White House exposé rubbished by Donald Trump earns royalties to rival the likes of perennial favourites such as James Patterson and JK Rowling

Runaway sales of White House exposé Fire and Fury have powered Michael Wolff into Forbes’s annual round-up of the world’s highest paid authors for the first time.

According to the business magazine, which bases its estimates on data from NPD BookScan as well as interviews with industry insiders, Fire and Fury sold 1.7m copies worldwide during its first three weeks on sale. Coupled with seven-figure advances for a sequel, and the sale of film and television rights, in total Forbes estimates that Wolff earned $13m (£10.2m) from June 2017 to June 2018, putting him in seventh position in its list of the book world’s top annual earners.

Forbes said that Donald Trump, whom Wolff alleges in the book was described as a “fucking idiot” by news mogul Rupert Murdoch, had helped publicise the bestseller by writing on Twitter: “Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book.”

First place in the list was taken by James Patterson, who Forbes estimates sold 4.8m books in the US alone over the 12 months, and earned $86m (£67.9m). Patterson, who has topped the list 10 times in the last two decades, replaces JK Rowling, who was the highest earning author in 2017. This year, Forbes estimates Rowling’s earnings dropped by $41m this year, to $54m. The business magazine puts the fall down to the lack of a new Harry Potter book over the period, with Rowling’s earnings coming from backlist sales, theme parks and the theatre production Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

The year’s third-highest earner was Stephen King, who saw his sales top $27m with the release of a new film based on his horror novel It. According to Forbes, King “nearly doubled his earnings by collecting an eight-figure paycheque from the film”.

The rest of Forbes’ top 10 puts John Grisham in fourth place with earnings of $21m, Jeff Kinney and Dan Brown tying for fifth place, with $18.5m each, Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts in joint eighth ($12m), and EL James and Rick Riordan in joint 10th position ($10.5m).

British author Paula Hawkins slipped out of the top 10 this year, said Forbes, after sales of her second thriller, Into the Water “failed to live up to its predecessor”, The Girl on the Train.

“In the UK, the paperback edition of The Girl on the Train outsold Into the Water by nearly 100,000 copies last year,” wrote Forbes’s Hayley Cuccinello. “We close the covers on Hawkins – for now, at least. After all, everyone loves a comeback story.”