Chapter IV: Part 4

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 due time. 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 and _The 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 the _Saturday 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 deliver a novel from which he will receive not one cent until $2,500 has been deducted from the royalties.

11

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 years ago 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 which _Fads and Fatalities_ keeps 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 of _Fads 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.

12

There is a gentleman’s agreement among publishers, arrived at some years back, not to indulge in 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. Particularly among 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 Publisher Losing an Author he would find the action too swift for the camera to record. Might as well try to film _The Birth of a Notion_.

13

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.

14

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 novel _Queed_. Many have heard of the publisher who decided not to “do” Vicente Blasco Ibañez’s _The 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 lost _Spoon River Anthology_ because 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’s _El Supremo_ after many rejections. And how about the publisher who accepted _Queed_?

15

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 and bound. 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?

THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER

VII

THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER

By “best seller” we may mean one of several things. Dr. Emmett Holt’s _Care and Feeding of Children_, of which the fifty-eighth edition was printed in the spring of 1919, is one kind of best seller; Owen Wister’s _The Virginian_ is quite another. The number of editions of a book is a very uncertain indication of sales to a person not familiar with book publishing. Editions may consist of as few as 500 copies or as many as 25,000 or even 50,000. The advance sale of Gene Stratton-Porter’s _A Daughter of the Land_ was, if we recall the figure exactly, 150,000 copies. These, therefore, were printed and distributed by the day when the book was placed on sale, or shortly thereafter. To call this the “first edition” would be rather meaningless.

One thousand copies of a book of poems--unless it be an anthology--is a large edition indeed. But not for Edgar Guest, whose books sell in the tens of thousands. The sale, within a couple of years, of 31,000 copies of the poems of Alan Seeger was phenomenal.

The first book of essays of an American writer sold 6,000 copies within six months of its publication. This upset most precedents of the bookselling trade. The author’s royalties may have been $1,125. A few hundred dollars should be added to represent money received for the casual publication of the essays in magazines before their appearance in the book. Of course the volume did not stop selling at the end of six months.

Compare these figures, however, with the income of one of the most popular American novelists. A single check for $75,000. Total payments, over a period of fifteen years, of $750,000 to $1,000,000. Yet it is doubtful if the books of this novelist reached more than 65 per cent. of their possible audience.

It is a moderate estimate, in our opinion, that most books intended for the “general reader,” whether fiction or not, do not reach more than one-quarter of the whole body of readers each might attain. With the proper machinery of publicity and merchandising book sales in the United States could be quadrupled. We share this opinion with Harry Blackman Sell of the Chicago _Daily News_ and were interested to find it independently confirmed by James H. Collins who, writing in the _Saturday Evening Post_ of May 3, 1919, under the heading _When Merchandise Sells Itself_, said:

“Book publishing is one industry that suffers for lack of retail outlets. Even the popular novel sells in numbers far below the real buying power of this nation of readers, because perhaps 25 per cent. of the public can examine it and buy it at the city bookstores, while it is never seen by the rest of the public.

“For lack of quantity production based on wide retail distribution the novel sells for a dollar and a half.

“But for a dollar you can buy a satisfactory watch.

“That is made possible by quantity production. Quantity production of dollar watches is based on their sale in 50,000 miscellaneous shops, through the standard stock and the teaching of modern mercantile methods. Book publishers have made experiments with the dollar novel, but it sold just about the same number of copies as the $1.50 novel, because only about so many fiction buyers were reached through the bookstores. Now the standard-stock idea is being applied to books, with assortments of 50 or 100 proved titles carried by the druggist and stationer.”

2

Speaking rather offhandedly, we are of opinion that not more than two living American writers of fiction have achieved anything like a 100 per cent. sale of their books. These are Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter.

