Blyton and Rowling have things in common: they both, for instance, made boarding schools more appealing. But the courses of their success reveal contrasting temperaments and different eras.
Both writers did well from the start. Blyton began to write stories and poems in 1922 and in 1923 she earned £300 from writing - the price, her biographer Barbara Stoney reckons, of a suburban house. She was prolific: that year, while still teaching, she produced 120 pieces of work, including storybooks, plus 88 items for Teachers' World. She was writing full-time by 1924, earned £1,200 in 1925 and had serious fame by 1926, at 29.
NVDL: This is fascinating. Rowling has the advantage of a fully fledged commercial machine, but when it came to sheer writing, Blyton WAS a machine, putting out 10 000 words a day, EASY.
Enid Blyton is the only children's author to have outsold JK Rowling. But Rowling has sold her books faster. In 10 years she has produced seven novels, some remarkably fat, and two slim spin-off books for Comic Relief, and has sold (not counting orders for the seventh, published on July 21) 325 million copies in 65 languages.
Enid Blyton wrote nearly 800 books over a 40-year career, many of them quite slim, as well as close to 5,000 short stories. She sold 200 million books in her lifetime, with few translations until the 1960s and 1970s, and has sold some 400 million altogether. About half of her titles are still in print, and they still sell 11 million copies a year, including a million for the Famous Five series and three million Noddy books.
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clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk
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