VIWHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS
A BIG subject? Not necessarily. Discussed by an authority? No, indeed. On the contrary, about to be written upon by an amateur recording impressions extending a little over a year but formed in several relationships—as a “literary editor,” as an author and, involuntarily, as an author’s agent—but all friendly. Also, perhaps, as a pretty regular reader of publishers’ products. What will first appear as vastness in the subject will shrink on a moment’s examination. For our title is concerned only with whateverypublisher knows. A common piece of knowledge; or if not, after all, very “common,” at least commonly held—by book publishers.
To state the main conclusion first: The one thing that every publisher knows, so far as a humble experience can deduce, is that what is called “general” publishing—meaning fiction and other books of general appeal—is a highly speculative enterprise and hardly a business at all. The clearest analogy seems to be with the theatrical business. Producing books and producing plays is terrifyingly alike. Full of risks. Requiring, unless genius ismanifested, considerable money capital. Likely to make, and far more likely to lose, small fortunes overnight.... Fatally fascinating. More an art than an organization but usually requiring an organization for the exhibition of the most brilliant art—like opera. A habit comparable with hasheesh. Heart-lifting—and headachy. ’Twas the night before publication and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a stenographer. The day dawned bright and clear and a re-order for fifty more copies came in the afternoon mail.... Absentmindedly, the publisher-bridegroom pulled a contract instead of the wedding ring from his pocket. “With this royalty I thee wed,” he murmured. And so she was published and they lived happily ever after until she left him because he did not clothe the children suitably, using green cloth with purple stamping.
A fine old publishing house once went back over the record of about 1,200 published books. This was a rather conservative firm, as little of a gambler as possible; its books had placed it, in every respect, in the first rank of publishing houses.
Of the 1,200 books just one in ten had made any sizable amount of money. The remaining 1,080 had either lost money, broken even, or made sums smaller than the interest on the money tied up inthem. Most of the 120 profitable books had been highly profitable; it will not surprise you to learn this when you reflect that these lucrative books had each to foot the bill, more or less, for nine others. So much for the analysis of figures. But what lay behind the figures? In some cases it was possible to tell why a particular book had sold. More often it wasn’t.... Is this a business?
Thorwald Alembert Jenkinson has a book published. It’s not a bad book, either; very good novel, as a matter of fact. Sales rather poor. Mr. Jenkinson’s publisher takes his next book with a natural reluctance, buoyed up by the certitude that this is a better story and has in it elements that promise popularity. The publisher’s salesman goes on the road. In Dodge City, Iowa, let us say, he enters a bookseller’s and begins to talk the new Jenkinson novel. At the sound of his voice and the sight of the dummy the bookseller lifts repelling hands and backs away in horror.
“Stock that?” asks the bookseller rhetorically. “Not on your life! Why,” with a gesture toward one shelf, “there’s his first book. Twenty copies and only two sold!”
The new Jenkinson novel has a wretched advance sale. Readers, not seeing it in the bookshops, mayyet call for it when they read a review—not necessarily a favorable account—or when they see it advertised. If Mr. Jenkinson wrote histories or biographies the bookseller’s wholly human attitude would not much matter. But a novel is different. The customer wanting Jenkinson’sHistory of Francewould order it or go elsewhere, most likely. The customer wanting Jenkinson’s new novel is quite often content with Tarkington’s instead.
When you go to the ticket agency to get seats at a Broadway show and find they have none left forWhoop ’Er Upyou grumble, and then buy seats atLet’s All Go. Not that you really care. Not that any one really cares. The man who producedWhoop ’Er Upis also the producer ofLet’s All Go, both theatres are owned by a single group, the librettists are one and the same and the music of both is equally bad, proceeding from an identical source. Even the stagehands work interchangeably on a strict union scale. But Mr. Jenkinson did not write Tarkington’s novel, the two books are published by firms that have not a dollar in common, and only the bookseller can preserve an evatanguayan indifference over your choice.
