ITV David Walliams now sits on a sales figure that few children’s authors reach: more than 50 million books worldwide by 2022. For readers tracking the market, the number matters because his catalogue kept expanding fast, and by July 2023 he had already reached his 38th title.
HarperCollins and the 50 million mark
HarperCollins said in 2022 that Walliams had sold more than 50 million books worldwide, a total that places him in the same small earnings bracket as JK Rowling and Dan Brown. In 2019, he joined a small group of authors whose writing had earned more than £100 million in the UK, which turns his children’s list into a serious commercial machine rather than a niche side project.
July 2023 and 38 titles
The World’s Worst Monsters arrived in July 2023 as Walliams’s 38th title, and that pace helps explain how the total kept moving upward: between two and four children’s books a year since 2013 is a high-output schedule by any standard. The commercial result is obvious, but the criticism is built into the same story, with his books described as lazy prose, stale humour, and zero imagination.
Roald Dahl and the comparison
Roald Dahl remains the obvious comparison point because Walliams has been treated as a dominant figure in British children’s publishing, yet the praise for scale sits beside a harsher judgment on the writing itself. That split matters for anyone buying, stocking, or assigning his books: the brand is massive, but the creative debate around it has never gone away.
September 2023 is the last dated marker in the source, and the piece says it came three years before the allegations against Walliams in came to light. The sales record stands on its own, but the surrounding controversy means the commercial story is not the whole story.
