Richard Russell Riordan, Jr. was born 5 June 1964 in San Antonio, Texas USA. He is an author, particularly well known for writing the book series “Percy Jackson & the Olympians”.
So just how rich is Rick Riordan? Rick has an estimated net worth of $35 million, which he has earned from his bestselling and award-winning books, during a career spanning almost 20 years.
Riordan grew up in a family of artists, his father Rick Sr being a ceramist and his mother Sandra Oshman a musician and artist. He went to Alamo Heights High School where he joined the school paper as an editor. He then went to North Texas State but transferred to the University of Texas, Austin and finally to University of Texas, San Antonio from where he graduated, with a double major in English and History. He then went on to teach English and History for fifteen years in SanFrancisco.
Rick Riordan Net Worth $35 Million
While teaching, he wrote his first book series “Tres Navarre”, consisting of seven books, which won the Edgar, Anthony and the Shamus Awards. He then turned his attention to writing children’s books, which started as bedtime stories for his son, Haley, who was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia. His son was particularly interested in Greek mythology, a subject which Riordan taught. When he ran out of Greek myths to tell, he then invented the character Percy Jackson and his quest to recover Zeus’ lightning bolts, which story took him a total of three nights to tell. With his son’s urging, he wrote the bedtime stories into the series “Percy Jackson & the Olympians”, with the title character also suffering from ADHD and dyslexia. He wrote a total of five books in the series, selling more than 30 million copies worldwide. The series also garnered awards such as Mark Twain, Rebecca Caudill, School Library Journal’s Best Book, and Children’s Choice Book. The success of his Percy Jackson series led to the movie adaptation of the first two books, “The Lightning Thief “ and “The Sea of Monsters”, distributed by 20th Century Fox. The films made more than $430 million in ticket sales worldwide. Rick’s net worth benefited considerably from these succsses.
Since his Percy Jackson series, Riordan has written other series such as “The Kane Chronicles” and “The Heroes of Olympus”, the sequel to the Percy Jackson series. He also authored “The 39 Clues” series which featured on the New York Times bestseller list. Aside from these, he has published a standalone novel “Cold Springs” which was released in 2004.
Rick now has another series in the works called “The Trials of Apollo”, with the first book to be released also on May 2016. He is also currently working on the “Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard” series in which the second book, “The Hammer of Thor” is set to be released in October 2016. His net worth is still growing.
In his personal life, Riordan married Becky in 1985 and they have two sons: Patrick and Haley. They are now residing in Boston.