The publisher’s salesman comes to the bookseller’s lair equipped with dummies. These show thebook’s exterior, its size, thickness, paper, binding and (very important) its jacket. Within the dummy are blank pages, or perhaps the first twenty pages of the book printed over and over to give the volume requisite thickness. The bookseller may read these twenty pages. If the author has got plenty of action into them the bookseller is favorably impressed. Mainly he depends for his idea of the book upon what the salesman and the publisher’s catalogue tells him. He has to. He can’t read ’em all.
Sometimes the salesman can illustrate his remarks. Henry Leverage wrote an ingenious story calledWhispering Wiresin which the explanation of a mysterious murder depended upon the telephone, converted by a too-gifted electrician into a single-shot pistol. Offering the story to the booksellers, Harry Apeler carried parts of a telephone receiver about the country with him, unscrewing and screwing on again the delicate disc that you put against your ear and showing how the deed was done.
The bookseller, like every one else, goes by experience. It is, or has been, his experience that collections of short stories do not sell well. And this is true despite O. Henry, Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber. It is so true that publishers shy at short story volumes. Where there is a name thatwill command attention—Alice Brown, Theodore Dreiser—or where a special appeal is possible, as in Edward J. O’Brien’sThe Best Short Stories of 191-, books made up of short tales may sell. But there are depressing precedents.
In his interesting article onThe Publishing Business, appearing in 1916 in thePublishers’ Weeklyand since reprinted as a booklet, Temple Scott cites Henri Bergson’sCreative Evolutionas a modern instance of a special sort of book finding its own very special, but surprisingly large, public. “Nine booksellers out of ten ‘passed’ it when the traveller brought it round,” observes Mr. Scott. “Fortunately, for the publisher, the press acted the part of the expert, and public attention was secured.” Was the bookseller to blame? Most decidedly not.Creative Evolutionis nothing to tie up your money in on a dim chance that somewhere an enthusiastic audience waits for the Bergsonian gospel.
Mr. Scott’s article, which is inconclusive, in our opinion, points out clearly that as no two books are like each other no two books are really the same article. Much fiction, to be sure, is of a single stamp; many books, and here we are by no means limited to fiction, have whatever unity comes from the authorship of a single hand. This unity may exist, elusively, as in the stories of Joseph Conrad, or may be confined almost wholly to the presence of the same name on two titlepages, as in the fact thatThe VirginianandThe Pentecost of Calamityare both the work of Owen Wister.
No! Two books are most often and emphaticallynotthe same article. Mr. Scott is wholly right when he points out every book should have advertising, or other attention, peculiar to itself. A method of reporting one book will not do for another, any more than a publisher’s circular describing one book will do to describe a second. The art of reporting books or other news, like the art of advertising books or other commodities, is one of endless differentiation. In the absence of real originality, freshness and ideas, both objects go unachieved or else are achieved by speciousness, not to say guile. You, for example, do not really believe that by reading Hannibal Halcombe’sHow to Heap Up Happinessyou will be able to acquire the equivalent of a college education in 52 weeks. But somewhere inHow to Heap Up HappinessMr. Halcombe tells how he made money or how he learned to enjoy pictures on magazine covers or a happy solution of his unoriginal domestic troubles—any one of which you may crave to know and honest information of which will probably send you after the book.
At this point in the discussion of our subject we have had the incredible folly to look back at ouroutline. Yes, there is an outline—or a thing of shreds and patches which once went by that description. What, you will say, wrecked so soon, after a mere introduction of 1,500 words or so? Certainly. Outlines are to writers what architects’ plans are to builders, or what red rags are supposed to be to bulls. Or, as the proverbial (our favorite adjective) chaff before the wind. Our outline says that the subject of selling books should be subdivision (c) under division 1 of the three partitions of our subject. All Gaul and Poland are not the only objects divided in three parts. Every serious subject is, likewise.
Never mind. We shall have to struggle along as best we can. We have been talking about selling books, or what every publisher knows in regard to it. Well, then, every publisher knows that selling books as it has mainly to be conducted under present conditions, is just as much a matter of merchandising as selling bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. But this is one of the things that people outside the publishing and bookselling businesses seldom grasp. A cultural air, for them, invests the book business. The curse of the genteel hangs about it. It is almost professional, like medicine and baseball. It has an odor, like sanctity.... All wrong.
