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A Publisher’s Confession
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§
Even when hurriedly written, as this facsimile
manuscript page from his article on “What the
World’s Work is Trying To do” obviously was,
“copy” from the pen of the late Walter H. Page
was so unfailingly legible and accurate as to its
grammar, spelling, and punctuation, that it went
straight to the typesetting machines precisely as
written without necessitating the usual ministra-
tions of the “copy editor.”
• Aſ
3 & 9, j, l, ** z a - {` gº t
Publisher'ſ Confession
By €/ .
//a/zer H. Page *
&
* & Jº 9
With an Introduction by
F. W. Doubleday
N E W E D I T' I O N
Garden City New York
T}oubleday, Page & Company
Y923


COPYRIGHT, 1905, IQI2, I923, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
copyRIGHT, 1907, BY HoughTon, MIFFLIN AND company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
There is expressed in these chapters
so much that is practical and of interest
to those engaged in the various branches
of authorship, book-making and book-
selling that the present publishers have
availed themselves of the permission of
the Boston Transcript, in which they
originally appeared, to gather them to-
gether in book form.
NEW YORK, March, Igos.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE RUINOUS POLICY OF LARGE ROYAL-
TIES . te & ſº e
II WHY “BAD " Novels SUCCEED AND
“GOOD " ONES FAIL . e *
III ARE AUTHORS AN IRRITABLE TRIBE 2
IV HAS PUBLISHING BECOME COMMERCIAL-
IZED 2 . g e º &
V HAS THE UNKNOWN AUTHOR A CHANCE 2
VI THE PRINTER WHO ISSUES BOOKS AT THE
AUTHOR’s EXPENSE .
VII THE ADVERTISING OF BOOKS STILL EX-
PERIMENTAL ſº e tº o
VIII THE STORY OF A BOOK FROM AUTHOR
TO READER e ſe tº e e
IX THE LIMITS OF THE BOOK MARKET
PLAIN WORDS TO AUTHORS AND PUBLISH-
ERS e e &
ON EDITORSHIP, an article which appeared
in the World's Work in January, IQI3,
under the title, “What the World’s Work
is Trying To Do” . . e & º
ON WRITING, an article which appeared in
the Atlantic Monthly's 50th Anniversary
Number, November, Igo7, under the title,
“The Writer and the University” .
PAGE,
27
45
6I
79
99
. II5
I31
I47
. I '79
I99
INTRODUCTION TO
NEW EDITION
One of the extraordinary things about
Mr. Page's letters and editorial writings
was his sense for what the future held—
a vision which amounted almost to the
gift of prophecy. This quality has struck
every reader of the recently published
LIFE AND LETTERS.
Here in this book, the larger part
written originally in the form of letters
for the Boston Transcript, we meet the
same far-seeing quality. In my close
and almost daily association with him,
dating back to I898, all the topics in
this book were matters of endless talk.
Even then he not only looked forward
to conditions which exist to-day in pub-
lishing, but had visions of publishing as
ix
X INTRODUCTION
it will exist many years hence. He fore-
cast, for example, the widened demand
for serious books, some of which are now
distributed in numbers that would have
made a novel successful two decades
ago. He anticipated the vast increase
in selling facilities, which have already
doubled and will doubtless continue to
grow until books are as easily accessible
to the public as groceries or clothes.
His acceptance of Mr. Wilson's invi-
tation to become the American Ambas-
sador to Great Britain necessarily inter-
rupted the close intimacy with his old
associates and the affairs which had en-
grossed him for SO many years; for
no man, I believe, ever enjoyed his work
more, and he always looked forward to
taking up his editorial labors again when
his term expired.
During the years of his absence he
never lost interest in his calling; his let-
ters always called for news of our pub-
lishing affairs, and they were among the
INTRODUCTION xi
most interesting letters he wrote—scores
of them composed during days and nights
of greatest stress, always in his own hand,
always balanced, calm, and quaintly
humorous. We who were his old inti-
mates felt that they were something
more than 1etters—they were the ex-
pressions of his thoughtful philosophy
worked out with the pen as he was ac-
customed to think out public matters
in the editorials which he wrote for the
World's Work for nearly fifteen years.
