Writers and Money

Further Notes on Two Years Before the Mast

"When Richard Henry Dana completed his immortal Two Years Before the Mast (1840), he was only twenty five, he had no publishing experience, but he needed money urgently. He considered himself lucky to find a New York publisher willing to pay a lump sum of $250 for all the rights on the book for the next thirty years. Out of this deal, the publisher was to eventually earn $50,000---a colossal sum at the time---not a cent of which ever went to the hapless author. (When a British edition came out in London, the English publisher felt moved to give $500 to Dana, even though he was under no legal obligation to do so; in the entire history of publishing, this must be the only instance of a publisher paying an author money not owed to him). . . 

Returning to Dana's unfortunate experience, one may feel that his New York publisher took unfair advantage of his ignorance; actually, this businessman may have been ruthless, but he was not devious and, at the start, he took considerable risk in publishing the manuscript of an unknown young writer. The fact is that no one could ever have foreseen the huge and long-lasting success of such an unusual work." 

 - Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. New York Review Books, 2013. "Writers and Money", pp. 267-68.