cread | read & see

Publishing success stories have been in the news following the runaway commercial success of EL James' 50 Shades of Grey and more recently, JK Rowling's first adult book, The Casual Vacancy ,  becoming a best-seller before it was released. It's no surprise that it is still possible to make big dollars in publishing and writing, despite the doom and gloom from the industry. And tensions remain between the artistic pursuit of writing and the commercial business of publishing, the fame notoriety or marketing of the author and the quality and value of what they actually write. So who are the world's highest earning authors and, for a different perspective, what do they do with their wealth in terms of charitable giving ? Forbes magazine has a wide-variety of "rich lists" and these writers are named in their World's Top Earning Authors List . Forbes writer Jeff Bercovici says, "To generate our earnings estimates, we talk to authors, agents, pub

"All over the world, brutal attacks are crippling entire cities." I began reading action novel Zoo within a few hours of reading Sweet Tooth and after a few pages was wondering if I could go on. After the tight, intense characterisation of Ian McEwan's new novel I was feeling unconvinced by the almost clumsy attempts to build the central character of Zoo , Oz. I've had this experience before. A few years ago after being captivated by the prose of Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall I picked up Ted Dekker's Emmanuel's Veins . To be honest (sorry Ted) I couldn't read past the first few pages. Here I go again, I thought, and this time it involves one of the world's top-selling and most prolific authors, although admittedly, I was a Patterson virgin. But I lay back and thought of the readers of Cread (Creaders?) and turned another page. After a few more pages I began to accept the kind of NCIS approach to characterisation - American individualist