Readers of those editorials may re-
member kindliness and Optimism as their
dominant qualities. A phrase that we
often chaffed him about, he used as
the beginning of many editorials: “the
cheerful fact is ” Then invariably
followed the bright side of a sombre
subject. He never, I believe, wrote an
editorial which failed to indicate the
bright side.
This leads me to speak of another
quality which he had beyond any man
xii INTRODUCTION
I ever knew: a strong interest in every
person with whom he came in contact,
if the new acquaintance was not abso-
lutely and hopelessly dull. When a
stranger came into his office, he was wel-
comed with facial expression and man-
ner that seemed to say: “I wonder
what you can tell me of interest.” No.
matter how busy or pressed he might
be, I never knew him to show it in his
actions. He was ever courteous, quick,
and interested. Perhaps that was to a
great extent the reason he gained such
widespread affection in England.
The re-publication of this book is
worth while because it is full of sound
publishing philosophy. The ideas and
principles here set forth, his old associ-
ates will strive to carry on, and to those
who were his intimates these pages are
of great significance and inspiration.
F. N. DOUBLEDAY.
The Ruinous Policy of Large
Royalties
A Publisher's Confession
CHAPTER I
THE RUINOUS POLICY OF LARGE
ROYALTIES
How it Operates to the Disadvantage of Both Au-
thor and Publisher—The Actual Facts and Fig-
wres—Authors' Earnings Greatly Exaggerated
by the Press—Books Sell Too Cheaply—What
a Fair Price for All Concerned Would Be.
The author of a very popular book,
who has written another that will be as
popular, wishes me to publish it, so he
is kind enough to say; and he came to
see me and asked on what terms I
would bring it out. In these strenuous
times he can dictate his own terms to
his publisher; and I happened to know
that two houses had made him offers.
3
4. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
I confess, since I am old-fashioned,
that this method of an author shocks
me. If he does not openly hawk his
book and his reputation, he at least
tempts one publisher to bid against
another, and thus invites the publisher
to regard it as a mere commodity. But
I suppressed my dislike of the method
and went straight about the business of
getting the book, for I should like to
have it.
“I will give you,” I said, “twenty per
cent. royalty, and I will pay you $5,000
on the day of publication.”
The words had not fallen from my
nouth before I wished to recall them,
for the publishing of books cannot be
successfully done on these terms. There
are only two or three books a year that
can pay SO much.
“I will consider it,” said he.
Abject as I was, I recovered myself
far enough to say: “No, the offer is
made for acceptance now or never—
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 5
before this conversation ends. I cannot
1<eep it open.”
“My dear sir,” I went on, for I was
regaining something of my normal cour-
age, “do you know what twenty per
cent. royalty on a $1.5o book means?
You receive thirty cents for every copy
sold. My net profit is about four or five
cents a copy, if I manufacture it well
and advertise it generously; and I sup-
ply the money in advance. I make an
advance to you; I pay the papermaker
in advance of my collections, the printer
—everybody; and I wait from ninety to
one hundred and twenty days after the
book is sold to get my money. My
profit is so small that it may vanish and
pecome a loss by any misadventure,
such as too much advertising, the print-
ing of too large an edition, or the loss of
an account with a failed bookdealer. I
have no margin as an insurance against
accidents or untoward events. I am
doing business with you on an unfairly
6 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
generous basis. I am paying you all the
money that the book can earn—perhaps
more than it can earn—for the pleasure
of having you on my list. If I make
money, I must make it on books for
which I pay a smaller royalty.”
“But I can get twenty per cent. from
almost any other publisher,” he replied,
truthfully. “Why should I consider
less from you?”
I could not answer him except by
saying:
“Yes, I am not blaming you—not
quite; but there is a grave fault in the
system that has brought about this gen-
eral result. You may have forgotten
that this high royalty is a direct tempta-
tion to a publisher to skimp his adver-
tising. You expect generous advertis-
ing of the book. Well, I can never sign
an order for an advertisement of it with-
out recalling the very narrow margin of
profit that I have. An order for $500
worth of advertising will take as much
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 7
net profit as I can make on several thou-
sand copies.
“Again, when I come to manufacture
the book, I cannot help recalling that
gilt letters on the cover will increase the
cost by one cent or two cents a copy.
