6
At this point in the discussion of our subject we have had the incredible folly to look back at our outline. 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’s Love Has Wings or Mr. Caspar Cartouche’s Martin 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, to enjoy reading, 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 fellow merchants 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.