17 highest-earning authors of 2014

You might call it the world’s most exclusive book club: Forbes magazine just announced its list of the top-earning authors of 2014, and the earnings are eye-popping, with the top spot going to an author who made an estimated $90 million in the past year. This year’s big story, however, is about the newcomers. The popularity of young adult lit has made authors like Veronica Roth and John Green exceedingly famous – and exceedingly wealthy. Each year, Forbes estimates the earnings of popular writers based on Nielsen Bookscan numbers as well as conversations with authors, publishers, and others in the trade. Read on to discover the 17 highest-earning authors of 2014.

Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

1. Stephen King

Dan Hallman/Invision/AP

“America’s grand master of horror,” as we’ve called him in past lists, King is another Top 15 mainstay whose appearance on the list each year is as reliable as his prose is popular. He earned an estimated $17 million in the past year, thanks in part to his recent release “Doctor Sleep,” a sequel to his 1977 novel “The Shining."

1 of 17

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.