When the going was better

In January 1923 Aldous Huxley signed a contract with Chatto & Windus, which would guarantee him a regular income for three years. He would be paid £500 per annum and in return agreed to ‘supply the publishers with two new works of fiction a year, one of them to be a full-length novel’—an onerous undertaking. The royalty rate was to start at 15 per cent, rising to 20 per cent after the first 2,000 copies sold, and to 25 per cent after 8,000. This contract was regularly renewed over the years, with some emendations (one non-fiction book being substituted for one of the works of fiction) while by the second or third renewal the initial royalty rate would rise to 20 per cent. Novelists today can only be envious. Huxley enjoyed a high reputation, but he was never a bestseller like Hugh Walpole or Somerset Maugham, to say nothing of genre writers such as Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Dennis Wheatley and Peter Cheyney. Perhaps some bestsellers today can demand and get comparable royalty rates, but the average literary novelist who is well-reviewed but sells only respectably certainly can’t look for such generosity from his publishers.

Since publishers who wish to stay in business are rarely philanthropists, one may ask how Chatto managed to offer such high royalties. After all, the advance they were offering was quite high — and would indeed rise to more than £1,000 a year later. First, of course, they were demanding a lot from Huxley himself, but this is an inadequate answer. Few novelists today are likely to be offered a starting royalty of more than 10 per cent, while paperback royalties may start as low as 7.5 per cent.