While many bloggers in the 'sphere hope to one day grow up to write words on, you know, paper, it turns out that penning fiction is not as lucrative as one might think.

The 10 best paid authors in the world netted only $563 million in one year, according to Forbes. (Actually the info on their websites reads "June 1, 2007 to June 1, 2007" as the timeline for this moneymaking, but since its doubtful even the best novel writers combined made that sum in one day, we're going to assume it's a typo.)

Now, that may seem like a lot of money, but consider most of that sum goes to one writer (named later) and the rest of the mills are split up over the other nine.

As it turns out, just because he looks like Bill Gates doesn't mean that Stephen King makes as much as him: King makes $45 mil annually from book deals and royalties and all those movie adaptations that inevitably suck, which is nothing to sneeze at. But still, before last week there were probably some guys down on Wall Street that could boast the same.

So who is the number one best paid writer in the world? The answer is not really that surprising:

J/K Rowling earned more than $300 million just last year for continuing the Harry Potter series with that whole Half Blood Prince hogwash. Overall, her empire has made her one of the five self-made billionaires in the world, and unsurprisingly, Rowling is the only author on that list. And she used to be on welfare blah blah blah.

Looks like all that gay wizarding really paid off, huh? It's almost enough to feel like Just Kidding is being a teensy bit greedy with her lawsuit to prevent the Harry Potter Lexicon book from being published by another poor writer.