Inspired Writing

1. Himalaya — Buddhist, Boudanath, Bhaktapur Gompa. Sitting + Singing. Terma.

2. Pushpati Temple, India — Born in the dirt. Tea, brick, bag on the back. Yogi. Pip / Ragged Dick / Siddhartha.

3. Arabia — Shop-boy/servant, beaten. Qur’an, a real Sufi. Gurdjieff as fog.

4. Andes — Hired hand, not tourist. Shaman. Dust and a porch.

5. Scotland — Loch house. Millie. Edinburgh café/books. Dreams of queen and ship.

Copy-writing - writing copy
copyrights - securing legal rights to your writing

AI Agents
Prompt -> Script

Writing
Articles
Social Media
Audience
Books
Fiction, Nonfiction
Script-writing
Animation
Film

Social media Publishing
Title Design
Content Hooks

Vocabulary
Psychology

Authors

Here are both lists — 150 public-domain classics first, then 150 copyrighted contemporary fiction titles, same format (Author — Title — approx. copies sold). A quick note: for centuries-old classics, no publisher tracks exact lifetime sales, so those figures are the best widely-cited estimates, not audited numbers. Public-domain status also varies slightly by country and edition — I've grouped by the common convention (century-plus-old literary canon vs. still-in-copyright modern fiction) rather than a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction legal check. ## LIST 1 — PUBLIC DOMAIN GREATS (150) **Ancient & Classical** 1. Homer — The Iliad — ~20 million+ (untracked across centuries)
2. Homer — The Odyssey — ~20 million+
3. Virgil — The Aeneid — ~15 million+
4. Ovid — Metamorphoses — ~10 million+
5. Aesop — Aesop's Fables — ~50 million+
6. Sophocles — Oedipus Rex — ~10 million+
7. Euripides — Medea — ~8 million+
8. Apuleius — The Golden Ass — ~3 million+
9. Petronius — Satyricon — ~3 million+
10. Longus — Daphnis and Chloe — ~2 million+
**Medieval & Renaissance** 11. Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy — ~20 million+
12. Geoffrey Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales — ~10 million+
13. Giovanni Boccaccio — The Decameron — ~8 million+
14. Sir Thomas Malory — Le Morte d'Arthur — ~5 million+
15. François Rabelais — Gargantua and Pantagruel — ~4 million+
16. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote — ~500 million
17. William Shakespeare — Hamlet — ~40 million+
18. William Shakespeare — Romeo and Juliet — ~40 million+
19. William Shakespeare — Macbeth — ~30 million+
20. John Bunyan — The Pilgrim's Progress — ~250 million (widely claimed, contested)
**18th Century** 21. Daniel Defoe — Robinson Crusoe — ~100 million+
22. Jonathan Swift — Gulliver's Travels — ~30 million+
23. Voltaire — Candide — ~20 million+
24. Samuel Richardson — Pamela — ~3 million+
25. Henry Fielding — Tom Jones — ~5 million+
26. Laurence Sterne — Tristram Shandy — ~3 million+
27. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — The Sorrows of Young Werther — ~15 million+
28. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos — Les Liaisons Dangereuses — ~8 million+
29. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre — Paul et Virginie — 25 million
30. Ann Radcliffe — The Mysteries of Udolpho — ~3 million+
**19th Century — British** 31. Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice — 20 million
32. Jane Austen — Sense and Sensibility — ~10 million+
33. Jane Austen — Emma — ~10 million+
34. Jane Austen — Persuasion — ~8 million+
35. Charlotte Brontë — Jane Eyre — ~40 million+
36. Emily Brontë — Wuthering Heights — ~30 million+
37. Anne Brontë — The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — ~5 million+
38. Charles Dickens — A Tale of Two Cities — 200 million+
39. Charles Dickens — Great Expectations — ~40 million+
40. Charles Dickens — Oliver Twist — ~30 million+
41. Charles Dickens — A Christmas Carol — ~30 million+
42. Charles Dickens — David Copperfield — ~25 million+
43. Charles Dickens — Bleak House — ~15 million+
44. Mary Shelley — Frankenstein — ~45 million+
45. Robert Louis Stevenson — Treasure Island — ~40 million+
46. Robert Louis Stevenson — Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — ~30 million+
47. Lewis Carroll — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — 100 million
48. Lewis Carroll — Through the Looking-Glass — ~20 million+
49. Bram Stoker — Dracula — ~100 million+
50. Arthur Conan Doyle — The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — 60 million
51. Arthur Conan Doyle — The Hound of the Baskervilles — ~30 million+
52. Thomas Hardy — Tess of the d'Urbervilles — ~15 million+
53. Thomas Hardy — Far from the Madding Crowd — ~10 million+
54. George Eliot — Middlemarch — ~10 million+
55. Anthony Trollope — Barchester Towers — ~3 million+
