How to Become an Author. Bennett Arnold
pounds. Baron Tauchnitz will give from twenty-five to fifty pounds for the continental rights, and the colonial rights are worth something. The grand total for the book will thus be quite two thousand four hundred pounds. This novelist will probably produce three novels in two years. Magazines will pay sixty pounds apiece and upwards for his short stories, and from time to time the stories will be collected and issued in a volume which is good for a few hundred pounds. By writing a hundred and fifty thousand words a year he will make an annual income of three thousand five hundred pounds. His habit will be to write a thousand words a day three days a week, and on each working day he will earn about twenty-five pounds. All which is highly agreeable—but then the man is highly exceptional.
The case of the novelist who has a vogue of the most popular kind, that is to say, whose books reach a circulation of from fifty to a hundred thousand copies, is even more opulent, luxurious, and lofty. The sale of a hundred thousand copies of a six-shilling novel means that the author receives upwards of seven thousand five hundred pounds. The value of the serial rights of a book by such an author is extremely high in many cases, though sometimes it is nothing. There are ten authors in England who can count on receiving at least four thousand pounds for any long novel they choose to write, and there are several who have made, and may again make, twenty thousand pounds from a single book, which is at the rate of about four shillings a word. And seeing that any author who knows his craft can easily —despite statements to the contrary in illustrated interviews and other grandiose manifestations of bombast—compose three thousand words of his very best in a week, the pecuniary rewards of the first-class “boom” should satisfy the most avaricious and exacting.
The Sagacious Mediocrity.
But the average mediocre novelist, too good to excite a mob to admiration, and not good enough to be taken seriously by persons of taste, can have only a polite interest in the foregoing statistics. It remains for me to assure the average mediocre novelist in posse, that, if he minds his task, produces regularly, perseveres in one vein, judiciously compromises between his own ideals and the desires of the public, and conscientiously puts his best workmanship into all he does, he may safely rely on a reasonable return in coin. There are scores of mediocrities who make upwards of five hundred a year from fiction by labour that cannot be called fatiguing, writers who never accomplish anything worthy of the name of art, but who fulfil a harmless and perhaps useful function in our effete civilisation. The novelist, even the mediocrity, works under felicitous conditions. He is tied to no place and no times. He probably writes for three hours a day, five days a week, nine months in the year. He can produce his tale beneath an Italian sky as easily as in the groves of Brixton or Hampstead. No man is his master, and he is dependent on nobody’s goodwill and on nobody’s whim. Only three things can seriously hurt him: a grave failure of health, a European war, and a prolonged strike of bookbinders. The efflux of time will serve but to solidify his reputation, if he uses it well; his income will rise for years, and will remain stable for more years, and though ultimately it must fall it will not fall as fast as once it rose. On the other hand, the novelist who will not study his readers, who presumes on their obtuseness to offer them less than his best, and who lacks stedfastness, may confidently anticipate a decreasing income, no matter what his powers.
Non-Fictional Writing.
The well-known division of authors into those who want to write because they have something to say, and those who merely want to write, is peculiarly applicable to the non-fictional field. To the former class belong the authors of the best histories, biographies, travel books, theological books, and scientific, critical, and technical treatises. The latter class is composed of a heterogeneous crowd of compilers, rearrangers, and general literary middlemen anxious to turn an honest penny. The former class seldom needs advice of an expert nature, for the troubling consciousness of a "message” almost invariably connotes the ability to deliver that message with all needful lucidity and conviction; no one is so sure of achieving the aims of the literary craftsman as the man who has something to say and wishes to say it simply and have done with it. The latter class needs direction, for it has none of its own; and its principal desire is to make money, whereas with the former class the financial side of the work is usually secondary. Many great works of fiction have been accomplished because the authors wanted money, and wanted it badly and in large quantities, but this can be said of extremely few great non-fictional works.
The literary aspirant who merely wants to write, and who cannot write fiction, will have to be content with the prospect of a smaller income than he could derive from the imaginative gift did he possess it But nevertheless, with ingenuity, he can make money. Popular biographies—especially of princes, artists, and scoundrels, anecdotic histories of places, people, and pastimes—especially of pastimes, smeltings of the ore of antique magazines, diaries, and other records, guides to everything past, present, and 'to come, and descriptions of travel undertaken in order to be described—the field open to the activities of the ingenious hack is well-nigh boundless; in my opinion it is yet far from being fully exploited. The demand for the Anecdote glorified in cloth covers is prodigious and insatiable, and if the reward of the anecdote is not overpowering, neither is the uncreative labour of serving it up. Among the most remunerative forms of non-fictional writing is the “gossipy” book dealing lightly with a past epoch, not too remote. A well contrived chitchat on the Reign of Terror, or the Age of Johnson, or the Regency, garnished with reproductions of a few old prints, is always welcomed by the libraries. Such volumes are put forth in imposing ornamental exteriors at a fairly high price, and a twenty per cent royalty on them means a satisfactory result to the author. It is not uncommon for Mudies alone to buy two hundred copies of a half-guinea, sixteen-shilling, or guinea book of glorified anecdote. Taking the lowest price, and assuming that a thousand copies are sold, the return to the ingenious compiler is a hundred pounds. The profits are frequently more, and not often less. The popular biography and the popular monograph do not, I am afraid, pay quite so well, because publishers have a preference for buying them from the author outright at a rate which probably does not average more than one pound per thousand words. But even this is not precisely despicable when one considers that the only qualifications necessary to the anecdotist and the compiler are a brisk, clear style and some skill in the arrangement of material.
The subject of popular non-fictional writing for money is so wide and various that it is impossible to select for discussion any career that would be fairly typical. The success of the book-concocter (I use the term without disrespect) depends on his invention and versatility, and his aptitude to foresee the changes of public taste. At best he is not likely to acquire riches; but, provided always that he has access to a great library, he may materially add to his income by intermittently concocting. He should not depend wholly on this branch of literature for a livelihood, although I admit that it might be possible, by using several pseudonyms and several publishers and an inordinate amount of research for topics, to earn as much in strenuous, tireless concoction as a second-rate novelist earns without undue exertion.
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