Bonnets, bathrobes, birdseed, books. All are saleable if you go about it right. And how is that? you ask.
The best way to sell bonnets is to lay a great foundational demand for headgear. The best way to sell bathrobes is to encourage bathing. The best way to sell birdseed is to put a canary in every home. It might be supposed that the best way to sell books would be to get people to read. Yes, it might be far more valuable in the end to stimulate and spread the reading habit than to try to sell 100,000 copies of any particular book.
Of course every publisher knows this and of course all the publishers, associating themselves for the promotion of a common cause not inconceivably allied to the general welfare, spend time and money in the effort to make readers—not of Mrs. Halcyon Hunter’sLove Has Wingsor Mr. Caspar Cartouche’sMartin the Magnificent, but of books, just good books of any sort soever. Yes, of course....
This would be—beg pardon, is—the thing that actually and immediately as well as ultimately counts: Let us get people to read, to like to read, toenjoyreading, and they will, sooner or later, read books. Sooner or later they’ll become book readers and book buyers. Sooner or later books will sell as well as automobiles....
On the merely technical side of bookselling, on the immediate problem of selling particular new novels, collections of short stories, histories, books of verse, and all the rest, the publishers have, collectively at least, not much to learn from their fellowmerchants with the bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. The mechanism of merchandising is so highly developed in America that many of the methods resemble the interchangeable parts of standardized manufactures everywhere. Suppose we have a look at these methods.
The lesson of flexibility has been fully mastered by at least two American publishing houses. With their very large lists of new books they contrive to avoid, as much as possible, fixed publication dates. While their rivals are pinning themselves fast six months ahead, these publishers are moving largely but conditionally six and nine months ahead, and less largely but with swift certainty three months, two months, even one month from the passing moment. And they are absolutely right and profit by their rightness. For this reason: Everything that is printed has in it an element of that timeliness, that ephemerality if you like but also that widening ripple of human interest which is the unique essence of what we call “news.” This quality is present, in a perceptible amount, even in the most serious sort of printed matter. Let us take, as an example, Darwin’sOrigin of Species. Oh! exclaims the reader, there surely is a book with no ephemerality about it! No? But there was an immense quantity ofjust that in its publication. It came at the right hour. Fifty years earlier it would have gone unnoticed. To-day it is transcended by a body of biological knowledge that Darwin knew not.
Fifty years, one way or the other, would have made a vast difference in the reception, the import, the influence of even so epochal a book asThe Origin of Species. Now a little reflection will show that, in the case of lesser books, the matter of time is far more sharply important. Darwin’s book was so massive that ten or twenty years either way might not have mattered. But in such a case as John Spargo’sBolshevisma few months may matter. In the case ofMr. Britlingthe month as well as the year mattered vitally. Time is everything, in the fate of many a book, even as in the fate of a magazine article, a poem, an essay, a short story. Arthur Guy Empey was on the very hour withOver the Top; but the appearance of hisTales from a Dugouta few days after the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918, was one of the minor tragedies of the war.
Therefore the publisher who can, as nearly as human and mechanical conditions permit, preserve flexibility in his publishing plans, has a very great advantage over inelastic competitors. That iron-clad arrangements at half year ahead can be avoided the methods of two of the most important American houses demonstrate. Either can get out a bookon a month’s notice. More than once in a season this spells the difference between a sale of 5,000 and one of 15,000 copies—that is, between not much more than “breaking even” and making a handsome profit.
Every book that is published requires advertising though perhaps no two books call for advertising in just the same way. One of the best American publishing houses figures certain sums for advertising—whatever form it may take—in its costs of manufacture and then the individual volumes have to take each their chances of getting, each, its proper share of the money. Other houses have similar unsatisfactory devices for providing an advertising fund. The result is too often not unlike the revolving fund with which American railways were furnished by Congress—it revolved so fast that there wasn’t enough to go round long.
A very big publishing house does differently. To the cost of manufacture of each book is added a specific, flat and appropriate sum of money to advertise that particular book. The price of the book is fixed accordingly. When the book is published there is a definite sum ready to advertise it. No book goes unadvertised. If the book “catches on” there is no trouble, naturally, about more advertising money; if it does not sell the advertising of itstops when the money set aside has been exhausted and the publishers take their loss with a clear conscience; they have done their duty by the book. It may be added that this policy has always paid. Combined with other distinctive methods it has put the house which adopted it in the front rank.