56. Wilkie Collins — The Woman in White — ~8 million+
57. Wilkie Collins — The Moonstone — ~8 million+
58. Anna Sewell — Black Beauty — 50 million
59. Rudyard Kipling — The Jungle Book — ~20 million+
60. Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray — ~20 million+
**19th Century — American** 61. Mark Twain — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — 20 million
62. Mark Twain — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — ~20 million+
63. Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Scarlet Letter — ~15 million+
64. Herman Melville — Moby-Dick — ~20 million+
65. Louisa May Alcott — Little Women — ~50 million+
66. Harriet Beecher Stowe — Uncle Tom's Cabin — ~30 million+
67. Edgar Allan Poe — Tales of Mystery and Imagination — ~20 million+
68. Washington Irving — The Legend of Sleepy Hollow — ~8 million+
69. L. Frank Baum — The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — ~15 million+
70. Kate Chopin — The Awakening — ~3 million+
71. Stephen Crane — The Red Badge of Courage — ~10 million+
72. Henry James — The Portrait of a Lady — ~5 million+
73. Mark Twain — The Prince and the Pauper — ~8 million+
74. Booth Tarkington — Penrod — ~3 million+
75. O. Henry — The Four Million — ~5 million+
**19th Century — Russian & European** 76. Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace — 36 million (Russia alone)
77. Leo Tolstoy — Anna Karenina — ~30 million+
78. Fyodor Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment — ~25 million+
79. Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Brothers Karamazov — ~20 million+
80. Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Idiot — ~10 million+
81. Nikolai Gogol — Dead Souls — ~8 million+
82. Ivan Turgenev — Fathers and Sons — ~8 million+
83. Anton Chekhov — Selected Stories — ~8 million+
84. Alexandre Dumas — The Count of Monte Cristo — ~100 million+
85. Alexandre Dumas — The Three Musketeers — ~40 million+
86. Victor Hugo — Les Misérables — ~30 million+
87. Victor Hugo — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame — ~20 million+
88. Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary — ~20 million+
89. Émile Zola — Germinal — ~10 million+
90. Stendhal — The Red and the Black — ~8 million+
91. Honoré de Balzac — Père Goriot — ~8 million+
92. Alexander Pushkin — Eugene Onegin — ~10 million+
93. Johanna Spyri — Heidi — 50 million
94. Carlo Collodi — The Adventures of Pinocchio — 35 million
95. Alessandro Manzoni — The Betrothed — ~20 million+
96. Jules Verne — Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — 60 million
97. Jules Verne — Around the World in Eighty Days — ~30 million+
98. Jules Verne — Journey to the Center of the Earth — ~20 million+
99. Wu Cheng'en — Journey to the West — ~100 million+
100. Cao Xueqin — Dream of the Red Chamber — 100 million
**Early 20th Century** 101. Kenneth Grahame — The Wind in the Willows — 25 million
102. J. M. Barrie — Peter and Wendy — ~20 million+
103. Beatrix Potter — The Tale of Peter Rabbit — 45 million
104. Lucy Maud Montgomery — Anne of Green Gables — 50 million
105. Jack London — The Call of the Wild — ~20 million+
106. Jack London — White Fang — ~10 million+
107. Edith Wharton — The Age of Innocence — ~5 million+
108. E. M. Forster — A Room with a View — ~5 million+
109. Joseph Conrad — Heart of Darkness — ~10 million+
110. Joseph Conrad — Lord Jim — ~5 million+
111. Edgar Rice Burroughs — Tarzan of the Apes — ~20 million+
112. H. Rider Haggard — She — 83 million
113. H. Rider Haggard — King Solomon's Mines — ~20 million+
114. Anthony Hope — The Prisoner of Zenda — ~8 million+
115. Booth Tarkington — Alice Adams — ~3 million+
116. Sinclair Lewis — Main Street — ~5 million+
117. Willa Cather — My Ántonia — ~5 million+
118. F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby — 30 million
119. James Joyce — Ulysses — ~5 million+
120. Franz Kafka — The Trial — ~10 million+
121. Franz Kafka — The Metamorphosis — ~10 million+
122. Marcel Proust — Swann's Way — ~5 million+
123. D. H. Lawrence — Lady Chatterley's Lover — ~20 million+
124. Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway — ~5 million+
125. E. Nesbit — Five Children and It — ~5 million+
126. Selma Lagerlöf — The Wonderful Adventures of Nils — ~5 million+
127. Knut Hamsun — Hunger — ~5 million+
128. Thomas Mann — Buddenbrooks — ~5 million+
129. Jaroslav Hašek — The Good Soldier Švejk — 20 million (printed)
130. Zane Grey — Riders of the Purple Sage — ~5 million+
**Rounding Out the Canon** 131. Johann David Wyss — The Swiss Family Robinson — ~15 million+
132. Rudyard Kipling — Kim — ~8 million+
