“Do I look like a Jew or a Mohammedan?” I asked.
She never forgave me. Her novel had a great religious motive. It sold by the tens of thousands and most maudlin emotionalists in the land have read it. But I do not publish it. To do so, I should have had to pay the price of being “converted.” Now this lady is a crank. But it is not fair to call her books literature.
The veriest crank of all is our great scholar. It is an honor to publish the results of his scholarship (few parsnips as it butters), for the man’s work is as attractive as he is odd. He thinks himself the very soul of fairness. Yet he comes at frequent intervals wishing so to change his contract as to make publishing his books an even more expensive luxury than it was before. A contract is to him a thing to make endless experiments with. When we were once driven to desperation, one of my associates suggested that we propose half a dozen unimportant changes in it, on the theory that change—any change—was all he wanted. It was an inspired suggestion. A great scholar, a restless child. But some day (we feel) he will break over all traces, and we are all afraid of him.
But very sane and sensible men and women are most of those who succeed in winning the public favor. Some are grasping, as other men are. One, for instance, whose book had earned $7,000 in two years, demanded a prepayment of $8,000 for the next book. A compromise was made on $2,000! That was the measure of my folly, for the book is waning in its popularity and has hardly earned this prepaid royalty.
An author came to my office one day indignant because his novel was not more extensively advertised. There was the usual explanation—it would not pay. He had money to spare and he proposed to advertise it himself. He wrote the advertisements, he selected the journals in which the advertisements should appear, and he inserted them—$1,000 worth.
By some strange fate the sales of the book began just then greatly to decline. They have kept declining since, and why nobody can tell. When the public has bought a certain number of copies of a novel—of one novel it may be 1,000 copies, of another 100,000 copies—there is nothing that can be done to make it buy another 1,000 or 100,000. It seems to know when it has enough. Take more it will not. The worst “crank” that any publisher ever encountered is not an author; it is the public, unreasoning, illogical, unconvincible, stolid!
Odd persons are found in every craft. But I think that there are fewer odd ones among successful writers than among successful lawyers, for instance. And this is what one would naturally expect, but for the traditional notion that writers are unbalanced. Who else is so well balanced as the writer of good books? He must have sanity and calmness and judgment, a sense of good proportion, an appreciation of right conduct and of all human relations, else he could not make books of good balance and proportion.
Most writers have few financial dealings, and they often innocently propose impracticable things. But this is not a peculiar trait of writers. Most preachers and many women show it. I have known a successful college president, for instance, to cut a paragraph out of a proof sheet with a pair of scissors, imagining that this would cause it to be taken out by the printers.
They are appreciative, too; and they make the most interesting friends in the world. Almost all writers of books work alone. Lawyers work with clients and with associated and opposing lawyers. Even teachers have the companionship of their pupils in the work. Men of most crafts work with their fellows, and they forget how much encouragement they owe to this fellowship. A dreary task is made light by it and monotonous labor is robbed of its weariness. But the writer works alone.
Almost the first man to be taken into his confidence about his work is his publisher. If the publisher be appreciative and sympathetic and render a real service, how easily and firmly the writer is won. A peculiarly close friendship follows in many cases—in most cases, perhaps, certainly in most cases when the author’s books are successful.