In the publishing world, there is a case to made for a balance of quality and quantity. Readers should eagerly await the next release from their favorite author, thrilled with the volume they have just finished and ready for more. But they shouldn’t be made to wait too long, lest they lose interest altogether. Take, for example, ubiquitous checkstand-rack writers like John Grisham: Since the former lawyer released “A Time to Kill” (1989) and “The Firm” (1991), he has turned out a book a year for decades, putting him at more than 40 novels and counting.
Meanwhile, Russian-born American science-fiction author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is credited with more than 500 works, while R.L. Stein of “Goosebumps” fame for a time churned out one teen novel every two weeks while amassing more than $400 million in sales. Scare master Stephen King has written more than 60 full-length novels since 1973. These are all impressive bodies of work, but they pale in comparison to the true top-three most prolific scribes in history, listed in descending order below.
Barbara Cartland
Romance novel fans will immediately recognize the name of Barbara Cartland, but they may not realize how many books she actually wrote. The English novelist, whose true full name is Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland (1901-2000), was one of the most commercially successful writers in history. Cartland — some of whose most popular romances were turned into movies ("A Hazard of Hearts,” “A Ghost in Monte Carlo”, and more) — holds the Guinness World Record for most novels written in one year, an astounding 23 — nearly two per month. That type of output is what helped her reach a whopping 720-plus novels during her career. Most of those titles were in her specialty niche, Victorian-era romance. And in fact, even death didn’t totally slow her down, as several manuscripts surfaced and were published after she died. Cartland is said to be the third best selling author in history, with an estimated 1 billion copies sold.
Charles Hamilton
If you were a young British lad around the turn of the last century, you probably were a fan of Billy Bunter. He was the protagonist of many serial magazine tales for boys, which were written under the name Frank Richards and detailed the trials, tribulations, and public-school exploits of Billy and his pals. Appearing in magazines for decades, Bunter was the most well-known character dreamed up by Charles Hamilton (1876-1961), who used Frank Richards among many other noms des plumes. In fact, because he wrote under so many names, it's hard to determine exactly how prolific he actually was. His known attributable works alone, however, put Hamilton at the number two spot of all time. The London-born author started young and enjoyed a long life, during which he kept up his pace. The book gurus at the “B&N Reads” blog on the Barnes and Noble website note that historians estimate Hamilton wrote a total of around 100 million words. Dividing that word count by the length of an average novel, they figure he published the equivalent of nearly 1,200 full-length books.
Corín Tellado
Working in a similar vein to her British counterpart Cartland, Spanish romance writer María del Socorro Tellado López (1927-2009) takes top honors for most prolific author of all time. She wrote a majority of her works under the name Corin Tellado, publishing more than 5,000 works in her lifetime, many of which were best-sellers in multiple Spanish-speaking countries. Due to potential censorship, however, Tellado may have had to work even harder than Cartland to keep readers coming back. Steamy scenes deemed acceptable in London, for example, would have been expunged by Spanish censors, so Tellado toned down the sexual exploits of her characters. Instead, she creatively alluded to their passions, keeping readers interested regardless of the somewhat tame content. According to the Barnes and Noble blog “B&N Reads,” more than 400 million of Tellado’s books have been sold to date.