I’ll Probably Delete This

If you write one of the most popular books in the history of the English language,

surely you're going to be rich, right?

Right?

Welcome to episode 13 of I'll Probably Delete This.

My name is Will Jauquet.

And today we're going to finish up the story that we had started in episode 11,

talking about Daniel Defoe and really his masterpiece that was a groundbreaking book,

Robinson Caruso.

It was wildly popular from the start.

But one of the things we're going to do is we're going to use Robinson Caruso

to kind of explore what the media landscape was at the time,

and also to look at kind of what avenues were open to Defoe as an author

in terms of profiting off of that story.

So join me now as we learn about Robinson Caruso,

Daniel Defoe, and the difficult life of an author.

In late May of 1719, Daniel Defoe was considering a request from William Taylor.

Taylor's print shop was preparing the plates for its third printing of

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Caruso.

And Taylor was asking for another book just like it.

Defoe was happy to earn more money with his pen.

He was better at writing than he was at business.

And he had bills to pay and his family to support.

Writing another book would be more fun than all the haggling and arguing he did with

Nathaniel Mist. Defoe thought Mist should be more grateful.

He had probably kept Mist out of jail a half dozen times over the past year.

He did this by persuading Mist to tone down criticism of King George and of the government.

He even pulled a few articles that couldn't be salvaged because they

just went way too far in terms of tone and criticism.

In addition to this editorial work, Defoe's job was to translate articles from French papers

so that Mist could run them in his own papers in England.

That and he wrote many original articles for Mist.

Defoe did all this while secretly working on retainer for the royal government,

almost as a spy inside Mist's paper.

He both toned down Mist's opposition to the Whig government and he reported back on Mist's

activities. Defoe was glad Taylor was happy with Robbins Curruso.

It meant that maybe he could write more novels and do less newspaper and pamphlet writing.

That type of political writing came with too many risks and Defoe wanted to keep both his freedom

and his ears. Now at 60 years old,

the idea of writing more novels and writing less politics appealed to Defoe.

When Taylor published Robbins and Curruso in April of 1719, Defoe's book capitalized on two strands

that were popular with the increasingly literate English public.

First, and most obvious, is the travel adventure story.

The public loved stories about voyages, so a voyage to Borneo and back,

or cruising around the world. There were books about both topics.

It was common for early books to represent themselves as true-life accounts,

just as Defoe did in Robbins and Curruso. As the book's preface says,

the editor believes this narrative to be a just history of fact. Neither is there any

appearance of fiction in it. Defoe was inspired by the real-life story of a Scottish sailor

stranded on an island off the coast of South America.

Unlike other adventure stories, Defoe's Robbins and Curruso was much more realistic,

both in the dangers Curruso faced, in his mental struggles to meet those dangers,

and in his practical solutions. That's actually one of the most compelling parts of the book at

times, is the practical things he did to try to survive on an island while all by himself.

The other strand was books of popular sermons. If you read an abridged version of the novel,

this is the part that might get edited out. That and the run-in with the pack of wolves on his

voyage back home to England. My daughter just finished an abridged Penguin Classics version

of Robbins and Curruso, and they edited out much of Curruso's overt religious reflections.

But those reflections on God's providence, Curruso's view of his own failings, and his

conversion to faith, offer a richer and deeper picture than most any popular book of sermons

did or could. So in addition to capitalizing on those two popular strands, the adventure story

and then the popular sermons, within kind of English literature, Defoe's book also hit at a

really interesting time for the business and the practice of publishing.

Prior to Defoe, in the 1600s English law limited the number of printing presses

and required a license before a printer could publish any work. This gave those approved

presses freedom from competition, and the licensing requirement gave the government

significant direct control over what was published. But in 1695, Parliament refused

to renew the relevant law. This was the licensing of the Press Act. With the expiration of that law,

people were free to start competing presses, and presses were free to print what they chose.

