Best-selling French novelists, 2012

       An annual favorite: Le Figaro lists the top ten bestselling French novelists of 2012 -- counting sales of all their books.
       In 2012 the top three were:

1. Guillaume Musso - 1,710,500 copies sold
2. Marc Levy - 1,433,000
3. Katherine Pancol - 705,000

       That's the same three, in the same order, as last year -- see my discussion of the 2011 list -- but while the top two had similar sales totals in both 2011 and 2012 Pancol was down over half a million copies sold. Last year 967,000 copies sold was only good for 4th place, and 790,500 copies sold for fifth .....
       A surprise this year was Joël Dicker, who came in fifth with 496,000, largely on the basis of La Vérité sur l'affaire Harry Quebert, while the winner of the biggest prize of the year, prix Goncourt winner Jérôme Ferrari, flopped mightily, his 321,000 copies shifted only good for a pathetic seventeenth place. Meanwhile, local favorite Amélie Nothomb slipped down one place but still (just) made the top ten with 405,000 copies sold.
       The 7,000,000 copies of titles sold by the top ten nevertheless apparently accounted for 23 per cent of all sales of contemporary French fiction.