In The Scotsman David Robinson reveals that James Kelman 'made only £15,000 from writing in 2011', as:
Yes, clearly being a 'literary' (and regional) author apparently does not look like the easy ticket to fortune.
James Kelman, the only Scottish writer to have won the Man Booker Prize or to have been twice nominated for the International Man Booker Prize, has revealed that all he made from his writing last year was £15,000.Recall that that Nobel laureate Patrick White earned a mere $7000 from royalties in the last six months of his life -- and, as David Marr reported:
In an angry speech scattered with expletives, he accepted a £5,000 cheque for winning the Saltire Society's Scottish Book of the Year for his eighth novel, Mo Said She Was Quirky. Kelman said it would be "really useful".
Nielsen BookScan, that pitiless surveyor of the trade, tells me that last year [2007] White's 13 titles in print sold only 2728 copies(Of course, there aren't nearly that many of his titles in print in the US -- though with the movie tie-in one imagines at least The Eye of the Storm did modestly better this year.)
Yes, clearly being a 'literary' (and regional) author apparently does not look like the easy ticket to fortune.