You tempt me to do all my work in the
cheapest possible way.”
Well, we are good friends, this writer
and I, and we signed the contract. He
is to receive a royalty of twenty per
cent., and a payment on his royalty
account of $5,000 on the day of publi-
cation.
When, therefore, I had the pleasure of
receiving the friends of another author,
who told me that he would give me the
book for twenty per cent. royalty
($5,000 cash on publication) if I cared to
read it, I replied, “No.”
No MONEY ON THAT BASIS
I had recovered. I said: “I cannot
make money on that basis. Neither
8 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
can other legitimate and conscientious
publishers, who build their business to
last. I will let novels alone, if I must.
I will do a small business—but sounder.
If that is your condition, do not leave
the book. I will pay you a sliding scale
of royalties: I cannot give you twenty
per cent.”
And he went away. I had just as lief
another publisher lost money on the
book as to lose it myself. True, the
public, the reading public and the writ-
ing public, will regard the success of the
book (if it succeed) as evidence of a rival
publisher's ability and enterprise. He
will win temporary reputation. He will
seem to be in the “swim” of success. He
will publish flaming advertisements, in
the hope of obtaining other successful
authors; and he will attract them, for
much book advertising is done not with
the hope of selling the book, but chiefly
to impress writers with the publisher's
energy and generosity. But there's no
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 9
profit and great risk in business con-
ducted in this way. ...”
There is positive danger, in fact.
And I owe it to myself and to all the
men and women whose books I publish
to see to it first of all that my own busi-
ness is sound, and is kept sound. In no
Other way can I discharge my obliga-
tions to them and keep my publishing
house on its proper level instead of on
the level of a mere business shop.
The rise of royalties paid to popular
authors is the most important recent
fact in the publishing world. It has
not been many years since ten per cent.
was the almost universal rule; and a ten
per cent. royalty on a book that sells
only reasonably well is a fair bargain
between publisher and author. If the
publisher do his work well—make the
book well, advertise it well, keep a well-
ordered and well-managed and energetic
house—this division of the profits is a
fair division—except in the case of a
Io A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
book that has a phenomenally large
sale. Then he can afford to pay more.
Unless a book has a pretty good sale, it
will not leave a profit after paying more
than a ten per cent. royalty.
Figure it for yourself. The retail
price of a novel is $1.50.* The retail
bookseller buys it for about ninety
cents. The wholesale bookseller buys it
from the publisher for about eighty
cents. This eighty cents must pay the
cost of manufacturing the book; of sell-
ing it; of advertising it; must pay its
share towards the cost of keeping the
publisher's establishment going—and
this is a large and increasing cost; it
must pay the author; and it must leave
the publisher himself some small profit.
Now, if out of this eighty cents which
must be divided for so many purposes,
the author receives a royalty of twenty
per cent. (thirty cents a copy), there is
left, of course, only fifty cents to pay all
the other items. No other half-dollar
*Prices have risen since Mr. Page wrote his “Confession,”
but otherwise conditions are little changed.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION II
in this world has to suffer such careful
and continuous division | I have met
a good many authors who have never
realized that a ten per cent. royalty
means nearly twenty per cent. On what
the publisher actually sells the book for,
and that a twenty per cent. royalty is
nearly forty per cent. On the actual
wholesale price.
There are several things of greater
importance in the long run to an author
than a large royalty. One of them is the
unstinted loyalty of his publisher. His
publisher must have a chance to be gen-
erous to his book. He ought not to feel
that he must seek a cheap printer, that
he must buy cheap paper, that he must
make a cheap cover, that he must too
closely watch his advertising account.
A publisher has no chance to be gener-
ous to a book when he can make a profit
on it only at the expense of its proper
manufacture. The grasping author is,
therefore, doing damage to his own book
12 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
by leaving the publisher no margin of
profit.
THE STABILITY OF THE PUBLISHER
There is still another thing that an
author should set above his immediate
income from any particular book; and
that is the stability of his publisher.
The publisher is a business man (he has
need to be a business man of the highest
type), but he is also the guardian of the
author's property. If his institution be
not sound and be not kept sound, the loss
to the author in money and in standing
may be very great. The embarrassment
or failure of a publishing firm now and
then causes much gossip; for a publishing
house is a center of publicity. But no-
body outside the profession knows what
practical trouble and confusion and loss
every failure or financial embarrassment
costs the writing world. The normal
sale of many books is stopped. The
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 13
authors lose in the end, and they lose
heavily.
