Stephen King Isn't the Best-Selling American Author of All Time. It Just Feels That Way
Before I began writing about every Stephen King movie for my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, I assumed that the prolific frightmaster was the best-selling author in American history.
I also assumed that Steven Spielberg was the most commercially successful American filmmaker of all time. I was right! The only real competition comes from James Cameron. That’s impressive, because while Spielberg has been cranking out hits since 1975, Cameron has only directed ten narrative films, and only a handful of them are any damn good at all.
Cameron directed instant classics like The Terminator, T2: Judgment Day, and Aliens, but he also made stinkers like Piranha II: The Spawning and Avatar.
Incidentally, I finally got around to watching Piranha II: The Spawning. I wondered just how bad a sequel to a Joe Dante cult classic, featuring flying killer fish and directed by a man whose next film was The Terminator, could be. The answer? Pretty damn bad. Some of the very cheap special effects were cool, and the movie takes place in and around water, but otherwise it doesn’t feel much like a Cameron movie, which isn’t surprising, since Cameron says he left the project early and it was made primarily by an Italian producer he did not like.
I was wrong about Stephen King being the most commercially successful American author, however. I was very wrong. According to Wikipedia, which can always be trusted, King barely cracked the top twenty.
I was not surprised to discover that J.K. Rowling has sold more books than King, but she’s English and also the worst.
Many of the best-selling writers of all time are English, like William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Barbara Cartland, and Jackie Collins.
King isn’t even the best-selling American author of all time. He’s somehow sold far fewer books than the lesser likes of Danielle Steel, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, Rick Riordan (author of the Percy Jackson books), James Patterson, and Dean Koontz.
I was not surprised to learn that Dr. Seuss has sold more books than King. Suess was famously cancelled and all of his books were both banned and burned a few years back due to “woke,” but before that, he was a very popular writer.
I knew that writers like Steel, Robbins, Sheldon, James Patterson, and Dean Koontz sold a shit ton of books, but that's all I knew about them.
None of these writers have endured like King for various reasons. For starters, with the exception of Rick Riordan, Patterson, and Koontz, they're all dead, and their oeuvre isn’t exactly timeless.
When was the last time you heard someone talk about Danielle Steel, Harold Robbins, or Sidney Sheldon? Patterson and Koontz are still alive and working, but it seems like their work is consumed exclusively by bored businessmen on aircraft, and has no cultural impact beyond diverting the easily entertained on flights.
Some of Koontz’s novels have been adapted for film, but they tend to be modestly budgeted television movies or poorly received low-budget independent schlock.
Patterson’s Alex Cross novels were adapted for the big screen in hit movies starring Morgan Freeman and, less successfully, Tyler Perry.
It feels like King is way more successful than authors who have sold more books because he has such a massive cultural footprint.
This year alone, King’s work was adapted into three critically acclaimed motion pictures: The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, and The Long Walk. King’s likely to score another winner if Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man is even half as good as it looks.
Filmmakers find King's outsized oeuvre irresistible, whereas the work of folks like Sheldon, Steele, and Robbins was turned into sleazy television movies.
I know nothing about the private lives of James Patterson, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, or Dean Koontz, but I feel like I know everything about King.
King has been very public with his struggles. King famously hates The Shining because he wrote it as an allegory for his alcoholism. On a similar note, King shared directing duties on Maximum Overdrive with a sentient bag of cocaine. Apparently, the cocaine did much of the work.
I know all about King’s brush with death, when he was nearly killed when he was hit by a car. I even know what kind of music King likes and how he feels about the current president.
If anything, King might just be too public. He’s a public figure who is very active on social media in a way that often proves embarrassing.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that King has sold fewer books than half-forgotten commercial powerhouses.
What’s important is that King matters in a way that the American authors more popular than King, other than Dr. Seuss, don’t.
King has an incredible legacy that cannot and should not be reduced to book sales alone, although he’s pretty damn impressive on that front as well.
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Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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