Richardson on WJ & $

There's actually quite a lot in Richardson's bio about WJ's money worries...

"During the first week of November 1898, James sent Henry Holt a letter and, the next day, the manuscript of Talks to Teachers. James was in a hurry. The Atlantic was going to publish many of the talks; Scribner’s Magazine would print at least one. James wanted to know at once what Holt planned to do. Holt replied to the letter before even seeing the manuscript: he would publish it. He offered James 10 percent of the list price until he recovered his costs, and 20 percent thereafter. James responded as many an author has yearned to do but has lacked the nerve. He proposed to publish the book himself (edit, design, print, and bind it), then let Holt advertise and distribute the book and take 10 percent of the list price for his pains. Publishers do not like this kind of talk. But Holt wanted the book. James’s royalties from Holt for 1898 for The Principles of Psychology and Psychology: Briefer Course came to $1,281.03. This was a substantial fraction of James’s income, and it meant that his work had been very profitable for Holt. Besides, Holt liked James, so he wrote back that James could have it his way, only he would have to understand that teachers got a 20 percent discount and dealers got another 20 percent. James would manufacture the book and would receive either 50 percent of the retail price (the book was to sell for a dollar) or 60 percent of the net (defined as the teachers’ price of 80 cents). This arrangement cost James a huge amount of work and correspondence, as he worried about paper, design, type, binding, production schedules, bills, delivery and pickup, and coordination with Holt, who gleefully hounded James with details. Holt obviously wanted to make the whole process as difficult as possible so that James’s cheekiness didn’t spread to other authors. But the book appeared in April 1899, and in January 1900 James got word that the Indiana Teachers’ Reading Circle had adopted it. This meant sales of between ten and fourteen thousand copies; James stood to make a minimum of $4,500 from this one adoption, and there were others to come. This was a great deal of money, more than the Giffords paid for a year and nearly the same as a year’s salary at Harvard. Talks to Teachers freed James of money worries. His feisty, provocative, and unconventional publishing gamble had paid off, even though it was a nuisance to bring off. James had learned something, and when the Varieties was ready for publication, he made a similar deal with Longmans, Green.6"

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/j4dgtGL