I am indebted to Mr. Frank K. Reilly, president of the Reilly & Lee Company, Chicago, selling agents for the original editions of all Mr. Wright’s books, for the following figures:

“We began,” wrote Mr. Reilly, “with _That Printer of Udell’s_--selling, as I remember the figures, about 20,000. Then _The Shepherd of the Hills_--about 100,000, I think. Then the others in fast growing quantities. For _The Winning of Barbara Worth_ we took four orders in advance which totalled nearly 200,000 copies. On _When a Man’s a Man_ we took the biggest single order ever placed for a novel at full price--that is, a cloth-bound, ‘regular’ $1.35 book--250,000 copies from the Western News Company. The advance sale of this 1916 book was over 465,000.”

Mr. Reilly wrote at the beginning of March, 1919, from French Lick, Indiana. At that time Mr. Wright’s publishers had in hand a novel, _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_, published August 21, 1919. They had arranged for a first printing of 750,000 copies and were as certain of selling 500,000 copies before August 1 as you are of going to sleep some time in the next twenty-four hours. It was necessary to make preparations for the sale of 1,000,000 copies of the new novel before August 21, 1920.

The sale of 1,000,000 copies of _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_ within a year of publication may be said to achieve a 100 per cent. circulation so far as existing book merchandising facilities allow.

The sale, within ten years, of 670,733 copies of Gene Stratton-Porter’s story, _Freckles_, approaches a 100 per cent. sale but with far too much retardation.

3

How has the 100 per cent. sale for the Harold Bell Wright books been brought within hailing distance?

Before us lies a circular which must have been mailed to most booksellers in the United States early in the spring of 1919. It is headed: “First Publicity Advertisement of Our $100,000 Campaign.” Below this legend is an advertisement of _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_. Below that is a statement that the advertisement will appear, simultaneously with the book’s publication, in “magazines and national and religious weeklies having millions upon millions of circulation. In addition to this our newspaper advertising will cover all of the larger cities of the United States.” Then follows a list of “magazines, national and religious weeklies covered by our signed advertising contracts.”

There are 132 of them. The range is from the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _New Republic_ to _Vanity Fair_ and _Town Topics_ in one slant; from _System_ and _Physical Culture_ to _Zion’s Herald_ and the _Catholic News_; from _Life_ to _Needlecraft_; from the _Photoplay World_ to the _Girl’s Companion_; from the _Outlook_ to the _Lookout_--and to and fro and back and forth in a web covering all America between the two Portlands.

There are about 140,000,000 persons in the United States and Great Britain together. Over 100,000,000 of them, we are told, have read a Harold Bell Wright book or seen a Harold Bell Wright movie.

The secret of the sale of Mr. Wright’s books, so far as the external factor is concerned, resides in the fact that his stories have been brought to the attention of thousands upon thousands who, from one year’s end to the other, never have a new book of fiction thrust upon their attention by advertising or by sight of the book itself.

4

We speak of the “external factor.” There is an external factor quite as much as an internal factor in the success of every best seller of whatever sort. The tendency of everybody who gives any attention to the subject, but particularly the book publisher, is to study the internal factor almost to the exclusion of the other. What, you naturally ask yourself, are the qualities in this book that have made it sell so remarkably?

The internal factor is important. Its importance, doubtless, cannot be overrated. But it is not the whole affair. Before we go further let us lay down some general principles that are not often formulated clearly enough even in the minds of those to whom they import most.

1. The internal factor--certain qualities of the book itself--predetermines its possible audience.

2. The external factor--the extent to which it is brought to public attention, the manner in which it is presented to the public, the ubiquity of copies for sale--determines its actual audience.

3. The internal factor can make a best seller of a book with almost no help from the external factor, but cannot give it a 100 per cent. sale.

4. The external factor cannot make a big seller where the internal factor is not of the right sort; but it can always give a 100 per cent. sale.

5. The internal factor is only partly in the publisher’s control; the external factor is entirely controllable by the publisher.

