a modest little musical called Les Misérables, which opened in 1985. His agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, reportedly negotiated a 0.5 per cent rejection fee in the event that Fenton's work was not used. As it turns out, it wasn't, but Les Mis went on to gross £600 million in 22 countries in less than a decade and has now surpassed £1 billion. Fenton's is an unusual story, however, and most successful literary writers tend to build sales as they build a body of work. Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie are all still publishing (Amis and McEwan have new novels this year; Rushdie will publish an account of his time in hiding after the publication of The Satanic Verses; Barnes won last year's Man Booker Prize). Yet it is perhaps surprising to note, given the level of media attention these authors get, that only McEwan's Booker-shortlisted Atonement (2001) has sold more than one million copies (1,558,242) since 1998, earning £10,610,098.44, of which the author would get an estimated 10 per cent. Barnes's 2011 Booker winner The Sense of an Ending has sold 233,545 copies, while Amis's most recent book, The Pregnant Widow (2010), sold just 55,126 copies. Amis's "Career Move" appeared in 1992, prefiguring rather neatly his own career move both from his long-time agent Kavanagh to Andrew Wylie and from his publisher Random House to HarperCollins in pursuit of a widely reported £500,000 advance for his novel The Information (1995). At the time, the novelist A S Byatt called Amis's move "a kind of male turkey cocking," adding: "I always earn out my advances and I don't see why I should subsidise his greed, simply because he has a divorce to pay for and has just had all his teeth redone." Amis then brokered a new deal, returning to Random House for a £1 million, four-book deal, which seems like rather a lot until you work out that he takes about three years to write each novel, which works out at a much more reasonable income of £80,000 per year before tax and agent fees. And it's worth noting that even a poorly selling novel like The Pregnant Widow earned out its advance making that £1 million-deal seem rather justified. Where Amis's big advance unleashed what he called an "eisteddfod of hostility," Vikram Seth was paid a reported £250,000 for his bestselling novel A Suitable Boy and a further £1.4 million for Two Lives. Seth, so the story goes, instructed his agent to get him an advance large enough to buy the poet George Herbert's former house, the Old Rectory in Bemerton, Salisbury, where he now lives. The Information, rather fittingly, told the story of two writers - one a spectacularly unsuccessful literary novelist, the other a purveyor of airport novels. As in art, so in life: there are, of course, the immensely successful (and wealthy) novelists who make Amis et al's advances look like chicken feed. Jack Higgins (aka Harry Patterson) is worth an estimated £55 million; Jackie Collins £60 million; Lord Archer £130 million; Barbara Taylor Bradford £188 million. It is perhaps worth remembering that agents take around 10-15 per cent of an author's earnings, so the appearance this year of J K Rowling's former agent Christopher Little on The Sunday Times Rich List (worth an estimated £55 million to Rowling's £560 million) offers a hint of how well those around an author can do, too. Jones of The Bookseller says the real money in publishing is still with the publishers, "as it should be because they are the risk managers." "But," he adds, "it is shifting towards authors and agents. If publishers manage their portfolio well they can make money from books that never hit the bestseller charts, particularly in niche areas, and publish enough books so that a few do break out. The risk is the size of the advance, and committing too much cash by over-publishing: it can take a long time for the money to start coming through and the publishing process, though quicker than it was, is still very slow. The strongest part of any publisher's business, he says, is its backlist. It can provide a constant earnings stream with little or no additional investment, and can therefore fund new projects. Focusing too resolutely on following the latest trend or spotting the next million-seller may earn you money in the short term, but what makes the likes of these big literary stars worth backing is the body of work they've amassed for which publishers have forked out relatively small amounts and that will continue to sell for many years to come and even attract film deals. But, just in case you decide to start writing that thriller in the hope of joining the Millionaire's Club, a word of caution. According to a survey by the Authors" Licensing and Collecting Society, the median annual income of a writer in Britain today is just £4,000. Don't give up your day job.