Whether to publish a small, carefully selected list of books in a season or a large and comprehensive list is not wholly decided by the capital at the publisher’s command. Despite the doubling of all costs of book manufacture, publishing is not yet an enterprise which requires a great amount of capital, as compared with other industries of corresponding volume. The older a publishing house the more likely it is to restrict its list of new books. It has more to lose and less to gain by taking a great number of risks in new publications. At the same time it is subjected to severe competition because the capital required to become a book publisher is not large. Hence much caution, too much, no doubt, in many cases and every season. Still, promising manuscripts are lamentably few. “Look at the stuff that gets published,” is the classic demonstration of the case.
The older the house, the stronger its already accumulated list, the more conservative, naturally, itbecomes, the less inclined to play with loaded dice in the shape of manuscripts. Yet a policy of extreme caution and conservatism is more dangerous and deadly than a dash of the gambler’s makeup. Two poor seasons together are noticed by the trade; four poor seasons together may put a house badly behind. A season with ten books only, all good, all selling moderately well, is perhaps more meritorious and more valuable in the long run than a season with thirty books, nearly all poor except for one or two sensational successes. But the fellow who brings out the thirty books and has one or two decided best sellers is the fellow who will make large profits, attract attention and acquire prestige. It is far better to try everything you can that seems to have “a chance” than to miss something awfully good. And, provided you drop the bad potatoes quickly, it will pay you better in the end.
Theremustbe a big success somewhere on your list. A row of respectable and undistinguished books is the most serious of defeats.
Suppose you were a book publisher and had put out a novel or two by Author A. with excellent results on the profit side of the ledger. Author A. is plainly a valuable property, like a copper mine in war time. A.’s third manuscript comes along in duetime. It is entirely different from the first two so-successful novels; it is pretty certain to disappoint A.’s “audience.” You canvass the subject with A., who can’t “see” your arguments and suggestions. It comes to this: Either you publish the third novel or you lose A. Which, darling reader, would you, if you were the publisher, do? Would you choose the lady andThe Tiger?
You are neatly started as a book publisher. You can’t get advance sales for your productions (to borrow a term from the theatre). You go to Memphis and Syracuse and interview booksellers. They say to you: “For heaven’s sake, get authors whose names mean something! Why should we stock fiction by Horatius Hotaling when we can dispose of 125 copies of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s latest in ten days from publication?” Returning thoughtfully to New York, you happen to meet a Celebrated Author. Toward the close of luncheon at the Brevoort he offers to let you have a book of short stories. One of them (it will be the title-story, of course) was published in theSaturday Evening Post, bringing to Mr. Lorimer, the editor, 2,500 letters and 117 telegrams of evenly divided praise and condemnation. Short stories are a stiff proposition; but the Celebrated Author has a name that will insure a certain advance sale and a fame that will insure reviewers’ attention. For you to become his publisher will be as prestigious as it is adventitious.
From ethical and other motives, you seek out the C. A.’s present publisher—old, well-established house—and inquire if Octavo & Duodecimo will have any objection to your publishing the C. A.’s book of tales. Mr. Octavo replies in friendly accents:
“Not a bit! Not a bit! Go to it! However, we’ve lent ... (the C. A.) $2,500 at one time or another in advance moneys on a projected novel. Travel as far as you like with him, but remember that he can’t give you a novel until he has given us one or has repaid that $2,500.”
What to do? ’Tis indeed a pretty problem. If you pay Octavo & Duodecimo $2,500 you can have the C. A.’s next novel—worth several times as much as any book of tales, at the least. On the other hand, there is no certainty that the C. A. will deliver you the manuscript of a novel. He has been going to deliver it to Octavo & Duodecimo for three years. And you can’t afford to tie up $2,500 on the chance that he’ll do for you what he hasn’t done for them. Because $2,500 is, to you, a lot of money.
