There are still a few people – maybe five – who think writers are rich as well as famous. We dwell in mansions. We swan around on yachts. From our limousines, we fight off autograph hounds. We never peel our own grapes.
My students have often thought that I – the author of 11 mostly forgotten books – must wallow around in my wealth. Why am I even teaching? Am I paying my dues? Slumming?
In my youth, it was possible to make a living writing books. If you sold your novel to a publisher, you might be able to quit your day job – librarian, mobster – and write full-time.
If you wrote fast, caught a wave of the zeitgeist, and/or had some juicy scandal in your life, then you might succeed.
But you’d usually scurry back to that day job. Of those who published one novel in the old days, 75 percent never published another. I’m one. So were Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison.
Still, while there’s life: I just got a royalty statement.
In a later column, I’ll describe my riches.
