10,000 a Year Contrary to popular belief, novelists as a class are both hardworking and poor. Dr. Johnson and Anthony Trollope declared with the utmost emphasis that no man ever wrote except for money; that is to say, every man who writes a novel hopes to be paid at least adequately for his humour. But not one published novel in every ten earns its author £50.
As a matter of fact, only a writer of peculiar and special gifts can make a good living from his pen, Mere "cleverness" counts for little. The ability to tell a story is rare, but it is only the tellers of stories that command a large public.
Intellectuals used to regard Charles Garvice with amused contempt, but they would have given their ears for his gift of building up and developing plots. Garvice was not a great writer, but he was a born spinner of yarns. And if you look down a list of our best-sellers you will see that all of them, without exception, cdncentrate on the story and nothing but the story.
What does a "best-seller"? make. Like all sensible authors, he contracts with his publisher on a royalty basis. On every copy of his novels sold he gets 25 per cent. of the published price. On a 7s. Gd. book he receives 1s. 10}d. Tf he sells 30,000 copies he nets just under £3,000.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.