In the particular instance where this happened (except for details, we narrate an actual occurrence) the beginning publisher went ahead and published the book of tales, and afterward another book of tales, and let Octavo & Duodecimo keep their option on the C. A.’s next novel, if he ever writes any. The probabilities are that the C. A. will write short stories for the rest of his life rather than delivera novel from which he will receive not one cent until $2,500 has been deducted from the royalties.
English authors are keenest on advance money. The English writer who will undertake to do a book without some cash in hand before putting pen to paper is a great rarity. An American publisher who wants English manuscripts and goes to London without his checkbook won’t get anywhere. A little real money will go far. It will be almost unnecessary for the publisher who has it to entrain for those country houses where English novelists drink tea and train roses. Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Wessex, &c., will go down to London. Mr. Britling will motor into town to talk about a contract. All the London clubs will be named as rendezvous. Visiting cards will reach the publisher’s hotel, signifying the advent of Mr. Percival Fotheringay of Houndsditch, Bayswater, Wapping Old Stairs, London, B. C. Ah, yes, Fotheringay; wonderful stories of Whitechapel and the East End, really! Knows the people—what?
It has to be said that advances on books seem to retard their delivery. We have in mind a famous English author (though he might as well be American, so far as this particular point is concerned) who got an advance of $500 (wasn’t it?) some yearsago from Quarto & Folio—on a book of essays. Quarto & Folio have carried that title in their spring and fall catalogues of forthcoming books ever since. Spring and fall they despair afresh. Daylight saving did nothing to help them—an hour gained was a mere bagatelle in the cycles of time through whichFads and Fatalitieskeeps moving in a regular and always equidistant orbit. If some day the League of Nations shall ordain that the calendar be set ahead six months Quarto & Folio may get the completed manuscript ofFads and Fatalities.
American authors are much less insistent on advance payments than their cousins 3,000 miles removed. A foremost American publishing house has two inflexible rules: No advance payments and no verdict on uncompleted manuscripts. Inflexible—but it is to be suspected that though this house never bends the rule there are times when it has to break it. What won’t bend must break. There are a few authors for whom any publisher will do anything except go to jail. Probably you would make the same extensive efforts to retain your exclusive rights in a South African diamond digging which had already produced a bunch of Kohinoors.
There is a gentleman’s agreement among publishers, arrived at some years back, not to indulgein cutthroat competition for each other’s authors. This ethical principle, like most ethical principles now existing, is dictated quite as much by considerations of keeping a whole skin as by a sense of professional honor. There are some men in the book publishing business whose honorable standards have a respect for the other fellow’s property first among their Fourteen Points. There are others who are best controlled by a knowledge that to do so-and-so would be very unhealthy for themselves.
The agreement, like most unwritten laws, is interpreted with various shadings. Some of these are subtle and some of them are not. It is variously applied by different men in different cases, sometimes unquestionably and sometimes doubtfully. But in the main it is pretty extensively and strictly upheld, in spirit as in letter.
How far it transgresses authors’ privileges or limits authors’ opportunities would be difficult to say. In the nature of the case, any such understanding must operate to some extent to lessen the chances of an author receiving the highest possible compensation for his work. Whether this is offset by the favors and concessions, pecuniary and otherwise, made to an author by a publisher to whom he adheres, can’t be settled. The relation of author and publisher, at best, calls for, and generally elicits, striking displays of loyalty on both sides. Particularlyamong Americans, the most idealistic people on earth.
In its practical working this publishers’ understanding operates to prevent any publisher “approaching” an author who has an accepted publisher of his books. Unless you, as a publisher, are yourself approached by Author B., whose several books have been brought out by Publisher C., you are theoretically bound hand and foot. And even if Author B. comes to you there are circumstances under which you may well find it desirable to talk B.’s proposal over with C., hitherto his publisher. After that talk you may wish B. were in Halifax. If everybody told the truth matters would be greatly simplified. Or would they?
If you hear that Author D., who writes very good sellers, is dissatisfied with Publisher F., what is your duty in the circumstances? Author D. may not come to you, for there are many publishers for such as he to choose from. Shall we say it is your duty to acquaint D., indirectly perhaps, with the manifest advantages of bringing you his next novel? We’ll say so.