Every publisher who appreciates his
profession tries to make his house per-
manent, with an eye not only to his own
profit, but also to the service that he
may do to the writers on his list. If it is
of the very essence of banking that a
bank shall be in sound condition and
shall have the confidence of the com-
munity, it is even more true that a pub-
lishing house should be sound to the
core and should deserve financial con-
fidence. The publisher must do his
business with reference to a permanent
success. But if he must do business on
the basis of a twenty per cent. royalty,
he takes risks that he has no right to
take. It deserves to be called “wild-
cat” publishing.
I am, therefore, not making a plea, by
this confession, for a larger profit to the
publisher in any narrow or personal
sense. Every successful publisher—
I4 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
really successful, mind you—could make
more money by going into some other
business. I think that there is not a
man of them who could not greatly in-
crease his income by giving the same
energy and ability to the management
of a bank, or of some sort of industrial
enterprise. Such men as Mr. Charles
Scribner, Mr. George Brett, Mr. George
H. Mifflin, could earn very much larger
returns by their ability in banks, rail-
roads or manufacturing, than any one
of them earns as a publisher; for they
are men of conspicuous ability.
It is, therefore, not as a matter of
mere gain to the publisher that it is im-
portant to have the business on a sound
and fair basis; but it is for the sake of
the business itself and for the sake of the
writers themselves.
AN AUTHOR's BLUNDER
Here is a true tale of a writer of good
fiction: He made a most promising
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 15
start. His first book, in fact, caused him
to be sought by several publishers, who
do not hesitate to solicit clients—a
practice that other dignified professions
discourage. The publisher of his first
book gave him a ten per cent. royalty.
For his second book he demanded more.
A rival publisher offered him twenty
per cent. The second book also suc-
ceeded. But the author in the mean-
time had heard the noise of other
publishing houses. He had made the
acquaintance of another writer whose
loooks (which were better than his) had
sold in much greater quantities. Of
course, the difference in sales could not
be accounted for by the literary quali-
ties of the books—his friend had a bet-
ter publisher than he—so he concluded.
His third book, therefore, was placed
with a third publisher, because he
would advertise more loudly. Well,
that publisher failed. His failure, by
the way, the report of the receivers
I6 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
showed, was caused by spending too
much in unproductive advertising.
Here our author stood, then, with
three books, each issued by a different
publishing house. What should he do
with his fourth book? He came back to
his second publisher, who had, natur-
ally, lost some of his enthusiasm for such
an author. To cut the story short, that
man now has books on five publishers'
lists. Not one of the publishers counts
him as his particular client. In a sense
his books are all neglected. One has
never helped another. He has got no
cumulative result of his work. He has
become a sort of stray dog in the pub-
lishing world. He has cordial relations
with no publisher; and his literary prod-
uct has really declined. He scattered
his influence, and he is paying the
natural penalty.
The moral of this true story (and I
could tell half a dozen more like it) is
that a publisher is a business man, but
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 17
not a mere business man. He must be
something more. He is a professional
man also. He can do his best service
only for those authors who inspire his
loyalty, who enable him to make his
publishing house permanent, and who
leave him enough margin of profit to
permit him to make books of which he
can be proud.
The present fashion of a part of the
writing world—to squeeze the last cent
out of a book and to treat the publisher
as a mere manufacturer and “boomer”
—cannot last. It has already passed
its high period and is on the decline. A
self-respecting worm would have turned
long ago. Even the publisher is now
beginning to turn.
Better still, the authors whose books
will be remembered longest have not
caught the fashion of demanding every-
thing. It was that passing school of
“booms” and bellowing that did it all
—the writers of romances for kitchen
18 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
maids and shop girls, whose measure of
book values was by dollars only. Such
fashions always pass. For, if novel writ-
ing be so profitable an industry, a large
number of persons naturally take it up;
and they ruin the market by overstock-
ing it.
THE “BOOMED ' BOOK PASSING
Fast passing, then—praise God—is
the “boomed” book, which, having no
merit, could once be sold by sheer adver-
tising, in several editions of Ioo,000 each.
