Books: The Year's highest-paid writers

-Forbes

Forbes (H. Cuccinello)

J.K. Rowling has topped Forbes' highest-paid authors list three times since 1999.

DO YOU BELIEVE in magic? For the first time in nearly a decade, J.K. Rowling tops our ranking of the highest-earning wordsmiths, displacing the freakishly prolific James Patterson.

Fans of the printed (or digital) word will be cheered to know that although five writers on our list had novels made into movies this past year, they nonetheless earned the bulk of their bucks from their books. Together these 11 writers sold nearly 30 million volumes in the United States over the past 12 months, logging $312.5 million in pretax income.

We close the covers--for now, at least--on a couple of scribes who fell off the list this year: Game of Thrones'George R.R. Martin and The Fault in Our Stars' John Green. Both will likely return; Martin has four Thrones prequels in the works, and Green is publishing Turtles All the Way Down, his first novel in five years, this October.

Dan Brown's latest movie adaptation was a flop, but in the past year, The Da Vinci Code scribe still doubled his earnings from the same period 12 months earlier, thanks to an estimated eight-figure advance for his upcoming novel Origin. Prior to Origin, Brown's most recent Robert Langdon novel, Inferno (source of that cinematic misfire), was 2013's adult-fiction bestseller, with 1.7 million hardcover sales alone, according to Penguin Random House.

British novelist Paula Hawkins, author of the psychological thriller The Girl on the Train, debuted on Forbes' writers list last year and just keeps a-rollin': She sold 2.2 million print books in the U.S. over the past 12 months, the most of any female author save the inexorable J.K. Rowling. The film version of Train grossed $173 million in 2016; Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners has acquired the rights to her second novel, this year's chart-topping mind-bender Into the Water.

Notably, nearly half of the world's highest-paid authors are women. This year, Veronica Roth of the Divergent trilogy left our ranks, but five female authors kept their places on the list. Though Rowling is not the richest author on our list -- Patterson holds that title with a net worth of $700 million -- she has amassed an astronomical $650 million thanks to the Boy Who Lived.

After a magical $95 million year, Rowling's earnings are set to dip since she will not be publishing a new Harry Potterbook in time for next year's list. Though only time will tell who next year's frontrunner will be, it's highly possible Patterson will place first for the 10th time in the list's two-decade history.