Whatever publishers agree to, authors are free. And every publisher knows how easy it is to lose an author. Why, they leave you like that! (Business of snapping fingers.) And for the lightest reasons! (Register pain or maybe mournfulness.) If D. W. Griffith wanted to make a Movie of a PublisherLosing an Author he would find the action too swift for the camera to record. Might as well try to filmThe Birth of a Notion.
One of the most fascinating mysteries about publishers, at least to authors, is the method or methods by which they determine the availability of manuscripts. Fine word, availability. Noncommittal and all that. It has no taint of infallibility—which is the last attribute a publisher makes pretensions to.
There are places where one man decides whether a manuscript will do and there are places where it takes practically the whole clerical force and several plebiscites to accept or reject the author’s offering. One house which stands in the front rank in this country accepts and rejects mainly on the verdicts of outsiders—specialists, however, in various fields. Another foremost publishing house has a special test for “popular” novels in manuscript. An extra ration of chewing gum is served out to all the stenographers and they are turned loose on the type-written pages. If they react well the firm signs a contract and prints a first edition of from 5,000 to 25,000 copies, depending on whether it is a first novel or not and the precise comments of the girls at page 378.
Always the sales manager reads the manuscript, if it is at all seriously considered. What he says has much weight. He’s the boy who will have to sell the book to the trade and unless he can see things in it, or can be got to, there is practically no hope despite Dr. Munyon’s index finger.
Recently a publishing house of national reputation has done a useful thing—we are not prepared to say it is wholly new—by establishing a liaison officer. This person does not pass on manuscripts, unless incidentally by way of offering his verdict to be considered with the verdicts of other department heads. But once a manuscript has been accepted by the house it goes straight to this man who reads it intensively and sets down, on separate sheets, everything about it that might be useful to (a) the advertising manager, (b) the sales manager and his force, and (c) the editorial people handling the firm’s book publicity effort.
A little knowledge of book publishing teaches immense humility. The number of known instances in which experienced publishers have erred in judgment is large. Authors always like to hear of these. But too much must not be deduced from them. Every one has heard of the rejection of Henry Sydnor Harrison’s novelQueed. Many have heard ofthe publisher who decided not to “do” Vicente Blasco Ibañez’sThe Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was more than one of him, by the way, and in each case he had an exceedingly bad translation to take or reject (we are told), the only worthy translation, apparently, being that which was brought out with such sensational success in the early fall of 1918. A publisher lostSpoon River Anthologybecause of a delay in acceptance—he wanted the opinion of a confrere not easily reached. For every publisher’s mistake of this sort there could probably be cited an instance of perspicacity much more striking. Such was the acceptance of Edward Lucas White’sEl Supremoafter many rejections. And how about the publisher who acceptedQueed?
Let us conclude these haphazard and very likely unhelpful musings on an endless subject by telling a true story.
In the spring of 1919 one of the principal publishing houses in America and England undertook the publication of a very unusual sort of a novel, semi-autobiographical, a work of love and leisure by a man who had gained distinction as an executive. It was a fine piece of work, though strange; had a delightful reminiscential quality. The book was made up, a first edition of moderate size printed andbound. It was not till this had been done and the book was ready to place on sale that the head of this publishing house had an opportunity to read it.
The Head is a veteran publisher famous for his prescience in the matter of manuscripts and for honorable dealings.
He read the book through and was charmed by it; he looked at the book and was unhappy. He sent for everybody who had had to do with the making of this book. He held up his copy and fluttered pages and said, in effect:
“This has been done all wrong. Here is a book of quite exceptional quality. I don’t think it will sell. Only moderately, though perhaps rather steadily for some years to come. It won’t make us money. To speak of. But it deserves, intrinsically, better treatment. Better binding. This is only ordinary six-months’-selling novel binding. It deserves larger type. Type with a more beautiful face. Fewer lines to the page. Lovelier dress from cover to cover.
“Throw away the edition that has been printed. Destroy it or something. At least, hide it. Don’t let any of it get out. For this has been done wrong, all wrong. Do it over.”
So they went away from his presence and did it right. It meant throwing away about $2,000. Or was it a $2,000 investment in the good opinion of people who buy, read and love books?