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.”