Quote:
Originally Posted by BillSmithBooks
Prior to the 20th Century, very few authors made decent royalties. Twain, Stowe...Franklin owned his own newspaper press and so made a living as a publisher/author. Most authors were either independently wealthy or worked a day job to support their writing habit. It's well-known that Dickens wrote his books first as serials in newspapers that were then collected into novels...but he was pirated to death in the US, where copyright laws were ignored...so he was ripped off by his contemporary equivalent of the torrents and file-sharing, the big bad pirate USA...but he still made a very nice living on his books.
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I don't know that pirate is a fair word the copyrights weren't ignored, foreign copyrights didn't apply in the US until 1891 and even then it still required registration in the US on or before the date of publication.