There are two secrets of the best seller. One resides in the book itself, the other rests in the manner of its exploitation. One is inherent, the other is circumstantial. One is partly controllable by the publisher, the other is wholly so. Since a book possessing certain qualities in a sufficient degree will sell heavily anyway, it is human nature to hunt ceaselessly for this thing which will triumph over every sort of handicap and obstacle. But it is a lazy way to do. It is not good business. It cannot, ultimately, pay. The successful book publisher of the future is going to be the publisher who works for a 100 per cent. sale on all his books. When he gets a book with an internal factor which would make it a best seller anyway, it will simply mean that he will have to exert himself markedly less to get a 100 per cent. result. He will have such best sellers and will make large sums of money with them, but they will be incidents and not epochal events; for practically all his books will be good sellers.

5

Before we go on to a discussion of the internal factor of the best seller we want to stress once more, and constructively and suggestively, the postnatal attention it should receive. The first year and the second summer are fatal to far too many books as well as humans. And this is true despite the differences between the two. If 100,000 copies represent the 100 per cent. sale of a given volume you may declare that it makes no difference whether that sale is attained in six months or six years. From the business standpoint of a quick turnover six months is a dozen times better, you may argue; and if interest on invested money be thought of as compounding, the apparent difference in favor of the six-months’ sale is still more striking. This would perhaps be true if the author’s next book could invariably be ready at the end of the six-months’ period. Other ifs will occur to those with some knowledge of the publishing business and a moderate capacity for reflection.

Most books are wrongly advertised and inadequately advertised, and rather frequently advertised in the wrong places.

Of the current methods of advertising new fiction only one is unexceptionably good. This is the advertising which arrests the reader’s attention and baits his interest by a few vivid sentences outlining the crisis of the story, the dilemma that confronts the hero or heroine, the problem of whether the hero or heroine acted rightly; or paints in a few swift strokes some exciting episode of the action--ending with a question that will stick in the reader’s mind. Such an advertisement should always have a drawing or other illustration if possible. It should be displayed in a generous space and should be placed broadcast but with much discrimination as to where it is to appear.

A kind of advertisement somewhat allied to this, but not in use at all despite its assured selling power would consist of the simple reproduction of a photographed page of the book. The Detroit _News_ has used such reproduced pages so effectively as illustrations that it seems strange no publisher (so far as we know) has followed suit. Striking pages, and pages containing not merely objective thrill but the flavor which makes the fascination of a particular book, can be found in most novels. The Detroit _News_ selected a page of the highest effectiveness from so subtle a romance as Joseph Conrad’s _The Arrow of Gold_. This manner of advertising, telling from its complete restraint, is applicable to non-fiction. A page of a book of essays by Samuel Crothers would have to be poorly taken not to disclose, in its several hundred words, the charm and fun of his observations. Publishers of encyclopædias have long employed this “page-from-the-book” method of advertisement with the best results.

The ordinary advertisement of a book, making a few flat assertions of the book’s extraordinary merit, has become pretty hopelessly conventionalized. The punch is gone from it, we rather fear forever. In all conscience, it is psychologically defective in that it tries to coerce attention and credence instead of trying to attract, fascinate or arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not different, essentially, from the public speaker. The public speaker who aims to compel attention by mere thundering or by extraordinary assertions has no chance against the speaker who amuses, interests, or agreeably piques his audience, who stirs his auditors’ curiosity or kindles their collective imagination.

There is too little personality in the advertising of books, and when we say personality we mean, in most cases, the author’s personality. The bald and unconvincing recital of the opinion of the _Westminster Gazette_, that this is a book every Anglo-American should read, is as nothing compared with a few dozen words that could have been written of, or by, no man on earth except H. G. Wells.