They were free to choose what to print, but not without risk. As we saw in our last episode on

Defoe, this is episode 11, the risks were real. The author or the printer of a work that criticized

the monarch or who criticized the monarch or the government could face serious consequences,

including having his ears nailed to a board while in the pillory. The expiration of the licensing

of the Press Act freed presses from the need to get a license before printing a work, but also

meant more competition. Even more, it threatened the presses with piracy, because it was the

licensing regime that both gave a press the right to print a work, and it prevented other presses

from printing that same work. With the end of licensing, the question was would every press

just be free to pirate anything that was printed? Well, the presses persuaded the courts that the

answer was or should be no. The presses were successfully able to persuade the courts that

only the original printer should have a right to copy a printed work. The common law gave the

printer the copyright. The law's expiration meant that writers like Defoe, while in demand,

were paid upfront a flat fee. They didn't own the copyright to their own work.

Let's now fast forward past Defoe's time in the pillory in 1703, where he was convicted for

seditious libel, and we're going to fast forward up to 1710. In 1710, Parliament changed the rules

again. This time, Parliament passed the Statutes of Anne that placed the copyright with the author

of the work and not with the printer publisher. It provided that the author had a copyright for

14 years and allowed the holder to renew that copyright for a second term of 14 years.

This change in the law seems like very good news for Defoe. Nine years after the change in copyright

law, Defoe wrote one of the most popular novels in the history of English literature. Robinson

Caruso was popular from the start. The printer William Taylor sold through the first printing

of 1,000 copies in less than a month, and before the end of the year, the book was on its fourth

printing, selling an estimated 8,000 copies. Given its popularity, excerpts and abridged

versions of the book also came out in 1719. You would think that given the success of Robinson

Caruso and Parliament's change in the law, that Daniel Defoe would soon be very wealthy.

But that's not how publishing worked in 1719.

In the 1700s, the printer publisher still retained the bulk of any financial reward.

Parliament had planted the seed to change this relationship, but when Defoe wrote Robinson

Caruso, that seed had yet to sprout. When the seed finally does sprout, it would grow a new

relationship between publisher and author, and change the balance of power and the allocation

of financial reward between the two. But that change would come well after the end of Defoe's

professional career. Robinson Caruso was profitable, but the book was profitable for Taylor

and for other printers, and not so much for Defoe. We'll cover what we know in terms of how much

Taylor profited off the book later in this episode. But before that, let's look at Defoe

and turn to the various ways an author could make money off of a popular story.

We'll start with royalties. If you write a popular book today, there are many ways to profit from

your work. The first way is through an advance or royalties. An advance is a prepayment of

expected royalties, and royalties are just a percentage of revenue that an author gets from

each copy sold of his or her book. It's the percentage that the author keeps versus what

the publisher keeps. In the 1700s, author didn't get advances or royalties. Instead, the custom and

practice was for the author to sell the copyright outright to the publisher. Authors, even in these

very early days of the novel, or what was becoming the novel, could negotiate over the

upfront price. But once they sold, first they didn't share the downside risk that the book

failed and the printer didn't recoup his cost. Second, they also didn't share in the upside.

If a book sold, like Robinson Caruso did, the author didn't make any more money. The upfront fee

was it. Defoe sold his copyright to this, his first novel, to Taylor in the same way he would

sell the copyright to a political pamphlet. Taylor was a prosperous bookseller, who owned

two separate print shops in London. It's difficult to get any hard figures, but Defoe could have

gotten as much as £50 for the book. This would have been a pretty good sum for the time. In

episode 11, we covered a deal Defoe had with a printer, where Defoe received a fee for each

set of 500 copies printed. This arrangement kind of approximated a royalty, but it was unusual for

the time. So given the arrangement Defoe made with Taylor, royalties from future sales were out. They

were off the table. Foreign rights. Another potential revenue stream open to authors is the

sale of foreign rights. Translate the book and sell it in other countries.

But that option wasn't available to Defoe or even to Taylor. This is because there was no

international copyright. The 1710 Statute of Anne was the first copyright law anywhere.

