Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

by Grant M. Overton

In autobiography a truly big sale is not possible unless the narrative has the fundamental qualities we have designated as necessary in the fictional best seller. All the popular autobiographies are stories that appeal powerfully to our instinctive desires and this is the fact with such diverse revelations as those of Benjamin Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Henry Adams. The sum of the instinctive desires is always overwhelmingly in favor of normal human existences. For this reason the predetermined audience of Mr. Tarkington’s Conquest of Canaan is many times greater than that of Mr. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. A moment’s reflection will show that this is inevitable, since these instinctive desires of ours are so many resistless forces exerted simultaneously on us and combining, in a period of years, to make a single resultant force impelling us to lead normal, sane, “healthy” and wholesome lives. On such lives, lived by the vast majority of men and women everywhere, the security of every form of human society depends; indeed, the continued existence of man on the face of the earth is dependent upon them.

You may say that Rousseau, Cellini, Marie Bashkirtseff, even Franklin and Henry Adams, led existences far from normal. The answer is that we accept the stories of their lives in fact where we (or most of us) would never accept them in fiction. We know that these lives were lived; and the very circumstance that they were abnormal lives makes us more eager to know about and understand them. What most of us care for most is such a recital as Hamlin Garland’s A Son of the Middle Border. The secret of the influence of the life of Abraham Lincoln upon the American mind and the secret of the appeal made by Theodore Roosevelt, the man, to his countrymen in general during his lifetime is actually one and the same—the triumph of normal lives, lived normally, lived up to the hilt, and overshadowing almost everything else contemporary with them. Such men vindicate common lives, however humbly lived. We see, as in an apocalyptic vision, what any one of us may become; and in so far as any one of us has become so great we all of us share in his greatness.

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But perhaps the greatest element in predetermining the possible audience for a non-fiction book is its timeliness. Important, often enough, in the case of particular novels, the matter of timeliness is much more so with all other books soever. It cannot be overlooked in autobiography; The Education of Henry Adams attracted a great host of readers in 1918 and 1919 because it became accessible to them in 1918 and not in 1913 or 1929. In 1918 and 1919 the minds of men were peculiarly troubled. Especially about education. H. G. Wells was articulating the disastrous doubts that beset numbers of us, first, in Joan and Peter, with its subtitle, The Story of an Education, drawing up an indictment which, whatever its bias, distortion and unfairness yet contained a lot of terrible truth; and then, in The Undying Fire, dedicated “to all schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and every teacher in the world,” returning to the subject, but this time constructively. Yes, a large number of persons were thinking about education in 1918-19, and the ironical attitude of Henry Adams toward his own was of keenest interest to them.

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We have discussed the internal factor which makes for a big sale in books rather sketchily because, as a whole, book publishers can tell it when they see it (all that is necessary) even though it may puzzle authors who haven’t mastered it. So far as authors are concerned we believe that this factor can, in many instances, be mastered. The enterprise is not different from developing a retentive memory, or skill over an audience in public speaking; but as with both these achievements no short cut is really possible and advice and suggestion (you can’t honestly call it instruction) can go but a little way. No end of nonsense has been uttered on the subject of what it is in books that makes them sell well, and nonsense will not cease to be uttered about it while men write. What is of vastly more consequence than any effort to exploit the internal factor in best sellers is the failure to make every book published sell its best. If, in general, books sell not more than one-quarter the number of copies they should sell, an estimate to which we adhere, then the immediate and largest gain to publishers, authors and public will be in securing 100 per cent. sales.

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A word in closing about the familiar argument that the habits of our people have changed, that they no longer have time to read books, that motoring and movies have usurped the place of reading.

Intercommunication is not a luxury but a necessity. Transportation is only a means of intercommunication. As the means of intercommunication—books, newspapers, mail services, railroads, aircraft, telephones, automobiles, motion pictures—multiply the use of each and every one increases with one restriction: A new means of intercommunication paralleling but greatly improving an existing means will largely displace it—as railroads have largely superseded canals.