The internal factor of H. G. Wells’s novel _The Undying Fire_ is so big that it constitutes a sort of a least common multiple of the hopes, doubts and fears of hundreds of thousands of humans. A 100 per cent. sale of the book, under existing merchandising conditions, would be 400,000 copies, at the very least. It ought to be advertised in every national and religious weekly of 10,000 circulation or over in the United States, and in every periodical of that circulation reaching a rural audience. And it ought to be advertised, essentially, in this manner:

SHALL MAN CURSE GOD AND DIE?
_No! Job Answered_
NO! H. G. WELLS TELLS STRICKEN EUROPE

_Read His New Short Novel, “The Undying Fire,”
in Which He Holds Out the Hope that Men
May Yet Unite to Organize the World and
Save Mankind from Extinction_

Such an appeal to the hope, the aspiration, the unconquerable idealism of men everywhere, to the social instinct which has its roots in thousands of years of human history, cannot fail.

6

Books are wrongly advertised, as we have said, and they are inadequately advertised, by which we mean in too few places; and perhaps “insufficiently advertised” had been a more accurate phrase.

It is correct and essential to advertise books in periodicals appealing wholly or partly to book readers. It is just as essential to recruit readers.

Book readers can be recruited just as magazine readers are recruited. The most important way of getting magazine readers is still the subscription agent. Every community of any size in these United States should have in it a man or woman of at least high school education and alert enthusiasm selling books of all the publishers. Where there is a good bookstore such an agent is unnecessary or may be found in the owner of the store or an employee thereof. Most communities cannot support a store given over entirely to bookselling. In them let there be agents giving their whole time or their spare time and operating with practically no overhead expense. Where the agents receive salaries these must be paid jointly by all the publishers whose books they handle. This should naturally be done through a central bureau or selling agency. Efficient agencies already exist.

The “book agent” is a classical joke. He is a classical joke because he peddled one book, and the wrong sort of a book, from door to door. You must equip him with fifty books, new and alluring, of all publishers; and arm him with sheets and circulars describing enticingly a hundred others. He must know individuals and their tastes and must have one or more of the best book reviewing periodicals in the country. He must have catalogues and news notes and special offers to put over. If he gives you all his time he must have assurance of a living, especially until he has a good start or exhibits his incapacity for pioneering. He must have an incentive above and beyond any salary that may be paid him.

But the consideration of details in this place is impossible. The structural outline and much adaptable detail is already in highly successful use by periodicals of many sorts. In fundamentals it requires no profounder skill than that of the clever copyist.

7

We charged in the third count of our indictment that books are rather frequently advertised in the wrong places. We had in mind the principle that for every book considerable enough to get itself published by a publisher of standing there is, somewhere, a particular audience; just as there is a certain body of readers for every news item of enough moment to get printed in a daily newspaper. A juster way of expressing the trouble would be this: Books are rather frequently not advertised in the right places.

The clues to the right places must be sought in the book itself and its authorship, always; and they are innumerable. As no two books are alike the best thing to do will be to take a specific example. Harry Lauder’s _A Minstrel in France_ will serve.

The first and most obvious thing to do is to advertise it in every vaudeville theatre in America. Wherever the programme includes motion pictures flash the advertisement on the screen with a fifteen second movie of Lauder himself. Posters and circulars in the lobby must serve if there are no screen pictures.

The next and almost equally obvious thing is to have Lauder make a phonograph record of some particularly effective passage in the book, marketing the record in the usual way, at a popular price. Newspaper and magazine advertising must be used heavily and must be distributed on the basis of circulation almost entirely.

8

The external factor in the success of the best seller is so undeveloped and so rich in possibilities that one takes leave of it with regret; but we must go on to some consideration of the internal factor that makes for big sales--the quality or qualities in the book itself.

Without going into a long and elaborate investigation of best-seller books, sifting and reasoning until we reach rock bottom, we had better put down a few dogmas. These, then, are the essentials of best-selling fiction so far as our observation and intellect has carried us:

1. A good story; which means, as a rule, plenty of surface action but always means a crisis in the affairs of one or two most-likable characters, a crisis that is _satisfactorily_ solved.