133. Rudyard Kipling — Just So Stories — ~10 million+
134. Robert Louis Stevenson — Kidnapped — ~15 million+
135. Alexandre Dumas — The Man in the Iron Mask — ~15 million+
136. Arthur Conan Doyle — The Lost World — ~8 million+
137. Baroness Emma Orczy — The Scarlet Pimpernel — ~10 million+
138. Frances Hodgson Burnett — The Secret Garden — ~15 million+
139. Frances Hodgson Burnett — A Little Princess — ~8 million+
140. Susan Coolidge — What Katy Did — ~5 million+
141. Hector Malot — Nobody's Boy (Sans Famille) — ~8 million+
142. Jules Verne — The Mysterious Island — ~10 million+
143. George MacDonald — The Princess and the Goblin — ~3 million+
144. Charles Kingsley — The Water-Babies — ~5 million+
145. William Makepeace Thackeray — Vanity Fair — ~10 million+
146. Nathaniel Hawthorne — The House of the Seven Gables — ~5 million+
147. Herman Melville — Billy Budd — ~3 million+
148. Ivan Goncharov — Oblomov — ~5 million+
149. Guy de Maupassant — Bel-Ami — ~5 million+
150. Alexandre Dumas fils — La Dame aux Camélias — ~8 million+
--- ## LIST 2 — NON-PUBLIC-DOMAIN, BEST-SELLING FICTION (150) **Literary & Book-Club Fiction** 1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — The Little Prince — 200 million
2. Harper Lee — To Kill a Mockingbird — 40 million
3. J. D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye — 65 million
4. Gabriel García Márquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude — 50 million
5. Vladimir Nabokov — Lolita — 50 million
6. Umberto Eco — The Name of the Rose — 50 million
7. Jostein Gaarder — Sophie's World — 60 million
8. Khaled Hosseini — The Kite Runner — 31.5 million
9. Elena Ferrante — My Brilliant Friend — 10 million
10. Jhumpa Lahiri — Interpreter of Maladies — 15 million
11. Anthony Doerr — All the Light We Cannot See — 15.3 million
12. Delia Owens — Where the Crawdads Sing — 18 million
13. Markus Zusak — The Book Thief — 16 million
14. Yann Martel — Life of Pi — 10 million
15. Chinua Achebe — Things Fall Apart — 20 million
16. John Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath — 15 million
17. Ernest Hemingway — The Old Man and the Sea — 13 million
18. Joseph Heller — Catch-22 — 10 million
19. Ray Bradbury — Fahrenheit 451 — 10 million
20. George Orwell — 1984 — ~30 million+
21. George Orwell — Animal Farm — ~20 million+
22. Aldous Huxley — Brave New World — ~8 million+
23. Haruki Murakami — Norwegian Wood — 12 million
24. Banana Yoshimoto — Kitchen — 20 million
25. Susanna Tamaro — Follow Your Heart — 18 million
**Mystery, Crime & Thriller** 26. Agatha Christie — And Then There Were None — 100 million
27. Agatha Christie — Murder on the Orient Express — ~20 million+
28. Dan Brown — The Da Vinci Code — 80 million
29. Dan Brown — Angels & Demons — 39 million
30. Dan Brown — The Lost Symbol — 30 million
31. Dan Brown — Inferno — ~20 million+
32. Stieg Larsson — The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — 30 million
33. Paula Hawkins — The Girl on the Train — 23 million
34. Gillian Flynn — Gone Girl — 20 million
35. Mario Puzo — The Godfather — 21 million
36. Peter Benchley — Jaws — 20 million
37. William Peter Blatty — The Exorcist — 11 million
38. Ken Follett — Eye of the Needle — 10 million
39. Ken Follett — The Pillars of the Earth — 15 million
40. Jack Higgins — The Eagle Has Landed — 50 million
41. Alice Sebold — The Lovely Bones — 10 million
42. Kathryn Stockett — The Help — 10 million
43. Carlos Ruiz Zafón — The Shadow of the Wind — 15 million
44. Jeffrey Archer — Kane and Abel — 37 million
45. John Grisham — The Firm — ~15 million+
46. Thomas Harris — The Silence of the Lambs — ~10 million+
47. Ian Fleming — Casino Royale — ~12 million+
48. James Patterson — Along Came a Spider — ~10 million+
49. Michael Crichton — Jurassic Park — ~12 million+
50. Tom Clancy — The Hunt for Red October — ~10 million+
**Fantasy & Science Fiction** 51. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone — 120 million
52. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets — 77 million
53. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — 65 million
54. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — 65 million
55. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — 65 million
56. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — 65 million
57. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — 65 million
58. J. R. R. Tolkien — The Hobbit — 100 million
59. J. R. R. Tolkien — The Lord of the Rings (single-volume) — ~150 million
60. Frank Herbert — Dune — 20 million
61. Paulo Coelho — The Alchemist — ~65–150 million (estimates vary widely)
