Forbes released on Wednesday the names of the ten highest payed authors. The list contains writers who have weathered the volatile market and conquered the void of big box stores to pull in eight-plus figures—not to mention spawn an array of products, from films to toys to video games—in the past fiscal year.
J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, who once relied on the welfare system in her native England as she raised her daughter alone and penned the first of seven best-selling novels about the boy wizard, took the top spot with an income of three hundred million dollars. Since the series debuted 1997, the books have sold over 375 million copies worldwide.
James Patterson came in second with fifty million dollars earned this year, due to the success of his series of Along Came a Spider mystery novels, and adaptations of several of his books for film, television, and video games.
Stephen King, who has published over forty books since the release of his novel Carrie (Doubleday, 1974), which he wrote during his time as a teacher, brought in forty-five million dollars this year.
Tom Clancy (thirty-five million dollars earned) and Danielle Steel (thirty million dollars earned), genre fiction darlings with huge fan bases, took the fourth and fifth places. In addition to extending their brands to movie and television adaptations of their books, Clancy recently sold video game rights to gaming company Ubisoft, and Steel has put her name on a perfume by Elizabeth Arden.
Other authors making the ranks are Nicholas Sparks, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, and Ken Follett, whose novel Pillars of the Earth (William Morrow, 1989) Oprah Winfrey chose for her best-seller-making book club in 2007.
