You’re in Good Company

This Guest Newsletter was created by Jordan Reeves, my extraordinary friend, author, community builder and The Story Cure community Chief Evangelist. I’m very excited for his coming book, Infinity Hotel. Meanwhile, follow him on Instagram.

A Google study estimated there are about 150 million unique books in the world — including everything from published and self-published titles to pamphlets, government reports, religious texts, academic volumes, and public domain works. Basically anything with an ISBN or logged in a major library system.

When you think about how many words that is, it’s staggering: 9.6 trillion. Enough words to stretch from here to Pluto — and back — in footnotes alone.

If you tried to read them all aloud for 8 hours a day at 150 words per minute, it would take you over 365,000 years. Even if you narrowed it down to just the 45 million books commercially published since the printing press (mostly in English and Western markets), you'd still need more than 36,514 years without breaks to read them all.

Now here’s the wild part:

How many people do you think wrote all those books? Just 50 million. Out of 117 billion humans who’ve ever lived.

That’s 0.043%. Fewer than 1 in 2,300 people.

Interestingly, if we only counted the 45 million books from the Bowker study (100 million fewer books), the percentage of authors stays roughly the same — because of power-writers like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ursula Bloom, and Ryoki Inoue, who holds the Guinness record with over 1,075 novels.

And the more you write, the rarer you are.

Only 6 million people in all of history have written five or more books — that’s just 0.005% of humanity. That’s the equivalent of the literary Olympics.

Here’s the point:

From stone tablets to digital shorts — including everything L. Ron Hubbard published (which could fill a small planet) — just 50 million humans have written a book.

So remember, when you're writing, you're not just writing a book. You're joining the 0.043%.

So keep going. You're making history. 

And I'm so proud of you.

Love,

Jordan Reeves

Tip of the Week: You're Already Making History

When you sit down to write, whether you're on page 5 or 500, remember: You're joining an incredibly exclusive club that spans from ancient scribes to today's indie authors.

Feeling stuck? Think about this: The more you write, the rarer you become.

So, the next time imposter syndrome creeps in, remind yourself that simply by writing, you're already making history.

Keep going. 

Quote of the Week

“Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.”

― Anaïs Nin, in her diary