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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.