CHAPTER IV
HAS PUBLISHING BECOME COMMERCIALIZED?
A Charge Fairly Met and Its Truths Admitted—Many Features of the Business in Which a Low Tone Prevails—The Literary Solicitor an Abhorrent Creature—On the Whole, However, Commercial Degradation Prevails Less with Publishers Than in Many Other Callings—The Confidence Authors Have in Them Is Their Best Asset.
Authorship and publishing—the whole business of producing contemporaneous literature—has for the moment a decided commercial squint. It would be wrong to say, as one sometimes hears it said, that it has been degraded; for it has probably not suffered as nearly a complete commercialization as the law has suffered, for instance. But that fine indifference to commercial results which was once supposed to be characteristic of the great publishers does not exist today. Perhaps it never existed except in memoirs and literary journals! But there was a less obvious effort to make money in the days of the first successful American publishing houses than there is now.
The old publishing houses put forth schoolbooks; and many a dignified literary venture was “financed” by money made from the sale of textbooks and subscription books. But now the greater part of the money made from these two special departments is made by houses that publish nothing else. The making of schoolbooks and the making of subscription books have been specialized, and almost separated from general publishing. Two great textbook houses have made large incomes; and they publish nothing but schoolbooks. These profits, which were once at the service of literature, are now withdrawn from it. The “general” publisher has to make all his profits on his “general” books. The necessity is the heavier on him, therefore, to make every book pay. This is one reason why the general publisher has to watch his ledger closely.
Another reason for greater emphasis on the financial side of literary production is the enormously increased expense of conducting a general publishing house. The mere manufacture of books is perhaps a trifle cheaper than it used to be, but every other item of expense has been increased enormously within a generation. It costs more to sell books than it ever cost before. Advertising rates have been doubled or trebled, and more advertising must be done. Even a small general publishing house must spend as much as $30,000 or $50,000 a year in general advertising. There are many houses that each spend a great deal more than this every year.
The author, too, it must be remembered, has become commercial. He demands and he receives a larger share of the gross receipts from his book than authors ever dreamed of receiving in the days of the old-time publisher. All the other expenses of selling books have increased. There was a time when publishing houses needed no travelling salesmen. Now every house of any importance has at least two. They go everywhere, with “dummies” and prospectuses of books long before they are ready for the market. Other items of “general expense” besides advertising and salesmen and ever-increasing rent, are the ever-growing demands of the trade for posters and circulars; correspondence grows more and more; more and more are special “window displays” required, for which the publisher pays. All the while, too, books are sold on long time. As a rule they are not paid for by many dealers till six months after they are manufactured.
All these modern commercial methods have added to the publisher’s expense or risk; and for these reasons his business has become more like any other manufacturing business than it once seemed to be—perhaps more than it once was. Of course there are publishers—there always were such—who look only to their ledgers as a measure of their success. These are they who have really demoralized the profession, and the whole publishing craft has suffered by their methods.
It was once a matter of honor that one publisher should respect the relation established between another publisher and a writer, as a physician respects the relation established between another physician and a patient. Three or four of the best publishing houses still live and work by this code. And they have the respect of all the book world. Authors and readers, who do not know definitely why they hold them in esteem, discern a high sense of honor and conduct in them. Character makes its way from any man who has it down a long line—everybody who touches a sterling character comes at last to feel it both in conduct and in product. The very best traditions of publishing are yet a part of the practice of the best American publishing houses, which are conducted by men of real character.