Arizona republican., 1908-09-17
WHAT WRITER'S EARN
 Tilt MONEY MAKERS
Literature May Pay As a Profession But is Seldom a Road to Riches.

New York. Sept S.-(Specila Cor
 respondence or The Republican.)-"
 discussion over the dollar-a-word rate
 that is to be paid to President Roose-
 velt for his story of his African hunt
 has led to the circulation of a lot of
 transformation about the sums paid
 to writers of books and magazine ar
 ticles." said an editor who has been
 connected for years with one of the
 largest publishing houses in this city
 As a matter of fact the man who
 takes up writing in the expectation of
 making fortune is almost as likely
 to meet disappointment now as he
 would have been in the days when
 John Milton sold Paradise Lost" for
 thirty dollars. On the other hand it
 is true that a much larger number of
 men and women than ever before are
 earning comfortable incomes out of the
 work they do with their pens. The
 rewards of ability as entrusted to
 genius are greater than in any previ-
 ous generation and there are a few
 writers who have risen to affluence
 solely by their literary work without
 any such adventitious aids such as
 having been elected to the presidency
 or having been defeated in trying to
 trying to be elected to it.
 Sir Walter Scott long remained the most remarkable example of a finan- ciaI successful practitioner of the lit- erary art with his record of more than a million dollars earned by his writing and that in a day when the returns from a successful book were far below what they are now. It is doubtful if any author living today can show a greater amount of earnings from his pen. Mark Twain undoubtedly has made that much. but part of it came through his lecture tours. Kipling's income from his books for half a dozen years was far above a hundred thou
 sand dollars a year, hut his produc tivity is greatly restricted now. He was wise enough to retire when signs that his hold on the public was weak ening began to appear. Sir Conan Doyle too has gained a handsome for tune and a knighthood from his stories and 1t is safe to say that Sherlock Holmes has brought his creator a larg- CT sum than any other single char acter in fiction It is said that sixty thousand dollars was paid in England and the United States for half a dozen short stories of the Sherlock Holmes series. This was merely for the serial rights, before ever the matter was put into book form.
 of the novelists who are continuing to turn out work in practically una bated volume. Hall Caine undoubtedly | is the most successful from the finan- | cial point of view. The peculiar fact about the Manx story writer is that | the sales of a new book from his pen | lead those of all other novelists both ! in Great Britain and America and are ! certain to amount to 100000 | copies for any book he writes. That ! means with payments for serial rights 1 like $15O.000 for each novel | As Caine spends about three years in l turning out a book he earns apprOXi | mately the salary of the president of | the United States.
 There are two ways in which the ! comparatively few American authors | who have made fortunes from their | work have achieved the golden re- i wards of literature. One is through | the demand, amounting to a craze for | a single book. The other is by a | steady output of popular successes by ! which a writer gains that asset which | endears him to the published, that is, | his own public.' vast circle of read | CTS who are certain to buy any book . that comes from his pen. Among | books of the former kind David Har- um' will probably long remain the un- disputed leader. Its author was one book man, but that one book has sold | more than 1,O00,000 copies and is still | selling at the rate of 50,000 year. More than million and half dollars has been paid by the American reading public for this one book and most of | the readers probably would agree that it was worth all of that.