62. C. S. Lewis — The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — ~85 million
63. George R. R. Martin — A Game of Thrones — ~20 million+
64. Douglas Adams — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — 14 million
65. Michael Ende — The Neverending Story — 16 million
66. Michael Ende — Momo — 13 million
67. Richard Bach — Jonathan Livingston Seagull — 44 million
68. Richard Adams — Watership Down — 50 million
69. Stephenie Meyer — Twilight — ~17 million+
70. Suzanne Collins — The Hunger Games — 29 million (US)
71. Suzanne Collins — Catching Fire — 21 million (US)
72. Suzanne Collins — Mockingjay — 20 million (US)
73. Veronica Roth — Divergent — ~10 million+
74. Philip Pullman — Northern Lights — ~8 million+
75. Andrzej Sapkowski — The Witcher (Blood of Elves) — ~5 million+
96. John Green — The Fault in Our Stars — 23 million
97. S. E. Hinton — The Outsiders — 15 million
**Romance** 111. Robert James Waller — The Bridges of Madison County — 60 million
112. Nicholas Sparks — The Notebook — ~10 million+
113. Jojo Moyes — Me Before You — 12 million
114. E. L. James — Fifty Shades of Grey — 15.2 million (US)
115. E. L. James — Fifty Shades Darker — 10.4 million (US)
116. Colleen McCullough — The Thorn Birds — 33 million
117. Jacqueline Susann — Valley of the Dolls — 31 million
118. Erich Segal — Love Story — 21 million
119. Erica Jong — Fear of Flying — 37 million
120. Daphne du Maurier — Rebecca — 30 million
121. Diana Gabaldon — Outlander — ~5 million+
122. Nora Roberts — Vision in White — ~3 million+
123. Danielle Steel — Kaleidoscope — ~3 million+
124. Helen Fielding — Bridget Jones's Diary — 10 million
125. V. C. Andrews — Flowers in the Attic — 40 million
129. Anne Rice — Interview with the Vampire — ~8 million+
131. Richard Matheson — I Am Legend — ~3 million+
James Clavell — Shōgun — 15 million
Australia Faraway Downs Suits, tv series, lawyers J. R. R. Tolkien — The Lord of the Rings — ~150M J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone — ~120M C. S. Lewis — The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — ~85M Arthur Conan Doyle — Sherlock Holmes — ~60M+ A. A. Milne — Winnie-the-Pooh — ~50M+ Bram Stoker — Dracula — ~50M Richard Adams — Watership Down — ~50M Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace — ~30–40M George Orwell — Nineteen Eighty-Four — ~30M+ Suzanne Collins — The Hunger Games — ~30M+ Stieg Larsson — The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — ~30M Frank Herbert — Dune — ~20M+ Jean M. Auel — The Clan of the Cave Bear — ~20M Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice — ~20M+ Mark Twain — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — ~20M+ Charles Dickens — Great Expectations — ~20M+ Charles Dickens — Oliver Twist — ~20M+ Mary Shelley — Frankenstein — ~20M+ Robert Ludlum — The Bourne Identity — ~20M Hermann Hesse — Siddhartha — ~10–15M Albert Camus — The Stranger — ~10M+ Patrick Rothfuss — The Name of the Wind — ~10M+ Gabriel García Márquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude — ~10M+ Chinua Achebe — Things Fall Apart — ~10M+ Jules Verne — Journey to the Center of the Earth — several million+ H. G. Wells — The War of the Worlds — several million+ Ernest Hemingway — The Old Man and the Sea — several million+ Homer — The Odyssey — millions across editions/translations Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy — millions Herman Melville — Moby-Dick — millions Mark Twain — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — millions John Milton — Paradise Lost — millions Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust — millions Isaac Asimov — Foundation William Gibson — Neuromancer Ursula K. Le Guin — A Wizard of Earthsea Philip K. Dick — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick — A Scanner Darkly Robert A. Heinlein — Stranger in a Strange Land Neal Stephenson — Snow Crash Vladimir Nabokov — Lolita Toni Morrison — Beloved Haruki Murakami — Norwegian Wood Joseph Heller — Catch-22 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — The Gulag Archipelago Stanisław Lem — Solaris Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway Franz Kafka — The Trial Henry David Thoreau — Walden Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra Rumi — Masnavi Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums William Blake — The Marriage of Heaven and Hell St. Teresa of Ávila — The Interior Castle St. John of the Cross — Dark Night of the Soul Emanuel Swedenborg — Heaven and Hell Fran Striker & George W. Trendle — The Green Hornet Stan Lee & Steve Ditko — Doctor Strange