International copyright didn't exist. Robinson Caruso would quickly get translated into dozens

of languages, but none of the profit from those sales went to Defoe or even to Taylor. We've seen

this already in today's story. While working for Mist, Defoe benefited from being able to translate

and then publish articles he took from French newspapers. Mist didn't pay the French papers

for use of their articles. Translating and reprinting articles from foreign papers was a

very common practice. Adaptations. So then what about adaptations? With a popular book today,

you may have the opportunity to option it for movies or TV, to have it appear on YouTube or in

some streaming service. The equivalent in Defoe's time would have been a dramatization in the form

of a play or a puppet show or a pantomime. And because of Robinson Caruso's popularity, plays

did come out very quickly in 1719 based on the book. But the world's first copyright law

didn't cover adaptations. Anyone could read Robinson Caruso and make a play or a puppet

show without having to pay the author of the book or the holder of the rights. This remained true

in England for more than a hundred years. Let's fast forward to a hundred years in the future

when Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein in 1818. The idea of Frankenstein's monster

proves to be much more popular than the book does. The monster makes his way into public

consciousness not through the 500 copies of the book, which sell only slowly, but instead through

plays and other dramatizations that quickly captured people's imaginations. Mary Shelley

received nothing from these, and it had to really struggle to make ends meet for her and

her family, particularly after the death of her husband. Derivative works.

So what about derivative works? The Statute of Anne was very narrow in its copyright protection.

One avenue open to Taylor was to produce derivative works. This could have been illustrated

versions, abridged versions, or versions aimed at children, and the market would produce all

of those and produce them very quickly, but neither Defoe nor Taylor played any role in those.

Before the end of the year, there were two different abridged versions circulating in print

that cut 100 pages from the book. The Statute of Anne, as I said, was very narrow in its

copyright protection so that these derivative works didn't violate the copyright. Taylor did

what he could to protect his copyright and threatened suit against other publishers,

but it isn't clear that he in fact took anyone to court. It also isn't clear that he would have won.

The English courts would take a pretty permissive view of the ability of other

printers to make abridged or modified versions of the same work as long as they added something to

it and therefore wouldn't have violated the copyright. Serialization.

I mentioned serialization because it would grow into a really significant way to profit from a

book. Go back to episodes three and four covering Laura Ingalls Wilder and the start of The Little

Housebooks. Laura's daughter Rose was targeting serials in the 1930s America as a way to profit

from her mom's stories. People like Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott famously published

many of their most profitable and most famous novels as serials first. Even much more recently,

Andy Weir first published The Martian as a free serialized story on his personal blog.

Unlike Defoe, in each of those cases the serial came first followed by the book. The serial acted

as an advertisement for the book that followed. It also was a way for the author to get paid

hopefully twice for the same work. Like the other avenues, this one also was not a source of profit

for Defoe and likely not for Taylor either. In 1719, London papers did publish excerpts of

Robinson Crusoe but it isn't clear they paid anything for those rights. Copyright didn't offer

clear enough protections and enforcement at the time was weak. So just to review, we went through

royalties, foreign rights, adaptations, derivative works, and serials. None of them were open to

60-year-old Daniel Defoe and the question is what was left? Only one avenue was open to Defoe

from which he could profit and that was to write another book.

So write another book he did. As we've talked about, Robinson Crusoe was the first novel that

Defoe wrote but it would be the first of seven or more novels that he would write over the

rest of his life and arguably it was one of the first novels that anyone has written in English.

I say that because it has a form that's understandable to the modern reader and it very

much looks and feels like a novel. It had a consistent narrative with an overarching and

consistent plot focused on a main character who developed over the course of the book.

Very few books did this before Defoe. For modern readers, the book still holds up even though it

was written 300 years ago. To try to capitalize on the popularity of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe

immediately wrote a sequel. That sequel was The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,

very creatively named, and Taylor published it in August of 1719, so only five months after he

printed and put on sale the first 1,000 copies of Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps Defoe was able to get

more money out of Taylor from the second Robinson Crusoe book but it still was likely less than 100

pounds. The sequel The Further Adventures was also popular and over the next five years would go

through four printings in its own right. Defoe and Taylor followed up those first two books with

another one called Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

That one came out in August of 1720. It was not a novel but more of a series of essays connected

to Robinson Crusoe. It didn't sell nearly as well as the first two books. It never became as popular

or as often read as The Further Adventures and certainly much less popular than Robinson Crusoe

was. In total, Defoe likely earned 150 pounds or less from the three books, a good sum and equal to

multiple years of the average craftsman's annual wage. Certainly good money but not enough to make

