Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

by Grant M. Overton

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.

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The lesson of flexibility has been fully mastered by at least two American publishing houses. With their very large lists of new books they contrive to avoid, as much as possible, fixed publication dates. While their rivals are pinning themselves fast six months ahead, these publishers are moving largely but conditionally six and nine months ahead, and less largely but with swift certainty three months, two months, even one month from the passing moment. And they are absolutely right and profit by their rightness. For this reason: Everything that is printed has in it an element of that timeliness, that ephemerality if you like but also that widening ripple of human interest which is the unique essence of what we call “news.” This quality is present, in a perceptible amount, even in the most serious sort of printed matter. Let us take, as an example, Darwin’s Origin of Species. Oh! exclaims the reader, there surely is a book with no ephemerality about it! No? But there was an immense quantity of just that in its publication. It came at the right hour. Fifty years earlier it would have gone unnoticed. To-day it is transcended by a body of biological knowledge that Darwin knew not.

Fifty years, one way or the other, would have made a vast difference in the reception, the import, the influence of even so epochal a book as The Origin of Species. Now a little reflection will show that, in the case of lesser books, the matter of time is far more sharply important. Darwin’s book was so massive that ten or twenty years either way might not have mattered. But in such a case as John Spargo’s Bolshevism a few months may matter. In the case of Mr. Britling the month as well as the year mattered vitally. Time is everything, in the fate of many a book, even as in the fate of a magazine article, a poem, an essay, a short story. Arthur Guy Empey was on the very hour with Over the Top; but the appearance of his Tales from a Dugout a few days after the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918, was one of the minor tragedies of the war.

Therefore the publisher who can, as nearly as human and mechanical conditions permit, preserve flexibility in his publishing plans, has a very great advantage over inelastic competitors. That iron-clad arrangements at half year ahead can be avoided the methods of two of the most important American houses demonstrate. Either can get out a book on a month’s notice. More than once in a season this spells the difference between a sale of 5,000 and one of 15,000 copies—that is, between not much more than “breaking even” and making a handsome profit.

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Every book that is published requires advertising though perhaps no two books call for advertising in just the same way. One of the best American publishing houses figures certain sums for advertising—whatever form it may take—in its costs of manufacture and then the individual volumes have to take each their chances of getting, each, its proper share of the money. Other houses have similar unsatisfactory devices for providing an advertising fund. The result is too often not unlike the revolving fund with which American railways were furnished by Congress—it revolved so fast that there wasn’t enough to go round long.