A Publisher's Confession

by Unknown

That man yet has no sense of literary values, as they are usually considered. The only good quality of his style is its perfect directness and clearness. He writes blunt, plain sentences. But every one of them tells something. He does not bother himself about style, nor about literary quality. He fixes his mind on the story itself, to see that it has substance, form, action, proportion. And he worked out this new novel with these qualities in it.

It was a dime novel in praise of one of the cardinal Christian virtues—very earnest, very direct. But the persons in it were real. They not only said things, they did things; and many of the things they did were interesting. One of our salesmen was asked to read the manuscript. “It’ll sell,” said he. Our literary adviser said that it was a bald moral Sunday school play. “You could put it on the stage by cutting it here and there,” he declared. “But it has no literary quality.” Both were right. The book has sold well. It has amused and interested its tens of thousands.

The author’s next book after that was very much better. Having learned something of the art of construction he began to think of such a detail as style. He re-wrote the book to make it “smooth.” But the point is, he first paid attention to his construction and made sure that he had a story to tell.

The enormous amount of waste work done by unsuccessful novel writers is done without taking the trouble first to make sure that they have a story to tell.

Few persons have any constructive faculty. This is the sad fact that comes home at last to a man who has read novels in manuscript for many years. A publisher comes to look for construction in a novel before he looks for style or literary quality.

This confession is enough to provoke the literary journals to condemn the publishers as mere mercenary dealers in sensational books. Yet, while a book that is well constructed may not be “literature,” very few books have a serious chance to become literature unless they have good construction.

I, for one, and I know no publisher who holds a different opinion, care nothing for the judgment of the professional literary class. Their judgment of a novel, for instance, is of little value or instruction. It may be right—often it is. It may be wrong. But whether right or wrong (and there is no way that I know to determine finally whether any judgment be right or wrong) it is of no practical value. A literary judgment of a new novel cannot affect the judgment that men will form of it ten years hence. Therefore it is of no permanent value. Neither can it affect the sales of a new novel. It is therefore of no practical importance for the moment. I look upon reviews of novels as so much publicity—they have value, as they tell the public that the book is published and can be bought, and as they tell something about it which may prod the reader’s curiosity. Further than this they are of no account. Not one of the three publishers whose personal habits I know as a rule takes the trouble to read the reviews of novels of his own publishing.

Novel making, then, is an industry, and the people who make them best concern themselves very little about what is usually meant by “literary values,” and very little about their popularity. The writers who deliberately set out to write novels of great popularity have almost always missed it. The industry is an art, also, but it is not an art of mere fine writing. It is chiefly an art of construction—an art of putting things in due proportion. This assumes, of course, that the novelist has things to put.

The truth is, the delicate and difficult art of finding out just what the public cares for—the public of this year or the public of ten years hence—has not been mastered by many men, whether writers or publishers. If you find out what the great public of today wants, you are a sensationalist. If you find out what the great public of ten or twenty years hence will want, you are a maker or a publisher of literature. And the public of the future is pretty sure to want something different from the public of today.

Within six months after the publication of a popular novel the publisher of it (other publishers, too) will receive a dozen or a hundred stories that have been suggested by it. Many an author of such a manuscript will write that he has discovered the secret of the popular book’s success and that he has turned it to profit in his own effort. Such letters are singularly alike. The writers of them regard success as something won by a trick, as a game of cards might be won. These remind one, too, of the advertisements of patent medicines—except that the writers of them are sincere. They believe heartily in their discovery. Thus every very popular novel gives a great stimulus to the production of novels. “To Have and To Hold” brought cargoes of young women for colonists’ wives to hundreds of amateur story writers.