These are not pleasant facts. I wish that every novelist might have an increasing sale for every book he writes. They all earn more than they receive—even the bad ones whose books prosper; but the system that they brought with them deserves to die—must die, if publishing is to remain an honorable profession. They brought with them the 20 per cent. royalty, and the demand for an advertising outlay that was based on the sale of 100,000 or 200,000 copies. Only the keeper of dark secrets knows how many publishers have lost, or how large their losses have been, on “boomed” books. But any intelligent business man may take the 50 cents that the publisher receives for his $1.50 novel after paying the author’s 20 per cent. royalty, and divide it thus:
Cost of manufacture,
Cost of selling,
Office expense,
Extravagant advertising,
Profit.
If he can find anything left for profit, then he can get rich at any business. There have been novels so extravagantly advertised that the advertising cost alone amounted to 22 cents for every copy sold. The writer drove the publisher to loss; the publisher (foolishly) consented in the hope of attracting other authors to his house. If “other authors” knew that the very cost of the bait that attracted them makes the publishing house unsound, they would not long be fooled.
Thus it comes about, in this strange and fascinating world of writing and making and selling books, that one period of “whooping up” novels is ending. Half the novels advertised during the past few years in big medicine style did not pay the publishers; and any conservative publisher can tell you which half they are.
The manufacturing novelist has always been with us. But he used to be an humble practitioner of the craft whose “output” was sold for ten cents a volume. He always will be with us, and his product will sell, some at ten cents a volume, some at $1.50. But the time seems about to pass when he can disturb the publishing situation. For the publisher has to accept his methods when he accepts his work; and his methods do not pay either in dignity, permanency, or cash. If any of these be lacking—and in proportion as they are lacking—the results will fall short of the ideal. The results to be hoped for are money, but not money only, but also a watchful care by the publisher over his author’s reputation and growth, and a cumulative influence for his books.
THE INCOME OF AUTHORS
There are, perhaps, a dozen American novelists who have large incomes from their work; there are many more who have comfortable incomes; but there is none whose income is as large as the writers of gossip for the literary journals would have us believe. It has been said that Harper’s Magazine pays Mrs. Humphry Ward $15,000 for the serial right of each of her stories and twenty per cent. royalty. Miss Johnston must have made from $60,000 to $70,000 from royalties on “To Have and to Hold,” for any publisher can calculate it.
But along with these great facts let us humbly remember that Mr. Carnegie received $300,000,000 for all his steel mills, good will, etc.; for the authors that I have named are the “millionaires” of the craft. I wish there were more. But the diligent writers of most good fiction, hard as they have ground the publishers in the rise of royalties, are yet nearer to Grub street than they are to Skibo Castle.
The truth is—but it would be a difficult task to reduce such a truth to practice—that the public gets its good new novels too cheap. There is not a large enough margin of profit for author, publisher and bookseller in a new book that is meant to be sold for $1.50 and that is often sold for $1.08. The business of bookmaking and bookselling is underpaid. There is not a publisher in the United States who is today making any large sum of money on his “general trade.” Money is made on educational books, on subscription books, on magazines. But publishing, as publishing, is the least profitable of all the professions, except preaching and teaching, to each of which it is a sort of cousin.