The World's Top-Earning Authors: Veronica Roth, John Green And Gillian Flynn Join Ranking
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Natalie Robehmed
Watch out Danielle Steel and Stephen King - the kids are coming. The world's top-earning authors list includes three newcomers who made more than $9 million each in the last year - and were born after 1970. In a ranking long-dominated by stalwarts like crime writer James Patterson (b. 1947) and romance author Nora Roberts (b. 1950), these [...]
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Forbes
Watch out Danielle Steel and Stephen King - the kids are coming. The world's top-earning authors list includes three newcomers who made more than $9 million each in the last year - and were born after 1970. In a ranking long-dominated by stalwarts like crime writer James Patterson (b. 1947) and romance author Nora Roberts (b. 1950), these fresh ink spillers, two of whom write young adult fiction, rank thanks to the increasing commercial appeal of teen literature for readers of all ages.

Young adult author Veronica Roth's ranks 6th on account of her "Divergent" trilogy which sold a combined 6.7 million copies in 2013, earning her around $17 million from print and ebook sales between June 2013 and June 2014. She also benefited from the book's 2014 film adaption, which grossed $270 million at the global box office. At just 26, Roth is the youngest newcomer on the ranking, and one of seven women on the 17-person list.

37-year-old newcomer John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" propelled him to an estimated $9 million yearly paycheck before taxes and fees. The YA love story, which follows the trials of two cancer-stricken teens, has sold well over 1 million copies in the U.S. and spawned a weepy summer blockbuster.

Green is tied for 12th place with Gillian Flynn, who joins the rankings for the first time due to the continued success of 2012's "Gone Girl." While not a YA book, it is a New York Times bestseller that sold 1.2 million copies in 2013; a movie version starring Ben Affleck hits cinemas this year.

A 2012 Bowker Market Research study suggested 55% of YA books are bought by people 18 and older. Adults aged between 30 and 44 accounted for 28% of all YA sales, and the books are purchased for their own reading the vast majority of the time.

“The category has reached adult audiences and really become okay to read,” said Lori Benton, VP Group Publisher at Scholastic Trade Publishing. “Harry Potter was the very first one to reach that audience – it was quickly embraced by children, and just as quickly by adults.”

With $14 million in earnings, the original young adult tour de force, J.K. Rowling, ranks 8th on our list. She continues to earn from back sales of her iconic Harry Potter series, while Pottermore – a proprietary website she setup to sell Harry Potter ebooks – makes her a pretty penny. Unlike most authors, Rowling never signed over the digital rights to her books, so she sells directly to readers, earning far more from these digital sales than most authors do through ebooks.

Full List: The World's Top-Earning Authors

The top-earning authors list is perhaps the world's most exclusive book club, with very few paths to entry. Most members have sold millions of novels, notched hit screen adaptations and have been doing so for decades. Take the No. 1 ranked author James Patterson, who published his first book in 1976 and made an estimated $90 million before taxes and fees between June 2013 and June 2014.

Patterson produces at an astonishing rate, churning out 14 books a year with the help of coauthors, making him publishing's busiest (and richest) penman. The author of the Alex Cross and Michael Bennett series, Patterson has sold more than 300 million copies since his 1976 debut and pulled in an estimated $700 million in the last decade. This year, he earned $62 million more than second ranked Dan Brown.

"Rude people occasionally go, 'Are you going to retire?" but you don’t retire from play, you retire from work, and I don’t work," said Patterson. "I just do the stuff I want to do and within reason I can get anything I want published."

Brown, who first joined the Celebrity 100 ranking in 2004 thanks to the meteoric success of the Da Vinci Code, made an estimated $28 million in our scoring period from sales of his Robert Langdon thriller series. In 2013, his fourth installment, "Inferno," sold more than 1.4 million copies in the U.S.

Mainstays Nora Roberts ($23 million), Danielle Steel ($22 million) and Janet Evanovich ($20 million) round out the first five. Notably absent from the top: Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins, who ranked third in 2013. This year, she earned a relatively paltry $16 million - a 71% decrease from the $55 million she pulled in between 2012 and 2013 - due to an 88% drop in book sales of her dystopian trilogy. (Hunger Games sold a combined 27.7 million copies in 2012; it shifted a comparatively few 3.3 million in 2013).

Collins still fared better than "Fifty Shades Of Grey" author E.L. James. The top earning author on last year's ranking with a $95 million paycheck, James (No. 11) made just $10 million in this scoring period. Her erotic trilogy sold a meager 1.8 million copies in 2013, compared to more than 29 million in 2012. An upcoming film could boost earnings next year.

“Hollywood tends to be a good driving force for attention and market sales,” noted Chris Shoemaker, president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association.

To form the list of highest-earning authors, we look at print, ebook and audiobook sales from Nielsen BookScan figures, consider TV and movie earnings and talk to authors, agents, publishers and other experts. Earnings are tabulated from June 2013 to June 2014 and are pretax; other fees are not deducted.