A louder complaint of commercialism has been provoked by the unseemly advertising of novels than by any other modern method of publishers. Now this is a curious and interesting thing. A man or woman writes a story (let us call it a story, though it be a mild mush of mustard, warranted to redden the faded cheeks of sickly sentimentality) which, for some reason that nobody can explain, has the same possibilities of popularity as Salvation Soap. A saponaceous publisher puts it out; he advertises it in his soapy way; people buy it—sometimes two hundred or three hundred thousand of them.
Behold! a new way has been found to write books that sell, and a new way to sell them. Hundreds of writers try the easy trick. Dozens of minor publishers see their way to fortune. But the trick cannot be imitated, and the way to fortune remains closed. It is only now and then that a novel has a big “run” by this method. The public does not see the hundreds of failures. It sees only the occasional accidental success.
There is no science, no art, no literature in the business. It is like writing popular songs: One “rag-time” tune will make its way in a month from one end of the country to the other. A hundred tune-makers try their hands at the trick—not one of their tunes goes. The same tune-maker who “scored a success” often fails the next time. There is, I think, not a single soap-novelist who has put forth a subsequent novel of as great popularity as his “record-breaker,” and several publishing houses have failed through unsuccessful efforts at the brass-band method.
This is not publishing. It is not even commercialism. It is a form of gambling. A successful advertising “dodge” makes a biscuit popular, or a whiskey, or a shoe, or a cigarette, or anything. Why not a book, then? This would be all that need be said about it but for the “literary” journals. They forthwith fall to gossiping, and keep up a chatter about “great sellers,” and bewail commercialism in literature, until we all begin to believe that the whole business of book-writing and book-publishing has been degraded. Did it ever occur to you that in the “good old days” of publishing there were no magazines that retailed the commercial and personal gossip of the craft?
As nearly as I can make out the publishing houses in the United States that are conducted as dignified institutions are conducted with as little degrading commercialism as the old houses whose history has become a part of English literature, and I believe that they are conducted with more ability. Certainly not one of them has made a colossal fortune. Certainly not one of them ever failed to recognize or to encourage a high literary purpose if it were sanely directed. Every one of them every year invests in books and authors that they know cannot yield a direct or immediate profit, and they make these investments because they feel ennobled by trying to do a service to literature.
The great difficulty is to recognize literature when it first comes in at the door, for one quality of literature is that it is not likely even to know itself. The one thing that is certain is that the critical crew and the academic faculty are sure not to recognize it at first sight. To know its royal qualities at once under strange and new garments—that is to be a great publisher, and the glory of that achievement is as great as it ever was.
CHAPTER V
HAS THE UNKNOWN AUTHOR A CHANCE?
A Popular Illusion Based on “Graustark” and “David Harum” Dispelled—Publishers Blunder More Often in Welcoming Than in Rejecting Manuscripts of the “New Man”—Guess Work Enters Largely Into the Fate of a Novel—How Publishers Judge Manuscripts and How “Reading” Is Done.