User blog comment:DarkLordZeta/Is it just me or has Fairy Tail/@comment-24748439-20140405160238/@comment-173.79.102.70-20140405195839

@DarkLordZeta

"Most" mangaka don't make a top 10 selling manga. Oda, Kubo, Kishimoto, Mashima, pretty much anyone who shows up in the top ten selling manga for multiple years, with sales in the multi-million range is essentially a rich small business owner worth millions.

Case in point, here's the top 30 franchises by revenue as measure by Oricon that a french website helpfully posted recently:

textup.fr/87897UA

Fairy Tail's on there at #15 with 2,444,400,000 yen in revenue. Which is approximately $23,676,874 in dollars. Mashima's cut of that is likely around at least 10% of that. Yes he still has taxes and expenses, but that's not dropping a couple million in income to less than 50k.