I have made a list of the writers of books
that during the last five or six years
have sold in enormous editions; and
every one of these writers, but two, has
lived to see his (or her) latest book sell
far below its predecessors. One man,
for instance, wrote a first book which
sold more than 200,000 copies. His
publishers announce only the sixtieth
thousand of his latest novel, though it
has now nearly run its course.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 19
These are not pleasant facts. I wish
that every novelist might have an in-
creasing 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 pub-
lishing is to remain an honorable pro-
fession. They brought with them the
20 per cent. royalty, and the demand for
an advertising outlay that was based on
the sale of Ioo,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 $1.5o
novel after paying the author's 20 per
cent. royalty, and divide it thus:
Cost of manufacture,
Cost of selling,
Office expense,
Extravagant advertising,
20 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
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 pub-
lisher 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 end-
ing. 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 al-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 21
ways 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 $1.5o. But the time
seems about to pass when he can disturb
the publishing situation. For the pub-
lisher 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 cumula-
tive 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
22 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
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,ooo,000 for all his steel
mills, good will, etc.; for the authors
that I have named are the “million-
aires” 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 diffi-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 23
cult task to reduce such a truth to prac-
tice—that the public gets its good new
novels too cheap. There is not a large
enough margin of profit for author, pub-
lisher 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 under-
paid. 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 maga-
zines. 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.
Why “Bad” Novels Succeed and
“Good * Ones Fail
CHAPTER II
WHY “BAD'' NOVELS SUCCEED AND
“GOOD " ONES FAIL
The First May Have No Literary Quality, but
They Have a Genuine Quality—Power of Con-
struction the Main Thing in Story-Writing—
Literary Reviews of Novels are Regarded as of
Little Value by Publishers—Odd Incidents and
Facts in the Business.
A report on the manuscript of a novel
made by a “literary” reader not long
ago ended with this sentence: “This
novel is bad enough to succeed.” He
expressed the feeling of a great many
literary persons that fiction often suc-
ceeds in the market in proportion to its
“badness.” And surely there are many
instances to support such a contention
from the “Lamplighter” to “When
Knighthood Was in Flower.” But the
27
28 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
“literary” view of fiction is no more
trustworthy than the “1iterary” view
of politics or of commerce; for it con-
cerns itself more with technique than
with substance.
It is a hard world in which “Knight-
hood,” “Quincy Adams Sawyer” and
“Graustark,” to say nothing of “The
One Woman,” “Alice of Old Vincennes”
and a hundred more “poor’’ books
make fortunes, while Mr. Howells and
Mr. James write to unresponsive mar-
Rets and even Mr. Kipling cannot find
so many readers for a new novel as Mr.
Bacheller of “Eben Holden.” It seems
a hard world to the professional literary
folk; but the professional literary folk
would find it a hard world anyhow; for
it has a way of preferring substance to
color. And novels, after all, have less
to do with literature than they have to
do with popular amusement.
Heaven forbid that I should make de-
fence of bad writing, or of sensational
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 29
literature, or of bad taste, or of any
other thing that is below grade; but, as
between the professional literary class,
and the great mass of men who buy
“Eben Holdens” and “David Harums”
the mass of men have the better case.
Why does a man read a novel? Let
us come down to common sense. He
seeks one of two things—either a real
insight into human nature (he got that
in “David Harum”) or he seeks diver-
sion, entertainment. A writer's style
is only a part of the machinery of pre-
sentation. The main thing is that he has
something to present. Even though I
am a publisher I think that I know
something about literary quality and
literary values, and it must be owned at
once that hardly one in a dozen of the
very popular recent novels has any
literary quality. But every one of
them, nevertheless, has some very gen-
uine and positive quality. They were
not written by any trick, and their pop-
30 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ularity does not make the road to suc-
cess any easier to find. They have
qualities that are rarer than the merely
literary quality. Mr. Henry James's
novels have what is usually called the
literary quality. Yet half the publish-
ing houses in the United States have
lost money on them, while the pub-
lisher and the author of “Richard
Carvel” and “The Crisis” and “The
Crossing” made a handsome sum of
money from these books, which have no
literary style.