Defoe rich, particularly given the way that he spent money. I mentioned earlier that I'd come back

to Taylor and how much he profited off of the book. Despite the piracy, Taylor still profited

substantially from Robinson Crusoe and the three sequels, sorry the two sequels. He made 10 times

more than Defoe did. He likely made more than a thousand pounds. This is even after failing to

face down other printers, kind of their rampant piracy of the book. Historical conversions of

money is difficult but to try to put the sum in context, a thousand pounds in 1720 would

exceed three hundred thousand dollars on the low end in today's dollars and could approach several

million dollars depending on sort of your scale and your consideration. Defoe for his part was

never good with his money and was certainly seeking ways to earn more of it. Taylor on the other hand

was very successful and very profitable. He owned two printer shops. When he died, he ends up dying

five years after Robinson Crusoe comes out and his estate was worth between forty and fifty thousand

pounds, a sum far greater than Defoe would ever earn and certainly greater than Defoe's estate was

worth when he died. Defoe would go on to write a number of other books including Journal of a Plague

Year and Mole Flanders. None were as popular or had the lasting impact that Robinson Crusoe did.

In terms of his legacy, Defoe has likely greatly benefited from the rampant piracy first and then

by the relatively short copyright term. The reason is that this meant that the book was reprinted

thousands and thousands of times and had reached many hundreds of millions of people. It had firmly

lodged itself or it has firmly lodged itself into kind of the the canon of important English

literature. It's never gone out of print and if you haven't read it, I certainly encourage you to.

I'm going to skip the bibliography on this one. Instead, I wanted to spend just a minute to talk

about a few reflections on Defoe's life between episode 11 and then this one. Defoe is a really

interesting character. I wish there was more that was known about his life and as I said in the last

episode, if anyone finds a really good biography of him and what he was like as a person, I would

love to see it. So reach out and I'd love to hear about it. But in terms of his career and kind of

the landscape at the time, there are so many things that remind me of the information age

that we're in now. So printing was expanding. Also, the individual reach of a single person

was expanding greatly. There weren't as many gatekeepers but at the same time, there was a

lot of risk if you screwed up or if you or if you offended the wrong person. So obviously,

you could end up in jail. As I've mentioned a half dozen times probably, you could end up losing your

ears. You can end up in the pillory, have things thrown at you. So the risk was real and if that

happened to you, it was likely to be a big hit to your reputation. Defoe is pretty unique in that

he was able to survive the reputational hit because a number of people rallied around him.

They were selling his poems. He had a poem of an ode to the pillory that was being sold while he's

in the pillory in front of the crowd in London. So he was unique. It ended up being kind of a

rallying cry for him for a little bit. But even so, he was pretty chastened. It's almost like kind

of people who were canceled and then come back. He was pretty chastened and ends up working very

closely with the government. The way we started off, we mentioned that he was a spy for the

government in Nathaniel Mist's papers and printing house. And he did that. He did things like that,

like being an agent for the government in trying to work with them in Scotland as Scotland was

considering whether to join with England or not as one country with one crown. The other thing that

I wanted to mention is sort of in thinking about this, Defoe was a hot take merchant.

He got out things quickly. In some ways, he was cranking out articles and posts and pamphlets

to hit on the news of the day. There wasn't reporting in the way that we think about it.

Instead, it was people with opinions sort of pontificating about a particular thing or an

item or whatever was in dispute. Very much like you might see today online, on Twitter or wherever.

The other thing is there were not these big media companies that acted as kind of gatekeepers

to what was the news. So, you know, we've got a handful, you go back 30 years or so, there were

a handful of TV stations, handful of radio stations, you had one or two newspapers, and that was the

news. It didn't function the same way. It was much more partisan as kind of the age that we're in now,

very contentious. It was also a little more free-flowing and dynamic. And it seems like

we are in a very similar media age now. I'll stop there. I've been kind of rambling,

but if I think about this more, maybe I'll put my thoughts in better order. I sort of freestyled

this part. So, just to close, I did want to give you all a heads up that I will probably skip a

week. So, the next episode, I'll have a week off before we have another episode. And then it's

possible that episodes are going to come out a little less frequently. So, maybe every other

week instead of every Tuesday. So, join me next time for another episode of I'll Probably Delete

This, where we get to hear about stories of great storytellers, publishing, and the business of books

and of media. Happy reading! Thanks everybody!