Nailed it
July 09, 2014
QUQ has blogged about authors' incomes in response to an article in the Guardian.
Whenever the subject of authors' incomes is raised – in particular by someone who's been paid to do so – I reach for this, by Nick Tosches from In the Hand of Dante, my favourite rant on the subject. When I got the book from the shelf I discovered it was bookmarked: the subject must come up often.
Nick writes:
"Faulkner. His story said it all. For every writer, every publisher, every editor, every reader: his story said it all.
"'I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals,' he had told Boni & Liveright, the publisher of his first two, God-awful novels, after finishing the manuscript of Flags in the Dust, in the fall of 1927. He was right. And the book was published in due time, in the summer of 1973, eleven years after he was dead.
"The house of Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith did, however, publish another one of his great books, The Sound and the Fury, in the fall of 1929. Depression or no depression, bestsellers then, as now, could and did sell in the millions. All Quiet on the Western Front, also published in 1929, would sell more than three and a half million copies throughout the world in the span of eighteen months. The Sound and the Fury sold one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine copies.
"When Harrison Smith saw Faulkner's next book, Sanctuary, he responded aghast: "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.'" Smith eventually summoned his courage, and when Sanctuary was published, in early 1931, it sold more than six thousand copies – a degree of commercial success that Faulkner would not see again for another eight years.
"Random House acquired these books when it acquired Smith's company and became Faulkner's publisher in 1936. As Smith had shown bravery, conviction, and devotion, so did Random House. Though it took almost thirteen years, from 1931 to 1943, for The Sound and the Fury to sell another thousand copies, bravery, conviction, and devotion paid off. For Random House, The Sound and the Fury, and the rest of Faulkner's novels, became in years to come one of the most profitable and prestigious treasure-troves that any publisher could dream ever to possess.
"The catch, of course, is that, while Random House has justly prospered from its bravery, conviction, and devotion, the sweat and suffering of Faulkner's own brilliance and bravery have, as they say, earned out only after he has taken his place beneath the dirt.
"I'm sick of these sons of bitches who moan and groan about how they work so fucking hard for their families. They're full of shit, every fucking one of them. Only the artist truly works for his loved ones and descendants alone. And this is because they are the only ones who get to see the fucking paycheck. Artists are not paid hourly. They are not paid weekly. They are not paid monthly. They are not paid annually. They are paid posthumously. In life, there is nothing: not even a decent down-payment, not even the token gesture of a ten-percent lagniappe."
Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante (Little, Brown and Company, 2002) pp.99-101