Mark the italicized word. Not a “happy ending” in the twisted sense in which that phrase is used. Always a happy ending in the sense in which we say, “That was a happy word”--meaning a fit word, the “mot juste” of the French. Always a fitting ending, not always a “happy ending” in the sense of a pleasant ending. The ending of _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ is not pleasant, but fitting and, to the majority of readers, uplifting, ennobling, fine.

2. Depths below the surface action for those who care to plumb them.

No piece of fiction can sell largely unless it has a region of philosophy, moral ideas--whatever you will to call it--for those who crave and must have that mental immersion. The reader must not be led beyond his depth but he must be able to go into deep water and swim as far as his strength will carry him if he so desires.

3. The ethical, social and moral implications of the surface action must, in the end, accord with the instinctive desires of mankind. This is nothing like as fearful as it sounds, thus abstractly stated. The instinctive desires of men are pretty well known. Any psychologist can tell you what they are. They are few, primitive and simple. They have nothing to do with man’s reason except that man, from birth to death, employs his reason in achieving the satisfaction of these instincts. The two oldest and most firmly implanted are the instinct for self-preservation and the instinct to perpetuate the race. The social instinct, much younger than either, is yet thousands upon thousands of years old and quite as ineradicable.

Because it violates the self-preservative instinct no story of suicide can have a wide human audience unless, in the words of Dick at the close of Masefield’s _Lost Endeavour_, we are filled with the feeling that “life goes on.” The act of destruction must be, however blindly, an act of immolation on the altar of the race. Such is the feeling we get in reading Jack London’s largely autobiographical _Martin Eden_; and, in a much more striking instance, the terrible act that closed the life of the heroine in Tolstoy’s _Anna Karenina_ falls well before the end of the book. In _Anna Karenina_, as in _War and Peace_, the Russian novelist conveys to every reader an invincible conviction of the unbreakable continuity of the life of the race. The last words of _Anna Karenina_ are not those which describe Anna’s death under the car wheels but the infinitely hopeful words of Levin:

“I shall continue to be vexed with Ivan the coach-man, and get into useless discussions, and express my thoughts blunderingly. I shall always be blaming my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at once. I shall always feel a certain barrier between the Holy of Holies of my inmost soul, and the souls of others, even my wife’s. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to myself why. But my whole life, every moment of my life, independently of whatever may happen to me, will be, not meaningless as before, but full of the deep meaning which I shall have the power to impress upon it.”

9

It is because they appeal so strongly and simply and directly to our instinctive desires that the stories of Jack London are so popular; it is their perfect appeal to our social instinct that makes the tales of O. Henry sell thousands of copies month after month. Not even Dickens transcended O. Henry in the perfection of this appeal; and O. Henry set the right value on Dickens as at least one of his stories shows.

Civilization and education refine man’s instinctive desires, modify the paths they take, but do not weaken them perceptibly from generation to generation except in a few individual cases. Read the second chapter of Harold Bell Wright’s _The Shepherd of the Hills_ and observe the tremendous call to the instinct of race perpetuation, prefaced by a character’s comment on the careless breeding of man as contrasted with man’s careful breeding of animals. And if you think the appeal is crude, be very sure of this: The crudity is in yourself, in the instinct that you are not accustomed to have set vibrating with such healthy vigor.

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All this deals with broadest fundamentals. But they are what the publisher, judging his manuscript, must fathom. They are deeper down than the sales manager need go, or the bookseller; deeper than the critic need ordinarily descend in his examination into the book’s qualities.

Ordinarily it will be enough for the purpose to analyze a story along the lines of human instinct as it has been modified by our society and our surroundings and conventionalized by habit. The publishers of Eleanor H. Porter’s novel _Oh, Money! Money!_ were not only wholly correct but quite sufficiently acute in their six reasons for predicting--on the character of the story alone--a big sale.

The first of these was that the yarn dealt with the getting and spending of money, “the most interesting subject in the world,” asserted the publishers--and while society continues to be organized on its present basis their assertion is, as regards great masses of mankind, a demonstrable fact.

