Allan Massie

When the going was better

issue 12 May 2007

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.

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