Hitt had a grinding regimen, twelve-hour days in front of an aged Remington Royal perched on the kitchen table, surrounded by iced coffee, noisy children and Winston cigarettes, pausing only for supper or to watch wrestling or Sergeant Bilko on the television. Hitt produced a novel every two weeks, for which he was paid as little as $250.—Lee Server in Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945-1955
(Sixth in a series. Hitt was a master of the... um, erotic paperback original, in case you were thinking of ordering up a stack. Also, Server's book is very highly recommended.)
Update: James Reasoner, a modern-day Legend of the Underwood himself, heard from Orrie Hitt's daughter. Read all about it here.
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9 comments:
I think Orrie Hitt's life sounds pretty great.
That image of Hitt at the kitchen table has stayed with me ever since I read that passage in Server's book. You have to admire a guy like Hitt (well, I do, anyway), while at the same time feeling a little sorry for him.
i could absolutely write a novel in 2 weeks if someone would watch my damn kids and fix my iced coffee.
come on, dare me (and send the household help over.)
Sophie,
Duane is locked in the basement with his books and computer (besides, his wife wouldn't let him), so he can't take you up on your dare. But, I will!!! Does plopping your kids down in front of the TV and feeding them pizza count? One thing though, I won't compete with Fabio. No way!
You know, I think $250 is still the going rate for the average novel today in royalties, unless you've already established yourself like Robert Parker or James Lee Burke or maybe Lee Child. Forget Stephen King, or Tom Clancy, or Grisham and Rowlings. They're writing in an alternate universe that knows no bounds! They're in Steven Spielberg country.
Duane,
Is $250 about what you made on The Wheelman?
Wayne, I never write and tell.
The advance on my first book was $600.00 -- which the publisher never paid me.
Of all the legends you have listed so far this one scares me the most. I can see someone writing a book in three days if they had everything mapped out in their head and they sat on a rabbits foot, or had a horse shoe lodged somewhere. But to churn out a book every two weeks. That would require some kind of serious schizophrenic multitasking to be able to develop future ideas while writing something else entirely.
Plus who knew breaks for wrestling would help someone become a master of erotic paperbacks. Didn't see that coming at all.
James,
I know somewhat of how you feel. I wrote my first erotic/horror novel in five weeks (I was unemployed at the time and so I could put in sixteen-hour days or longer on the book), which included three complete rewrites. The publisher was so enthused with the novel that she managed to get it out in trade paperback in just one month. We were both expecting large sales from the kinky crowd of readers. In a year-and-a-half, after the cost for all the free copies that I sent out to friends and book critics are subtracted, I think I've made somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 from the novel. Still, I haven't given up. I don't think I could stop writing, even if I wanted to. What I would like to do is to one day write a book as good as The Wheelman. That novel blew me away and made me an instant fan of Duane's.
Thanks so much, Wayne. I wrote THE WHEELMAN for fun, with zero expectation that it would ever see the light of day. So I know exactly what you mean by never giving up writing. I want to keep doing this until I drop.
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