Does writing pay?

It is easy to talk on and on about writers and their books without asking the crucial question: does writing pay at all? If writing pays, how does it pay? Where are the key examples?

Often cited as the greatest writer in the English language and the bane of every high school student’s existence, it is often said that William Shakespeare has an estimated 4 billion copies of his works in circulation. However, was he rich himself from writing?

“On 23 April 1616 Shakespeare died,” S Schoenbaum writes.

But it is said that Shakespeare died rather early at age 53. It is stated that through his will, Shakespeare left behind 10 pounds to the poor of his home, Stratford. He also left some money to his friends, William Reynolds, Antony Nash and John Nash. His sole remaining sister, Mrs John Hart, was allowed to stay for the rest of her life in the Henley Street homestead. A daughter of the Halls received Shakespeare’s plate.

The bulk of Shakespeare’s estate went to his daughter, Susanna: After her death the entailed estate was to go to her eldest surviving son, and then to the late son’s male heirs…Susanna bore no sons and eventually the property passed to strangers. Shakespeare left to his wife, Anne, “my linen, my second best bed” and other things.

In one of his key tragedies, the play Macbeth, Shakespeare has this to say about life in relation to death, through Macbeth himself, in Act 5, scene 5:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Was he bitter? Was he rich?

Talking about Shakespeare’s net worth, a Dr Elizabeth Dollimore, Outreach and Primary Learning Manager at the SB is quoted as having said that it is terribly difficult to make comparisons between the currency of Shakespeare and that of today but Shakespeare was certainly wealthy. After all, he purchased a grand family home when he was 33.

It is called New Place. Dollimore says this was an expensive property. There are also indications that Shakespeare also made expensive purchases of land within and around Stratford-upon-Avon but those things made him more money because he bought the land and, along with the land, came the right to a percentage of the agricultural profits.

Finally the point is that Shakespeare was not as wealthy as the modern-day celebrity or a footballer who just has an impossibly enormous bank balance, but he was certainly better-off than an average person of his day.

Dollimore concludes: “I should think that the majority of the money that he made was from the land investments. I think that working in the theatre gave him enough to start that process and then the rest of that was probably savvy land investments in Stratford; of which he made two or three in his lifetime.”

Another source indicates that by 1592, William was an established player and playwright in London and author of at least seven plays. In 1594, he helped to found the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and held shares in the company.

Five years later he had amassed sufficient wealth to afford a new family home back in Stratford-upon-Avon, known as New Place, bought from William Underhill for about £120 in 1597.

Dr Robert Bearman, Retired Head of Archives and Local Studies, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust says, “He just seems to have taken off to London and made his living by his pen – first of all, by acting.

I suspect that he always got more money from being involved in the theatrical companies as an actor or the sharer than actually he did in writing plays, but he obviously managed to get himself attached to one of the playing companies and built up his career from there…”

Turning to Africa, according to a report by Sahara Reporters of September 4, 2013, Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, is quite a success. They say that according to the late author’s literary agent, the Wylie Agency revealed that at the time of Achebe’s death, the book had sold between 15 million and 20 million copies worldwide in 60 languages.

The Sahara reporters indicate that the sales figures “make Mr Achebe’s modern classic one of the bestselling literary novels and the most widely read book by an African author.”

Achebe, who was the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana Studies and Literary Arts, died in 2013, on March 21 at the age of 82. It is revealed that Achebe’s works besides Things Fall Apart have garnered numerous international prizes, awards for artistic excellence, and earned him more than forty honorary doctorates from universities in Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States.

Achebe was a recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award, his country’s highest accolade for intellectual accomplishment. However, Achebe was to later express his outrage at the desultory state of affairs in his country by refusing to accept two national honours given to him by former President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan.

In the last 10 years of his life, Achebe won several prestigious awards and honours, including an award for lifetime achievement by the New York-based National Art Society, the Man Booker International Prize (2007) for his artistic output as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010) for using his art and cultural advocacy to make the world a more beautiful place. All these awards must have brought monetary gains to Achebe.

