Trying to bolster the pathetic sales of his books, Scott bought all the copies he could find in Los Angeles and gave them away to friends. Almost everyone who writes about Fitzgerald mentions that during the last year of his life he sold only forty copies of his books and received a royalty of $13.13. But no one has noticed that his book sales were virtually the same at the end of the 1920s as they were at the end of the 1930s. In 1927, two years after he had published The Great Gatsby, his books earned only $153; in 1929 they earned $32. Most of his income, throughout his entire career, came from magazine stories and screenwriting, rather than book sales.
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