OF BOOKS AND AUTHORS

American novelist, Earnest Hemingway was paid £ 14,000 for a single short story.

The  detective  novelist, Edgar Wallace, earned between £50,000 and £100,000 a year.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, lived in a large country house, and after his death (1930), his heirs received royalties in around 50 different currencies. His stories were sold for over £500 each. A magazine in the USA even paid him £1 per word for each of a series of six 3,500-word stories.

Somerset Maugham, English author, earned two million pounds during his career as a writer.

George Bernard Shaw, British dramatist and critic, left more than £300,000 when he died; Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet, £91,000; John Galsworthy, English author £88,000.

John Braine’s book ‘Room at the Top’, sold half a million copies and its film rights alone earned him £5,000. Eric William’s ‘The Tunnel’ was another instant success, which sold about 263,000 copies.

Dale Carnegie’s first book, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, was written on practical experience. He was turned down by 17 publishers. Finally, a publishing company, Simon and Schuster, agreed to buy the book. So far, about 7,000,000 copies of the book have been sold in hardback alone.

E. Phillips Oppenheim, a prolific writer, in 50 years of his writing career, published 150 books, hundreds of short stories, series and articles.

J.R.R. Tolkein, a professor at Oxford, was correcting a set of examination papers. He scribbled down a sentence on paper which was bothering him…… “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. With the sentence in mind, he started a fairy story, which is now popularly known as ‘Hobbit’ books.