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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Kind of funny that people are talking about Fitzgerald and the rights to make money off of "Gatsby". He obviously intended to make a living off of the book but it didnt sell well. He was paid less than $2,000 for the book and sold the movie rights for $16,666...which is roughly $200K in today's money.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/money-behind-great-ga...

Too bad the book never got the recognition it deserved in his lifetime.

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Authors in Fitzgerald's time made their money off of short stories. He was apparently making $4,000 per story.

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/fitzstories.html

I've also heard that all the 19th century novels were so long because originally they were serialized, and the author was basically paid per chapter.

>>I've also heard that all the 19th century novels were so long because originally they were serialized, and the author was basically paid per chapter.

That's exactly how A Tale of Two Cities was written.

That's how Dickens wrote most of his novels, actually.

Dumas’s complete works are over 100,000 pages in part because he was paid by the line.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/23/behind-...

Although to me the book is much more valuable, making $200k off of it is not bad.

I doubt he sold the book rights outright without an ongoing royalty. He may not have benefited personally from the sales in his lifetime as much as his legacy would seem to owe him, but I imagine his estate (and its agents) have done perfectly well by it. According to this article, they have: http://theamericanscholar.org/living-on-500000-a-year/.

Film rights may not have included a royalty, and even if they did have historically been more subject to "creative accounting".

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