>>24562765 (OP)Are we talking "good" writers?
SOME REAL WRITERS WHO MADE A DECENT AMOUNT OF MONEY FROM WRITING:
— Shakespeare
Did pretty well but it's hard to say how much was a result of his writing and how much came from his acting / theatre-managing / theatre-directing etc. The Globe put on loads of plays, not just Shakespeare's own.
— Dickens
Earned £3000 p.a. apparently at his height. That was pretty good going in the mid-1800s. (A lot of this was from public recitals where he read from / acted out his book. Surprising that was such a thing but I guess when you don't have cinema or the internet or any way of recording music, it's going to be.)
— Trollope
He was the guy who got up at 5:30am and wrote 3K words every morning before going to his job at the Post Office. He wrote 45 novels and apparently earned £70,000 from them over his lifetime, which is about £3 million these days. Respectable but hardly J. K. Rowling level. (Not sure if he gave up his P.O. job once he had a decent amount of money. I suppose he might have liked it.)
— Walter Scott
He ought to have been super-wealthy but he got screwed by a combination of bad luck, shady partners and extreme honesty. He became a partner in some publishing firm and it crashed with debts of over £120,000. He refused to declare bankruptcy because he considered that was just stealing from his creditors so he set to work and wrote a whole bunch of stuff and actually paid all the debt off. But the overwork probably killed him. I think it was the equivalent of earning about £7-8 million in a few years these days. Again, not bad but we're not talking Taylor Swift here.
FUN ANECDOTE:
When D. H. Lawrence got his first novel (The White Peacock) accepted, the publisher advanced him £50 from the royalties (i.e. he got the £50, and then any royalties up to £50 they would keep, then he would start getting a small proportion of them. So if it flops, they lose, but if it's a hit, they win.)
Anyway D.H.L. showed this book to his coal-miner father who looked at it grimly. The following conversation ensued:
Father: "How much did they pay you for this?"
D.H.L. (proudly): "£50, father."
Father (with scorn): “£50?! And you've never done a day's work in your life.”
