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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.