Among his foreign peers, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez earned the most from the Chinese mainland book market this year with an annual royalty income of 11 million yuan (US$1.73 million), according to a sub-list of the China's Richest Writers 2011 list recently released by Huaxi Metropolitan Daily.

The sub-list is based on the foreign writers' royalty revenue in the Chinese mainland from November 2010 to November 2011. Wu Huaiyao, a literature enthusiast, has been compiling the list on a yearly basis since 2006. He aimed to track both changes in Chinese writers' fortunes as well as Chinese readers' literary tastes.

Following are the countdown of the top 15 commercially successful foreign writers in the Chinese mainland book market:

    Jeff Kinney 杰夫?金尼

 Royalty Income: 1 million yuan (US$0.16 million)

Bestseller: the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series

Buy it on Amazon.com

Jeff Kinney, born in 1971, is an American children's book writer, cartoonist, and online game designer. When studying at the University of Maryland in the early 1990s, the writer had already earned some reputation by compiling his pop comic strip Igdoof on the campus newspaper. In 2009, the writer was named "one of the world's 100 most influential people" by Time magazine.

Kinney is most celebrated for his New York Times bestseller, the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series, which chronicles the boy Greg Heffley's life and struggles at home and school. The popular comic first appeared online in 2004, and became an instant hit with more than 20 million views. A hardcover collection was published in 2007 and sold over 2.4 million copies. It has become a wildly successful book, winning a number of awards and wide critical acclaim for its humor and creativity. The first and second of the six-book series have been adapted into film.

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