The second reason was allied to the first; the story would “set every reader thinking how _he_ would spend the money.” And the third: it was a Cinderella story, giving the reader “the joy of watching a girl who has never been fairly treated come out on top in spite of all odds.” This is a powerful appeal to the modified instinct of self-preservation. The fourth reason--“the scene is laid in a little village and the whole book is a gem of country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy”--answers to the social hunger in the human heart. Fifth: “A charming love theme with a happy ending.” Sixth: “The story teaches an unobtrusive lesson ... that happiness must come from within, and that money cannot buy it.” To go behind such reasons is, for most minds, not to clarify but to confuse. Folks feel these things and care nothing about the source of the river of feeling.

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With the non-fictional book the internal factor making for large sales is as diverse as the kinds of non-fictional volumes. A textbook on a hitherto untreated subject of sudden interest to many thousands of readers has every prospect of a large sale; but this is not the kind of internal factor that a publisher is likely to err in judging! Any alert business man acquiring correct information will profit by such an opportunity.

But there is a book called _In Tune with the Infinite_, the work of a man named Ralph Waldo Trine, which has sold, at this writing, some 530,000 copies, having been translated into eighteen languages. A man has been discovered sitting on the banks of the Yukon reading it; it has been observed in shops and little railway stations in Burmah and Ceylon. This is what is called, not at all badly, an “inspirational book.” Don’t you think a publisher might well have erred in judging that manuscript?

Mr. Trine’s booklet, _The Greatest Thing Ever Known_, has sold 160,000 copies; his book _What All the World’s A-Seeking_, is in its 138,000th. It will not do to overlook the attractiveness of these titles. What, most people will want to know, is “the greatest thing ever known”? And it is human to suppose that what you are seeking is what all the world is after, and to want to read a book that holds out an implied promise to help you get it.

The tremendous internal factor of these books of Mr. Trine’s is that they articulate simple (but often beautiful) ideas that lie in the minds of hundreds of thousands of men and women, ideas unformulated and by the hundred thousand unutterable. For any man who can say the thing that is everywhere felt, the audience is limitless.

In autobiography a truly big sale is not possible unless the narrative has the fundamental qualities we have designated as necessary in the fictional best seller. All the popular autobiographies are stories that appeal powerfully to our instinctive desires and this is the fact with such diverse revelations as those of Benjamin Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Henry Adams. The sum of the instinctive desires is always overwhelmingly in favor of normal human existences. For this reason the predetermined audience of Mr. Tarkington’s _Conquest of Canaan_ is many times greater than that of Mr. Dreiser’s _Sister Carrie_. A moment’s reflection will show that this is inevitable, since these instinctive desires of ours are so many resistless forces exerted simultaneously on us and combining, in a period of years, to make a single resultant force impelling us to lead normal, sane, “healthy” and wholesome lives. On such lives, lived by the vast majority of men and women everywhere, the security of every form of human society depends; indeed, the continued existence of man on the face of the earth is dependent upon them.

You may say that Rousseau, Cellini, Marie Bashkirtseff, even Franklin and Henry Adams, led existences far from normal. The answer is that we accept the stories of their lives in fact where we (or most of us) would never accept them in fiction. We know that these lives were lived; and the very circumstance that they were abnormal lives makes us more eager to know about and understand them. What most of us care for most is such a recital as Hamlin Garland’s _A Son of the Middle Border_. The secret of the influence of the life of Abraham Lincoln upon the American mind and the secret of the appeal made by Theodore Roosevelt, the man, to his countrymen in general during his lifetime is actually one and the same--the triumph of normal lives, lived normally, lived up to the hilt, and overshadowing almost everything else contemporary with them. Such men vindicate common lives, however humbly lived. We see, as in an apocalyptic vision, what any one of us may become; and in so far as any one of us has become so great we all of us share in his greatness.

