What to do? ’Tis indeed a pretty problem. If you pay Octavo & Duodecimo $2,500 you can have the C. A.’s next novel—worth several times as much as any book of tales, at the least. On the other hand, there is no certainty that the C. A. will deliver you the manuscript of a novel. He has been going to deliver it to Octavo & Duodecimo for three years. And you can’t afford to tie up $2,500 on the chance that he’ll do for you what he hasn’t done for them. Because $2,500 is, to you, a lot of money.
In the particular instance where this happened (except for details, we narrate an actual occurrence) the beginning publisher went ahead and published the book of tales, and afterward another book of tales, and let Octavo & Duodecimo keep their option on the C. A.’s next novel, if he ever writes any. The probabilities are that the C. A. will write short stories for the rest of his life rather than deliver a novel from which he will receive not one cent until $2,500 has been deducted from the royalties.
11
English authors are keenest on advance money. The English writer who will undertake to do a book without some cash in hand before putting pen to paper is a great rarity. An American publisher who wants English manuscripts and goes to London without his checkbook won’t get anywhere. A little real money will go far. It will be almost unnecessary for the publisher who has it to entrain for those country houses where English novelists drink tea and train roses. Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Wessex, &c., will go down to London. Mr. Britling will motor into town to talk about a contract. All the London clubs will be named as rendezvous. Visiting cards will reach the publisher’s hotel, signifying the advent of Mr. Percival Fotheringay of Houndsditch, Bayswater, Wapping Old Stairs, London, B. C. Ah, yes, Fotheringay; wonderful stories of Whitechapel and the East End, really! Knows the people—what?
It has to be said that advances on books seem to retard their delivery. We have in mind a famous English author (though he might as well be American, so far as this particular point is concerned) who got an advance of $500 (wasn’t it?) some years ago from Quarto & Folio—on a book of essays. Quarto & Folio have carried that title in their spring and fall catalogues of forthcoming books ever since. Spring and fall they despair afresh. Daylight saving did nothing to help them—an hour gained was a mere bagatelle in the cycles of time through which Fads and Fatalities keeps moving in a regular and always equidistant orbit. If some day the League of Nations shall ordain that the calendar be set ahead six months Quarto & Folio may get the completed manuscript of Fads and Fatalities.
American authors are much less insistent on advance payments than their cousins 3,000 miles removed. A foremost American publishing house has two inflexible rules: No advance payments and no verdict on uncompleted manuscripts. Inflexible—but it is to be suspected that though this house never bends the rule there are times when it has to break it. What won’t bend must break. There are a few authors for whom any publisher will do anything except go to jail. Probably you would make the same extensive efforts to retain your exclusive rights in a South African diamond digging which had already produced a bunch of Kohinoors.
12
There is a gentleman’s agreement among publishers, arrived at some years back, not to indulge in cutthroat competition for each other’s authors. This ethical principle, like most ethical principles now existing, is dictated quite as much by considerations of keeping a whole skin as by a sense of professional honor. There are some men in the book publishing business whose honorable standards have a respect for the other fellow’s property first among their Fourteen Points. There are others who are best controlled by a knowledge that to do so-and-so would be very unhealthy for themselves.
The agreement, like most unwritten laws, is interpreted with various shadings. Some of these are subtle and some of them are not. It is variously applied by different men in different cases, sometimes unquestionably and sometimes doubtfully. But in the main it is pretty extensively and strictly upheld, in spirit as in letter.
How far it transgresses authors’ privileges or limits authors’ opportunities would be difficult to say. In the nature of the case, any such understanding must operate to some extent to lessen the chances of an author receiving the highest possible compensation for his work. Whether this is offset by the favors and concessions, pecuniary and otherwise, made to an author by a publisher to whom he adheres, can’t be settled. The relation of author and publisher, at best, calls for, and generally elicits, striking displays of loyalty on both sides. Particularly among Americans, the most idealistic people on earth.