Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

by Grant M. Overton

3. The internal factor can make a best seller of a book with almost no help from the external factor, but cannot give it a 100 per cent. sale.

4. The external factor cannot make a big seller where the internal factor is not of the right sort; but it can always give a 100 per cent. sale.

5. The internal factor is only partly in the publisher’s control; the external factor is entirely controllable by the publisher.

There are two secrets of the best seller. One resides in the book itself, the other rests in the manner of its exploitation. One is inherent, the other is circumstantial. One is partly controllable by the publisher, the other is wholly so. Since a book possessing certain qualities in a sufficient degree will sell heavily anyway, it is human nature to hunt ceaselessly for this thing which will triumph over every sort of handicap and obstacle. But it is a lazy way to do. It is not good business. It cannot, ultimately, pay. The successful book publisher of the future is going to be the publisher who works for a 100 per cent. sale on all his books. When he gets a book with an internal factor which would make it a best seller anyway, it will simply mean that he will have to exert himself markedly less to get a 100 per cent. result. He will have such best sellers and will make large sums of money with them, but they will be incidents and not epochal events; for practically all his books will be good sellers.

5

Before we go on to a discussion of the internal factor of the best seller we want to stress once more, and constructively and suggestively, the postnatal attention it should receive. The first year and the second summer are fatal to far too many books as well as humans. And this is true despite the differences between the two. If 100,000 copies represent the 100 per cent. sale of a given volume you may declare that it makes no difference whether that sale is attained in six months or six years. From the business standpoint of a quick turnover six months is a dozen times better, you may argue; and if interest on invested money be thought of as compounding, the apparent difference in favor of the six-months’ sale is still more striking. This would perhaps be true if the author’s next book could invariably be ready at the end of the six-months’ period. Other ifs will occur to those with some knowledge of the publishing business and a moderate capacity for reflection.

Most books are wrongly advertised and inadequately advertised, and rather frequently advertised in the wrong places.

Of the current methods of advertising new fiction only one is unexceptionably good. This is the advertising which arrests the reader’s attention and baits his interest by a few vivid sentences outlining the crisis of the story, the dilemma that confronts the hero or heroine, the problem of whether the hero or heroine acted rightly; or paints in a few swift strokes some exciting episode of the action—ending with a question that will stick in the reader’s mind. Such an advertisement should always have a drawing or other illustration if possible. It should be displayed in a generous space and should be placed broadcast but with much discrimination as to where it is to appear.

A kind of advertisement somewhat allied to this, but not in use at all despite its assured selling power would consist of the simple reproduction of a photographed page of the book. The Detroit News has used such reproduced pages so effectively as illustrations that it seems strange no publisher (so far as we know) has followed suit. Striking pages, and pages containing not merely objective thrill but the flavor which makes the fascination of a particular book, can be found in most novels. The Detroit News selected a page of the highest effectiveness from so subtle a romance as Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold. This manner of advertising, telling from its complete restraint, is applicable to non-fiction. A page of a book of essays by Samuel Crothers would have to be poorly taken not to disclose, in its several hundred words, the charm and fun of his observations. Publishers of encyclopædias have long employed this “page-from-the-book” method of advertisement with the best results.

The ordinary advertisement of a book, making a few flat assertions of the book’s extraordinary merit, has become pretty hopelessly conventionalized. The punch is gone from it, we rather fear forever. In all conscience, it is psychologically defective in that it tries to coerce attention and credence instead of trying to attract, fascinate or arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not different, essentially, from the public speaker. The public speaker who aims to compel attention by mere thundering or by extraordinary assertions has no chance against the speaker who amuses, interests, or agreeably piques his audience, who stirs his auditors’ curiosity or kindles their collective imagination.