Who's the Leader?
by Daisy Maryles -- Publishers Weekly, 2/2/2004
While our annual list of the books that sold the most copies (more than 100,000) in 2003 won't be published until March 22, it's easy to guess the #1 fiction and nonfiction hardcovers. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code from Doubleday heads up fiction and Zondervan's The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren is the big nonfiction seller. By the end of 2003, Brown's book boasted more than 5.85 million copies in print, while Warren's sold more than 11 million copies just in 2003. Da Vinci has been #1 for 30 of the 44 weeks it's been on the PW charts. Purpose-Driven Life has been on PW's weekly charts for about one year, but landed only once in the top slot. It's been #1 on our monthly religion charts for 14 months, and held the top spot for 11 of them. The South Beach Diet from Rodale, another top seller with a lengthy tenure in the #1 spot—26 out of 41 weeks—comes in a healthy second, with more than five million copies in print.
