Over the summer, the sales of George R.R. Martin’s first five books in the eventual heptalogy, A Song of Ice and Fire, surpassed 85 million copies sold worldwide.
Now available in 47 languages, the books are the basis for HBO’s Game of Thrones, which airs in 170 countries and is by many measures the most popular television show in this realm.
Martin, 70, already had a large following well before April 2011, when Game of Thrones first aired.
The first book in the series was published in 1996 to modest expectations, but when the fourth book in the series was published in 2005, it debuted at the top of best-seller lists, reports The New York Times. The world created by Martin became a global phenomenon after the HBO show premiered, and his readership reached heights few authors have ever ben able to find.
Martin depicts a society in these books that is simple enough to understand but complex enough in its dynamics to be a model and mirror of our own, writes The Times.
“We know not only what characters think and feel, but what they eat, wear, see and smell — even the sex of their horses,” Anne Groell, who has been Martin’s editor at Bantam Books for two decades, told the newspaper. “George’s characters feel like people because they are people, with all the foibles and doubts and internal contradictions that every one of us contain. We can relate to these characters because we are these characters.”
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