The Alchemist has sold about 150 million copies since its quiet debut in 1988.
My book, Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, launched on May 2, 2025, and is currently moving at a slightly more contemplative pace — around five or six copies a month.
At this rate, I’ll catch up with Paulo Coelho somewhere around the year 47,312.
But who’s counting?
People have told me Waking Up is “too simple,” “too idealistic,” even “naïve.”
And I smile, because those are the same words critics once used to describe some of the most beloved books ever written:
• The Alchemist — “childlike allegory.”
• The Little Prince — “too simple for adults.”
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull — “new-age fluff.”
• Siddhartha — “mystical oversimplification.”
• Always Coming Home — “utopian idealism.”
Apparently, sincerity makes people nervous.
But maybe simplicity isn’t a flaw — maybe it’s the distillation of depth.
When a story dares to believe in meaning, kindness, or transformation without irony, critics roll their eyes — until the world quietly falls in love with it.
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How the “naïve” ones sold
If we’re keeping score, here’s how the simpletons have done:
• The Little Prince — around 200 million copies.
• The Alchemist — about 150 million.
• Siddhartha — roughly 50 million.
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull — somewhere near 40 million.
• Always Coming Home — maybe a few hundred thousand.
And then there’s Waking Up — proudly holding at five or six copies a month.
Which, if you think about it, might make it the most energy-efficient book launch in history.
(Why rush a planetary awakening, right?)
But here’s the thing — I didn’t write Waking Up out of ambition at all.
I wasn’t trying to become a bestselling author.
I had never even written a full-length story before, only essays at university. Waking Up began as a screenplay, an idea for a film about a world beyond money and struggle. I had no clue if I could pull it off.
What drove me wasn’t career — it was curiosity and hope.
I wanted to show humanity an alternative future — a world we could actually long to live in.
Not another dystopia to fear, but a vision to believe in.
If Waking Up ever reaches millions of readers, it won’t be my “success” — it will be our success, because it means the story resonated deeply enough to tilt our collective imagination toward something better.
The royalties wouldn’t fund mansions or yachts; they’d firstly help make a movie to spread the ideas even further, and then, build the first City of Light, a real-world prototype of the cooperative, money-free world described in the book.
Buying the book helps make that future physically possible.
Reading it helps make it emotionally possible.
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A lineage of clarity
The Alchemist is a perfect example. It’s a straight road through the desert — one boy, one dream, one revelation. A parable so linear that a child can follow it, yet so archetypal that philosophers still quote it.
Its strength lies in its clarity. The Alchemist asks,
“What is your personal legend?”
It became a global phenomenon because everyone, everywhere, can answer that question.
Waking Up carries that torch into the 21st century — but widens the question:
“What is humanity’s personal legend?”
Where Santiago’s treasure was individual, Waking Up explores our collective treasure — a world healed of scarcity, fear, and competition. A civilization guided not by money and greed but by trust and creative abundance.
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Utopian? Maybe. But that’s the point.
Of them all, Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home might be the truest kin to Waking Up. Both imagine a cooperative, post-monetary humanity — not as a fantasy of escape but as a return home.
Le Guin’s masterpiece was visionary, but also fragmented — an anthropological mosaic rather than a story. Critics admired it, but few readers finished it. It was too far ahead of its time, and too far from the emotional thread most readers need.
I learned from that. I wanted to write a book that could touch the mainstream without dumbing down the vision.
That’s why Waking Up is linear, cinematic, and emotionally grounded.
It began as a screenplay — and maybe that’s why it reads like one.
You don’t have to understand systems theory or spiritual philosophy to get it.
You just follow Ben — and before you know it, you’ve crossed into another kind of world.
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The quiet revolution of sincerity
My goal was simple: for the reader to pause somewhere in the story and think,
“Hm. This is a world I’d like to live in.”
That thought — quiet, almost casual — is the beginning of transformation.
It’s the spark where imagination becomes possibility.
Because in a culture addicted to irony, sincerity itself is rebellion.
And the deepest revolutions have always begun with simple words that everyone can understand.
So yes, call Waking Up naïve if you like.
I’ll take that as a compliment.
After all, The Alchemist had to start somewhere too.
And maybe, just maybe, Waking Up is where we start — again.
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🌅 Ready to wake up?
Read Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity: