2
A fine old publishing house once went back over the record of about 1,200 published books. This was a rather conservative firm, as little of a gambler as possible; its books had placed it, in every respect, in the first rank of publishing houses.
Of the 1,200 books just one in ten had made any sizable amount of money. The remaining 1,080 had either lost money, broken even, or made sums smaller than the interest on the money tied up in them. Most of the 120 profitable books had been highly profitable; it will not surprise you to learn this when you reflect that these lucrative books had each to foot the bill, more or less, for nine others. So much for the analysis of figures. But what lay behind the figures? In some cases it was possible to tell why a particular book had sold. More often it wasn’t.... Is this a business?
3
Thorwald Alembert Jenkinson has a book published. It’s not a bad book, either; very good novel, as a matter of fact. Sales rather poor. Mr. Jenkinson’s publisher takes his next book with a natural reluctance, buoyed up by the certitude that this is a better story and has in it elements that promise popularity. The publisher’s salesman goes on the road. In Dodge City, Iowa, let us say, he enters a bookseller’s and begins to talk the new Jenkinson novel. At the sound of his voice and the sight of the dummy the bookseller lifts repelling hands and backs away in horror.
“Stock that?” asks the bookseller rhetorically. “Not on your life! Why,” with a gesture toward one shelf, “there’s his first book. Twenty copies and only two sold!”
The new Jenkinson novel has a wretched advance sale. Readers, not seeing it in the bookshops, may yet call for it when they read a review—not necessarily a favorable account—or when they see it advertised. If Mr. Jenkinson wrote histories or biographies the bookseller’s wholly human attitude would not much matter. But a novel is different. The customer wanting Jenkinson’s History of France would order it or go elsewhere, most likely. The customer wanting Jenkinson’s new novel is quite often content with Tarkington’s instead.
When you go to the ticket agency to get seats at a Broadway show and find they have none left for Whoop ’Er Up you grumble, and then buy seats at Let’s All Go. Not that you really care. Not that any one really cares. The man who produced Whoop ’Er Up is also the producer of Let’s All Go, both theatres are owned by a single group, the librettists are one and the same and the music of both is equally bad, proceeding from an identical source. Even the stagehands work interchangeably on a strict union scale. But Mr. Jenkinson did not write Tarkington’s novel, the two books are published by firms that have not a dollar in common, and only the bookseller can preserve an evatanguayan indifference over your choice.
4
The publisher’s salesman comes to the bookseller’s lair equipped with dummies. These show the book’s exterior, its size, thickness, paper, binding and (very important) its jacket. Within the dummy are blank pages, or perhaps the first twenty pages of the book printed over and over to give the volume requisite thickness. The bookseller may read these twenty pages. If the author has got plenty of action into them the bookseller is favorably impressed. Mainly he depends for his idea of the book upon what the salesman and the publisher’s catalogue tells him. He has to. He can’t read ’em all.