Danielle Steel.  A bookselling phenomenon.

Danielle Steel. A bookselling phenomenon.

Posted by Thomas Conneely on 10th Apr 2018

Say the name Danielle Steel to anyone and the chances are you'll get a few similar responses - Blockbuster would be one, Saga might be another, and Bestsellers would probably feature also. Some responses might be less kind - some might say trashy ( but they've probably never read her.) Some people would class her alongside Jackie Collins ( which isn't a fair mark) or Nora Roberts ( a better comparison) . 

Danielle Steel has been writing books since before I've been born, ( and indeed has recently increased her output - she had 5 new books in the last calendar year - and these are not co-written or ghosted like much of the recent James Patterson output. She is , simply, a publishing phenomenon. 

The daughter of German and Portuguese diplomats , Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel was born in New York in 1947, but later raised in Paris, ( where she now spends a lot of her time, and some of her novels feature Paris as a backdrop) her own life has had elements of the family saga about it - married five times , the last ended amicably in 2002, her sponsorship of the arts and of artists, her fear of flying ( difficult for an author with homes in San Francisco and Paris) , the tragic death of her son, Nicholas Traina by suicide in 1987, the subject of the non fiction bestseller - His Bright Light -

and the foundation she set up in his name, and above all, her unrelenting driving output - to the point where she is the world's bestselling living author.  ( She is , incidentally the fourth bestselling of all time after Shakespeare, Agatha Christie and... Barbara Cartland) . 

So ,with an estimated 800 million copies later - why does Danielle Steel continue to sell? And in an age where others have given up or fallen by the wayside, why does she retain her popularity? 

Basically , as always, it's the story. Steel has frequently taken elements of her own life to add shade and backround to some of her novels - Passion's Promise and Now and Forever - two of her 1970's successes - Yes - blockbusters- were partly influenced by her second marriage ( in prison ) to an inmate she met while interviewing another inmate.

Her first global success, The Promise, followed, and she became a staple of 1980's and 1990's bestseller lists - and has continued to do so ever since. Her sales in hardback were as high as in paperback, always a sign of a devoted following who will buy the book as soon as it comes out ( Maeve Binchy had a similar following) . 

While best classed as Romance, they do have a wide range and depth often lacking in more formulaic work, in that she can tackle all the darker side of human behaviour ( and how people behave in a crisis is a particular recurring theme) . 

We have at the time of writing, over 125 different Danielle Steel books in stock ( out of the 142 and counting) she has written . Just search Danielle Steel in wwwthebookshop.ie - http://thebookshop.ie/search.php?search_query=dani...