TV Shows

General Hospital
Suits
Days of OUr Lives
Bonanza — 14 seasons — 1959–1973
Hawaii Five-O — 12 seasons — 1968–1980
MAS*H — 11 seasons — 1972–1983
Happy Days — 11 seasons — 1974–1984
Hawaii Five-0 — 10 seasons — 2010–2020
Friends — 10 seasons — 1994–2004
CSI: Miami — 10 seasons — 2002–2012
Scrubs — 10 seasons — 2001–present
The Beverly Hillbillies — 9 seasons — 1962–1971
Perry Mason — 9 seasons — 1957–1966
The Love Boat — 9 seasons — 1977–1986
The Waltons — 9 seasons — 1972–1981
One Day at a Time — 9 seasons — 1975–1984
Walker, Texas Ranger — 9 seasons — 1993–2001
Little House on the Prairie — 9 seasons — 1974–1983
CSI: NY — 9 seasons — 2004–2013
Night Court — 9 seasons — 1984–1992
Dragnet — 8 seasons — 1951–1959
Bewitched — 8 seasons — 1964–1972

Movies

Star Wars Ep. VII: The Force Awakens — $936,662,225 (2015)
Spider-Man: Brand New Day — $923,466,178 (2026)
Avengers: Endgame — $858,373,000 (2019)
Avatar — $785,221,649 (2009)
Top Gun: Maverick — $718,732,821 (2022)
Black Panther — $700,059,566 (2018)
Avatar: The Way of Water — $688,809,501 (2022)
Avengers: Infinity War — $678,815,482 (2018)
Titanic — $674,460,013 (1997)
The Avengers — $623,357,910 (2012)
Star Wars Ep. VIII: The Last Jedi — $620,181,382 (2017)
The Odyssey — $588,986,925 (2026)
The Lion King — $543,638,043 (2019)
The Dark Knight — $536,625,724 (2008)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — $533,539,991 (2016)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — $515,202,542 (2019)
Beauty and the Beast — $504,014,165 (2017)
Finding Dory — $486,295,561 (2016)
Star Wars Ep. IV: A New Hope — $460,998,007 (1977)
Moana 2 — $460,405,297 (2024)
The Dark Knight Rises — $448,139,099 (2012)
Shrek 2 — $439,820,881 (2004)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — $439,801,744 (1982)
The Lion King — $423,981,226 (1994)
Lilo & Stitch — $423,778,855 (2025)
Wonder Woman — $412,563,408 (2017)
The Hunger Games — $408,010,692 (2012)
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle — $404,508,916 (2017)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — $383,381,648 (2003)
The Passion of the Christ — $370,782,930 (2004)
The Jungle Book — $364,001,123 (2016)
Aladdin — $355,559,216 (2019)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers — $349,701,429 (2002)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 — $337,135,885 (2014)
Alice in Wonderland — $334,191,110 (2010)

Hero's Journey

Chapter 1. ORIGIN, STARTING POINT - Normal person, a worker, sheeple, material body, Yoga at the gym, perceptual awareness (Matrix, Lord of the Rings). Introduce the character, scene, friends, workplace. JOB? Govt employee?

Chapter 2. DISTURBANCE - EMOTIONAL, fight with his girlfriend, she leaves him for his best friend, depresssed, angry, unsettled, throws himself into his work, or whatever.

Chapter 3. INFLUENCE - A close friend, a smart, trusted co-worker brings up an ineteresting thing that happened to her

Chapter 4. CRACKS START FORMING (Truman Show), coincidences, questioning strange things happening.

Chapter 5. BREAK HAPPENS (psychotic, mental episode, unforeseen happening)

Chapter 6. CALL TO ADVENTURE, refused, circles twice, loses his job, running out of money, getting nervous.

Chapter 7. CALL TO ADVENTURE, FORCED acceptance. (Wanted, Angelina Jolie)