The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown bestrides today's international book bestseller lists like a colossus - but he and other giant-selling male authors are being challenged by the growing success of women writers, according to a new study.
It warns that the day beckons when Brown could well have to change his name to Danielle to win back readers and Stephen King will be driven to borrow his novelist wife's name, Tabitha. At the rate of the little-noticed but rapid advance by female authors this is likely to happen within the next 20 years, it said.
Women have doubled their share at the top of the world's most closely watched chart, in the New York Times, within the past 20 years and have made huge strides in others.
The romantic novelist Danielle Steel has been a key agent in this change, but JK Rowling's Harry Potter stories have been even more vital.
The claims are supported by this week's charts. In both the New York Times list and the Bookseller magazine's in London, women authors take 10 of the top 20 places.The US poll is led by Janet Evanovich's Eleven on Top, the Bookseller's by Maeve Binchy's Night of Rain and Stars.
The study is based on a statistical analysis of 50 years of the New York Times chart by the print-on-demand website publisher Lulu.com.
The New York Times list, one of the world's oldest, started in August 1942 and is always the one the world's publishers read first. While other countries generate their own bestsellers, populist US authors such as Steel, King and John Grisham almost inevitably bulk large in their top 20s.
Rachel Field's romance And Now Tomorrow, about the travails of a rich deaf girl, headed the first New York Times chart in 1942. But this feat was a comparative rarity in its field for the next 40 years.
In the decade after 1955, women filled only 17.8% of the New York Times number one slots.
The years 1958-61 passed without women notching a single top bestseller. Jacqueline Susann's lurid Valley of the Dolls, about backstage sex, sleaze and drugs, was treated as a sensational novelty when it reached first place in 1966.
By the 80s the female score was 23.8%. Then in 1984 Steel's Full Circle arrived as the first of her stream of first places. And then came JK Rowling's miracle year of 1999.
The first three Harry Potters topped the New York Times chart by turn between June and September.
Until Rowling Valley of the Dolls tied with Gone With the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird as the bestselling novels by women.
The New York Times' reaction to her invasion was to change the rules of engagement. Shortly before the fourth Potter came out in 2002, it set up a special children's list, apparently to exclude Rowling from the main list, Lulu.com says.
But 2002 still saw nine different women, the biggest number so far, reach number one although their titles were only 43% of the year's top sellers. This year five of the 10 number one authors so far have been women, despite Brown's exceptional dominance of the period.
Bob Young, Lulu's chief executive, said: "Once women writers took on male pen names, like George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans. Soon, male writers may have to adopt female names."
Landmark New York Times chart-toppers by women
1942 And Now Tomorrow by Rachel Field - the first
1955 Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan - the youngest author at 19
1966 Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann - the raunchiest for its time
1976 Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie - oldest at 85
1984 Full Circle by Danielle Steel - first of 25 list-toppers
1999 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling - second wave of the women authors' revolution
US top five this week
1 Eleven on Top, Janet Evanovich
2 The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
3 The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
4 Miracle, Danielle Steel
5 The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd
UK top five this week
1 Nights of Rain and Stars, Maeve Binchy
2 The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
3 Angels & Demons, Dan Brown
4 The Graft, Martina Cole
5 Above Suspicion, Linda La Plante
