JK Rowling has headed the annual ranking for a number of years and Higashino is the first Japanese author to make it to the top of this list. His royalties surpassed US$3.5 million (2.2 million RNB) in 2017 – a year when the Chinese translation of his Miracles of the Namiya General Store was Amazon’s bestselling paperback in China, and the website’s third bestselling e-book. His novel Journey Under the Midnight Sun was also Amazon’s fourth bestselling paperback in 2017.
According to China Daily, Higashino’s novels have made it into Amazon’s top 10 bestseller rankings for four consecutive years since the Chinese edition of Miracles of the Namiya General Store was first published in 2014.
Born in Osaka, Higashino started writing novels while still working as an engineer at Nippon Denso Co, a leading supplier of advanced technology for the automobile industry. He won the coveted Edogawa Rampo Literary Prize, which is awarded annually to the finest mystery work, in 1985 aged 27, for his novel After School (Hokago). He subsequently quit his job to focus full-time on writing.
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