A global literary luminary, Achebe inspired other writers as well as political figures in Africa and beyond. The revered South African leader, Nelson Mandela, once described Achebe as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down.”

Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart was listed in 2009 as number 14 in Newsweek Magazine’s top 100 books. Though written in English, the novel has been translated into 50 other world languages.

“I’m a practised writer now,” Achebe says to Ed Pilkington in a 10 July 2007 article of The Guardian as they start to talk in Achebe’s small, homely sitting room. “But when I began I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn’t want it,” Achebe continues.

According to Wikipedia, Forbes, IMDb & various Online resources, and this has not yet been verified, famous novelist Chinua Achebe’s net worth ran into millions of dollars by the time of his death. Achebe is on record as having received over 30 honorary degrees for his work as an author.

Then there is the late Nobel Prize winning Gabriel García Márquez who died on 17 April, 2014 who was considered by many as the greatest author ever in the Spanish language.

Marquez’s most successful work as a writer is the long and expansive novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude which became a huge success in the years after its publication in 1967 selling more than 10 million copies in more than 30 languages! It made García Márquez a leader of the Latin American literary “boom” and an international phenomenon.

His novels, The Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) are some of his greatest masterpieces. But his short stories are also some of the world’s best. My favourite, Strange Pigrims, published originally in Spanish in 1992 constitutes the author’s fourth short story collection. In Strange Pilgrims, the reader finds Garcia Marquez’s Latin American characters doing their best to survive on European soil.

But was Marquez rich? Harsimran Gill writing in Scroll in 6 March, 2018 says, “In 2014, a few months after Garcia Marquez’s death, the estate of the writer of the iconic One Hundred Years of Solitude sold the archive of his photos, notebooks, manuscripts and scrapbooks to the Harry Ransom Center the University of Texas for $2.2 million.

Three years later, in December 2017, the university made over half of the archive available freely in digital form, throwing open a gateway to the private and public life of Gabo, as he is affectionately known, who continues to hold sway over literary critics and the lay reader alike.”

It is said Marquez’s physical archive arrived in 40 cartons, containing manuscripts of 10 of his books, including 32 pages of an unpublished memoir, over 40 photo albums, 20 scrapbooks, and over 2,000 pieces of correspondence with other writers, artists, thinkers and politicians. It’s not just an unparalleled resource for researchers, but a fascinating portal into the mind of one of the greatest writers of the 21st century. Marquez’s net worth is put to several millions of dollars by various websites. He was clearly a rich and famous man.

It is said that Agatha Christie currently holds the title of the world’s best-selling novelist, according to Guiness World Records, as well as the most-translated author in history, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.

Christie, born 15 September, 1890 and died 12 January, 1976 was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives; Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Christie also wrote the world’s longest-running play, the murder mystery, The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952. A writer during the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction”, Christie has been called the “Queen of Crime”.

The BBC is quoted as having said on 12 January, 1976 that Christie “In the late 1950s, Christie had reputedly been earning around £100,000 (approximately equivalent to £2,500,000 in 2021) per year. Christie sold an estimated 300 million books during her lifetime.” At the time of her death in 1976, “she was the best-selling novelist in history. One estimate of her total earnings from more than a half-century of writing is $20 million (approximately $95.2 million in 2021). By any standard Christie was a rich woman.

However, it is clear that writing does not only invite monetary rewards to authors. Writing often opens up opportunities to writers.

Talking to Edmore Zvinonzwa in 2012, Zimbabwe’s most anthologised poet, Musaemura Zimunya says, “I have flown around the world on the wings of poetry.”

Zimunya poses a bit and continues, “Which sounds arrogant, but is true. I have been invited to participate in poetry festivals in South Africa, Ethiopia, Italy, Yugoslavia, Germany, France, UK, USA and Colombia. I have enjoyed many fellowships and visiting professorships based on my combined literary and academic reputation. You can always google me under Musaemura or Musa Zimunya and check out for yourself just to sample what the world has said about me.”

Indeed writing pays variably to different authors, depending on what they have written and depending too on the geographical space which they occupy at the time of writing.

Memory Chirere