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But perhaps the greatest element in predetermining the possible audience for a non-fiction book is its timeliness. Important, often enough, in the case of particular novels, the matter of timeliness is much more so with all other books soever. It cannot be overlooked in autobiography; _The Education of Henry Adams_ attracted a great host of readers in 1918 and 1919 because it became accessible to them in 1918 and not in 1913 or 1929. In 1918 and 1919 the minds of men were peculiarly troubled. Especially about education. H. G. Wells was articulating the disastrous doubts that beset numbers of us, first, in _Joan and Peter_, with its subtitle, _The Story of an Education_, drawing up an indictment which, whatever its bias, distortion and unfairness yet contained a lot of terrible truth; and then, in _The Undying Fire_, dedicated “to all schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and every teacher in the world,” returning to the subject, but this time constructively. Yes, a large number of persons were thinking about education in 1918-19, and the ironical attitude of Henry Adams toward his own was of keenest interest to them.

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We have discussed the internal factor which makes for a big sale in books rather sketchily because, as a whole, book publishers can tell it when they see it (all that is necessary) even though it may puzzle authors who haven’t mastered it. So far as authors are concerned we believe that this factor can, in many instances, be mastered. The enterprise is not different from developing a retentive memory, or skill over an audience in public speaking; but as with both these achievements no short cut is really possible and advice and suggestion (you can’t honestly call it instruction) can go but a little way. No end of nonsense has been uttered on the subject of what it is in books that makes them sell well, and nonsense will not cease to be uttered about it while men write. What is of vastly more consequence than any effort to exploit the internal factor in best sellers is the failure to make every book published sell its best. If, in general, books sell not more than one-quarter the number of copies they should sell, an estimate to which we adhere, then the immediate and largest gain to publishers, authors and public will be in securing 100 per cent. sales.

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A word in closing about the familiar argument that the habits of our people have changed, that they no longer have time to read books, that motoring and movies have usurped the place of reading.

Intercommunication is not a luxury but a necessity. Transportation is only a means of intercommunication. As the means of intercommunication--books, newspapers, mail services, railroads, aircraft, telephones, automobiles, motion pictures--multiply the use of each and every one increases with one restriction: A new means of intercommunication paralleling but greatly improving an existing means will largely displace it--as railroads have largely superseded canals.

As a means of a particular and indispensable kind of intercommunication nothing has yet appeared that parallels and at the same time decidedly improves upon books. Newspapers and magazines do not and cannot, though they most nearly offer the same service. You cannot go in your Ford to hear from the lips of Mr. Tarkington his new novel and seeing it on the screen isn’t the same thing as reading it--as we all know. And until some inventor enables us to sit down with an author and get his story whole, at our own convenience and related in his own words, by some device much more attractive than reading a book,--why, until then books will be bought and read in steadily increasing numbers. For with its exercise the taste for intercommunication intensifies. To have been somewhere is to want to read about it, to have read about a place is to want to go there in innumerable instances. It is a superficial view that sees in the spread of automobiles and motion pictures an arrest of reading. As time goes on and more and more people read books, both absolutely and relatively to the growth of populations, shall we hear a wail that people’s habits have changed and that the spread of book-reading has checked the spread of automobiling and lessened the attendance at the picture shows? Possibly we shall hear that outcry but we doubt it; nor does our doubt rest upon any feeling that books will not be increasingly read.

WRITING A NOVEL

VIII

WRITING A NOVEL

There are at least as many ways of writing a novel as there are novelists and doubtless there are more; for it is to be presumed that every novelist varies somewhat in his methods of labor. The literature on the business of novel-writing is not extensive. Some observations and advice on the part of Mr. Arnold Bennett are, indeed, about all the average reader encounters; we have forgotten whether they are embedded in _The Truth About An Author_ or in that other masterpiece, _How to Live on 2,400 Words a Day_. It may be remarked that there is no difficulty in living on 2,400 words a day, none at all, where the writer receives five cents a word or better.

