{"id":3709,"date":"2014-10-08T07:05:28","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T11:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3709"},"modified":"2015-01-03T07:06:54","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T12:06:54","slug":"talk-about-an-income-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3709","title":{"rendered":"Talk about an Income Gap!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hudson<\/a>

(photo: wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

Let\u2019s call a temporary moratorium on grousing about how little money most aspiring book authors make\u201490 percent make absolutely $0<\/a>\u2014and peep through the keyhole at how the rich fare. Forbes<\/a> last month published a list of the world\u2019s top-earning authors and it includes some newcomers who demonstrate the appeal of \u201cyoung adult\u201d lit for people of all ages. Maybe this shouldn\u2019t be a surprise since American adults, on average, read at the 8th grade level.<\/p>\n

We all know that royalty checks arrive by the cartload to James Patterson\u2014presumably shared generously with the humming hive of workerbees who help him produce 14 books a year\u2014and brought in the top figure, around $90 million last year, June to June. In a laggardly second place is Dan Brown, with $28 million.<\/p>\n

Three women writers complete the top-earning five: Nora Roberts ($23 million), Danielle Steel ($22 million) and Janet Evanovich ($20 million). Suzanne Collins, who hit it big with The Hunger Games<\/em>, had to be satisfied with a measly $16 million. Speaking of falls-from-financial-grace, I\u2019ll be a snob and confess my delight that E.L. James\u2019s Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em> scam netted her only $10 million last year, precipitously down from the $95 million of the previous year.<\/p>\n

She was beaten out by young adult author Veronica Roth, a recently young adult herself at age 26, who earned around $17 million from print and ebook sales of the Divergent<\/em> series over the past year\u2014not counting income from the film adaptation. John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, <\/em>received some $9 million from U.S. book sales, plus more from last summer\u2019s movie. He ties for 12th place with Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl<\/em> (a review of that movie posted here Oct 6).<\/p>\n

J.K. Rowling had $14 million in earnings, putting her in 8th place. Others in the double-digit list are John Grisham, tied with Stephen King at $17 million, George R. R. Martin ($12 million), David Baldacci ($11 million), and Rick Riordan ($10 million).<\/p>\n

OK, enough wallowing in piles of filthy lucre. Back to reality<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s call a temporary moratorium on grousing about how little money most aspiring book authors make\u201490 percent make absolutely $0\u2014and peep through the keyhole at how the rich fare. Forbes last month published a list of the world\u2019s top-earning authors … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Talk about an Income Gap!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,104,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-the-morgue","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-XP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3710,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709\/revisions\/3710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}