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Stieg Larsson Is First Author To Sell 1M E-Books

Posted by timothy on from the nice-tattoo dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has become the first author to sell more than one million e-books on Amazon. The Swedish noir thrillers feature Lisbeth Salander, an asocial and extremely intelligent hacker and researcher, specialized in investigations of persons, and investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist. Quercus has sold 3.3M copies of Larsson's books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40M copies."

5 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wow, that's pretty ignorant.

    Most times the authors are against it because the publishing houses offer them a tiny flat fee and no percentage of the sales...As far as THEY are concerned, it's just one printing! And the author gets crap, which is wildly unfair given that the costs to the publishing house are non-existent.

    In this case, since he's dead, there is no one to stop the publishing houses from raping his corpse.

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  2. The real story is the custody battle by Terje+Mathisen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When Stieg Larsson died suddenly, and after writing just 3 of the planned 10 books about Blomquist and Salander, he left behind Eva Gabrielsson, his common-law wife of 30+ years.

    Unfortunately, with no explicit will and no legal acceptance of common-law marriage in Sweden, she inherited absolutely nothing.

    See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1240159/Stieg-Larssons-widow-seen-penny-20m-fortune-earned-together.html

    Terje
    PS. I loved the books, read them all in Swedish instead of waiting for the Norwegian translation.

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    "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
    1. Re:The real story is the custody battle by Stray7Xi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You left out the tragic reason why he couldn't marry her. Before he wrote the books he did a lot of work investigating extremist groups, he made a lot of enemies. His marriage would have put details of him and his wife into public view and he was unwilling to take that risk. Sad story.

  3. Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back by Vintermann · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know about that. There was a lot of dispute over Larsson's estate. His partner through many years, didn't get anything, because they never married or registered their relationship - and the reason they never did was that they were hiding from neo-nazis, which Larsson had royally pissed off.
    Disputes over rights aren't exactly ideal from a publisher's perspective. I think the success is a lot about the rather extreme anti-banker/capitalist/influental people sentiment in his stories, which has hit a nerve in the current troubles. Maybe that is also a genre of fiction which US audiences has been somewhat short on, due to a generation of films sanitized from such topics by Hollywood blacklists.

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  4. Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back by johndiii · · Score: 3, Interesting

    None of the books were published until after his death, and he apparently died without a will.

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