But there we go, talking about money, a shameful subject that has only a backstairs relation to Art. Let us ascend the front staircase together, first. Let us enter the parlor of Beauty-Is-Truth-Truth-Beauty, which, the poet assured us, is all we know or need to know. Let us seat ourselves in lovely æsthetic surroundings. If later we have to go out the back way maybe we can accomplish it unobserved.

There are only three motives for writing a novel. The first is to satisfy the writer’s self, the second is to please or instruct other persons, the third is to earn money. We will consider these motives in order.

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The best novels are written from a blending of all three motives. But it is doubtful if a good novel has ever been written in which the desire to satisfy some instinct in himself was not present in the writer’s purpose.

Just what this instinct is can’t so easily be answered. Without doubt the greatest part of it is the instinct of paternity. Into the physiological aspects of the subject we shall not enter, though they are supported by a considerable body of evidence. The longing to father--or mother--certain fictitious characters is not often to be denied. Sometimes the story as a story, as an entity, is the beloved child of its author. Did not Dickens father Little Nell? How, do you suppose, Barrie has thought of himself in relation to some of his youngsters? Any one who has read _Lore of Proserpine_ not only believes in fairies but understands the soul of Maurice Hewlett. The relation of the creator of a story to his persons is not necessarily parental. It is always intensely human.

O. Henry was variously a Big Brother (before the Big Brothers had been thought of), a father, an uncle, a friend, a distant cousin, a mere acquaintance, a sworn enemy of his people. It has to be so. For the writer lives among the people he creates. The cap of Fortunatus makes him invisible to them but he is always there--not to interfere with them nor to shape their destinies but to watch them come together or fly apart, to hear what they say, to guess what they think (from what they say and from the way they behave), to worry over them, applaud them, frown; but forever as a recorder.

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None of the author’s troubles must appear in the finished record. Still wearing Fortunatus’s cap he is required to be as invisible to the reader as to the people he describes. There are exceptions to this rule. Dickens was the most notable. Many readers prefer to have a tale told them by a narrator frankly prejudiced in favor of some of the characters and against others. Many--but not a majority.

In the best novel that Booth Tarkington has so far written, _The Flirt_, the dominating figure is a heartless young woman to whom the reader continuously itches to administer prussic acid in a fatal dose. But Mr. Tarkington does not scald Cora Madison with boiling invective nor blister her with hot irony. He relates her doings in the main almost dispassionately; and set forth thus nakedly they are more damnable than any amount of sound and fury could make them appear to be. Mr. Tarkington does not wave the prussic acid bottle, though here and there, distilled through his narrative and perceptible more in the things he selects to tell about than in his manner of telling them, the reader is conscious of a faint odor of almond blossoms, signifying that the author has uncorked the acid bottle--perhaps that his restraint in not emptying it may be the more emphasized.

May we set things down a little at random? Then let us seize this moment to point out to the intending novel writer some omissions in _The Flirt_. Our pupil will, when he comes to write his novel, be certain to think of the “strong scenes.” He will be painfully eager to get them down. It is these scenes that will “grip” the reader and assure his book of a sale of 100,000 copies.

Battle, murder and sudden death are generally held to be the very meat of a strong scene. But when the drunkard Ray Vilas, Cora Madison’s discarded lover, shoots down Valentine Corliss and then kills himself, Mr. Tarkington does not fill pages with it. He takes scarce fifteen lines--perhaps a little over 100 words--to tell of the double slaying. Nor does he relate what Ray Vilas and Cora said to each other in that last interview which immediately preceded the crime. “Probably,” says Mr. Tarkington, “Cora told him the truth, all of it; though of course she seldom told quite the truth about anything in which she herself was concerned”--or words to that effect.

Where oh where is the strong scene? Ah, one man’s strength is another’s weakness. _The Flirt_ is full of strong scenes but they are infrequently the scenes which the intending novel writer, reviewing his tale before setting to work, would select as the most promising.

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