If You Don't Write Fiction

by Charles Phelps Cushing

A huge army of disappointed scribblers have followed that haphazard plan of battle. They would know better than to try to market crates of eggs to a shoe store, but they see nothing equally absurd in shipping a popular science article to the Atlantic Monthly or an "uplift" essay to the Smart Set. They paper their walls with rejection slips, fill up a trunk with returned manuscripts and pose before their sympathetic friends as martyrs.

Many of these defeated writers have nose-sense for what is of national interest. They write well, and they take the necessary pains to make their manuscripts presentable in appearance. If they only knew enough to offer their contributions to suitable markets, they soon would be scoring successes. What they can't get into their heads is that the names in an index of periodicals represent needs as widely varied as the names in a city directory.

Take, for example, five of our leading weeklies: The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Leslie's, The Outlook and The Independent. They all use articles of more or less timeliness, but beyond this one similarity they are no more alike in character than an American, an Irishman, an Englishman, a Welshman and a Scot. Your burning hot news "story" which The Saturday Evening Post turned down may have been rejected because the huge circulation of the Post necessitates that its "copy" go to press six or seven weeks before it appears upon the newsstands. You should have tried The Independent, which makes a specialty of getting hot stuff into circulation before it has time to cool. Your interview with a big man of Wall Street which was returned by The Outlook might find a warm welcome at Leslie's. A character sketch of the Democratic candidate for President might not please Leslie's in the least, but would fetch a good price from Collier's. Your article on the Prairie Poets might be rejected by three other weeklies, but prove quite acceptable to The Outlook.

When you have completed a manuscript, forget the inspiration that went into its writing and give cold and sober second thought to this matter of marketing. The Outlook might have bought the article that Collier's rejected. Collier's might have bought the one that The Outlook rejected. Every experienced writer will tell you that this sort of thing happens every day.

Don't snort in disdain because the editor of The Ladies' Home Journal rejects a contribution on economics. Maybe the lady's husband would like it. So try it on The World's Work, or Leslie's or System. It might win you a place of honor, with your name blazoned on the cover.

Too many discouraged novices believe that the bromide of the rejection slip—"rejection implies no lack of merit"—is simply a piece of sarcasm. It is nothing of the sort. In tens of thousands of instances it is a solemn fact. Don't sulk and berate the editors who return your manuscript, but carefully read the contribution again, trying to forget for the moment that it is one of your own precious "brain children." Cold-bloodedly size it up as something to sell. Then you may perceive that you have been trying to market a crate of eggs at a shoe store. Eggs are none the less precious on that account. Try again—applying this time to a grocer. If he doesn't buy, it will be because he already has all the eggs on hand that he needs. In that event, look up the addresses of some more grocers.

The same common sense principles apply in selling manuscripts to the magazines and newspapers as in marketing any other kind of produce. The top prices go to the fellow who delivers his goods fresh and in good order to buyers who stand in need of his particular sort of staple. Composing a manuscript may be art, but selling it is business.

Naturally, it requires practice to become expert in picking topics of wide enough appeal to interest the public which reads magazines of national circulation. Every beginner, except an inspired genius, is likely to be oppressed with a sense of hopelessness when he is making his first desperate attempts to "break in." The writer can testify feelingly on this point from his own experience. Kansas City was then my base of operations, and it seemed as if I never possibly could find anything in that far inland locality worthy of nation-wide attention. Everything I wrote bounced back with a printed rejection slip.

At last, however, I discovered a "story" that appeared to be of undeniable national appeal. Missouri, for the first time in thirty-six years, had elected a Republican governor. I decided that the surest market for this would be a magazine dealing with personality sketches. If a magazine of that type would not buy the "story," I was willing to own myself whipped.

On the afternoon when we were all sure that Herbert Hadley had won, I begged a big lithographed portrait of the governor-elect from a cigar store man who had displayed it prominently in his front window. There was no time, then, to search for a photograph. A thrill of conviction pervaded me that at last my fingers were on a "story" that no magazine editor, however much he might hate to recognize the worth of new authors, could afford to reject.