World’s Top-Earning Authors

The announcement of this year’s highest earning author  was swallowed in near silence: much unlike in 2013, when the unexpected winner E.L. James, made instant headline news around the world.

In 2013, with earnings of $95 million, E.L. James emerged from nowhere to leap-frog James Patterson, the monopolist of the position. Patterson dropped to the second position ($91m) and The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins, who made $55m.

The 50-year-old writer is known for the series - Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), Fifty Shades Darker (2012) and Fifty Shades Freed (2012). According to Forbes, more than 70 million copies sold during the first eight months in the US. The magazine noted: “The e-book format was a key factor, giving readers an easy way to purchase the sex-filled sequels -- and a discreet way to read them in public.”

Some of us who believed that E.L. James’ success was on the wings of the growing taste for the erotic knew that Patterson would be back to reclaim his deserved position.

And he was done it. But there is a problem. So much has been said about Patterson over the years that there isn’t too much more to say again: his profile, his writing style, how he brings his advertising background onto writing, and even his lifestyle well known.

When E.L. James dethroned Patterson last year, there was so much to write about her, and there was so much discussion about how she changed the publishing business.
I wrote then: “There is so much more to say about the winner. James has written only three novels – the trilogy - and she has been doing serious writing only for four years.
“Her first, the Fifty Shades of Grey, has also become the poster book for self-publishing and e-publishing. And come to think of it o, the trilogy is erotic. Not porn, but some critics call it Mom’s porn.

“The origin of the trilogy, beautifully narrated by Wikipedia, is equally interesting: Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic romance novel. It is the first installment in the Fifty Shades trilogy that traces the deepening relationship between a college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a young business magnate, Christian Grey. It is notable for its explicitly erotic scenes featuring elements of sexual practices involving bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism.
The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published episodically on fan-fiction websites under the pen name “Snowqueen’s Icedragon”.

The piece featured characters named after Stephenie Meyer’s characters in Twilight, Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. After comments concerning the sexual nature of the material, James removed the story from the fan-fiction websites and published it on her own website, FiftyShades.com. Later she rewrote Master of the Universe as an original piece, with the principal characters renamed Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele and removed it from her website prior to publication. Meyer commented on the series, saying “that’s really not my genre, not my thing... Good on her—she’s doing well. That’s great!”
“This reworked and extended version of Master of the Universe was split into three parts. The first, titled Fifty Shades of Grey, was released as an e-book and a print on demand paperback in May 2011 by The Writers’ Coffee Shop, a virtual publisher based in Australia. The second volume, Fifty Shades Darker, was released in September 2011; and, the third, Fifty Shades Freed, followed in January 2012. The Writers’ Coffee Shop had a restricted marketing budget and relied largely on book blogs for early publicity, but sales of the novel were boosted by word-of-mouth recommendation.”