Why You Will (Probably) Never Be As Famous As JK Rowling

Let us all take this moment to realize a hard cold fact.

None of us are probably ever going to be half as famous as JK Rowling.

Or Rick Riordan, or Stephanie Meyer, or Cassandra Clare, or Susan Collins, or any other huge contemporary authors. You're probably never going to have a movie made out of your books. You're probably never going to travel around the world on book tours. You're probably never even going to make enough money to live off of. This is even if you do manage to get published.

I'm not trying to crush dreams. I'm caught up in the same dream as the rest of you. But as much as we like to retreat into our worlds of fantasy and fiction, we do have to acknowledged the reality of the fact.

I'm not saying—just to make it clear— that I will and you won't muahahaha. No, this applies to me and Margaret just as much as it does to you. It's not because we're young; it's simply an occupational hazard of writing books.

According to information published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), there were over 320,000 NEW book titles published in 2010 in the US alone. That's not including printing off more Harry Potters or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finns. That's new book titles. A great majority of these book titles will not do well. An even smaller percentage of those will become popular, and an even smaller percentage of that will become mainstream enough for the authors name to be recognizable. 

Here's an example that might be closer to home. Take a look around next time you go to a library or book store. Do you see how many books there are? Depending on the size of the library/book store you're at, there could be hundreds, maybe even thousands of books there. We'll forget everything that's nonfiction and wasn't originally published in the past... 20 years.

That's still a lot of books.

And of them, odds are that there are probably 20 or so that the lay man would be able to remember the author of. Those are really small odds. Becoming famous writing books is an exception, not a rule. Being able to make a good living writing books tends to be more of an exception.

Personally— as in this is my opinion— I would not want to be as famous as Rowling. I love her books, and I give her books credit for first making me want to write books myself. But think about how the rest of her life is going to go. She may be richer than the Queen, but she can essentially never write anything again. She tried and "it wasn't as good as Harry Potter". She will never be able to escape that shadow. The book that she wrote under a fake name was her attempt to escape it. She's obviously not entirely content to just rest on her laurels and I don't think I would be either.

I am going to take a moment to admit here though, that the title of this post is "Why You Will (Probably) Never Be As Famous As JK Rowling". Who knows? I doubt that she herself thought that she was ever going to be the authoress of books on the 10 Most Published Books of All Time list. Maybe you will become that one in 7 billion. 

The odds are though, as you can see from the 1/7 billion proportion... not exactly likely.