Follow Business Insider: You've seen Google's annual lists of trendy search terms, featuring things like  robin williams, world cup, and ebola , but those show only the most unusually popular terms, not the most popular terms overall.
Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
J.K. Rowling was the first billionaire author, not Tina Fey, and James Patterson sells more copies of his books than Tim Ferriss does (about 200 times more). In the end, top tier fiction authors make more than top tier non-fiction authors.(Not that itâs likely Iâll experience this first hand. have only written non fiction and memoir. In fact my first book was just published this past October, non fiction. I want my next book to be a novel and have fun using my imagination instead of working so hard with memory and facts, but the craft of it unnerves me.