This does not mean a whining confes-
sion that “literature” does not pay.
For my part I cannot weep because
Mr. James and Mr. Howells do not
find many readers for their latest books.
But, while Mr. Churchill is not a
great writer (since he has no style),
and while few persons of the next gen-
eration of readers (whereby I mean
those of year after next) are going to
take the trouble to read his books, yet,
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 31
for all that, they have a quality that
is very rare in this world, a quality
that their imitators never seem to see.
They have construction. They have
action. They have substance. A series
of events come to pass in a certain
order, by a well-laid plan. Each book
makes its appeal as a thing built, fin-
ished, shapen, if not well-proportioned,
substantial. It is a real structure—
not a mere pile of bricks and lumber.
The bricks and lumber that went into
them are not as fine nor as good
as somebody else may have in his brick-
yard and his lumber pile. But they
are put together. A well shapen
house of bad bricks is a more pleasing
thing than any mere brick-pile what-
eVer.
I recall this interesting experience of a
man whose novels are now fast winning
great popular favor. He sat down and
wrote a story and sent it to a publisher.
It was declined. He sent it to another.
32 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
Again it was declined. Then he brought
it to me. (He told me of the preceding
declinations a year later). I told him
frankly that it lacked construction. I
supposed that that was the last that I
should see of him. But about a year
later he came again with another manu-
script and with this interesting story.
“Like a fool,” said he, “I simply
blazed away and wrote what I supposed
was a novel. Nobody would publish it.
When you said that it lacked construc-
tion, I went to work to study the con-
struction of a novel. I analyzed twenty.
I found a dozen books on the subject
which gave me some help. But there
are few books that do help. I con-
structed a sort of method of my own.”
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
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 33
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 manu-
script. “It’11 sell,” said he. Our liter-
ary 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
34 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
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 construc-
tion 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 un-
less they have good construction.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 3.5
I, for one, and I know no publisher
who holds a different opinion, care noth-
ing 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 judg-
ment 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 prac-
tical importance for the moment. I look
upon reviews of novels as so much pub-
licity—they have value, as they tell the
public that the book is published and
can be bought, and as they tell some-
thing about it which may prod the read-
er's curiosity. Further than this they
are of no account. Not one of the three
36 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
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 con-
cern 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 writ-
ers or publishers. If you find out what
the great public of today wants, you are
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 37
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 publica-
tion 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 ad-
vertisements of patent medicines—ex-
cept that the writers of them are sincere.
They believe heartily in their discovery.
Thus every very popular novel gives a
38 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
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.
But stranger than the popularity of
very popular novels, or than the utter
failure of merely “literary” novels, is
the moderate success of a certain kind of
commonplace stories. I know a woman
of domestic tastes who every two years
turns off a quiet story. She has now
written a dozen or more. They are never
advertised. But they are well printed
and put forth by one of our best pub-
lishers. The “literary” world pays no
heed to her. Her books are not even
reviewed in the best journals. They lack
distinction. But every one is sure to
sell from ten to fifteen thousand copies.
No amount of advertising, no amount of
noise could increase the number of read-
ers to twenty-five thousand; and there
is no way to prevent a sale of from ten
A PUB, ISHER'S CONFESSION 39
to fifteen thousand copies. Why this is
so is one of the most baffling problems of
psychology. But it is the rule. Authors
of novels are known and rated among
publishers as ten thousand, or twenty-
five thousand, or fifty thousand, or One
hundred thousand writers. Book after
book reaches a certain level of popular-
ity and—stops. Mr. Marion Crawford,
Mr. Hopkinson Smith, Miss Wilkins—
all these have their more or less con-
stant levels.
The lay world has no idea of the num-
ber of novels that fail. There are one-
book authors all over the country. The
publishers’ hope always is that a new
writer who makes a pretty good novel
will do better next time. Thus the first
book is accepted for the sake of the next
one. The first fails, and the second is
not wanted. There are dozens and
dozens of such cases every year. The
public doesn't know it, for the very
abyss of oblivion is the place where a
4o A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
dead novel falls. Nobody knows it—
that is the tragedy—but the publishers
and the author.
A case came to light a little while ago
of a man who had years ago written
novels that failed. He had been forgot-
ten. But he took a new start. Yet he
feared that his first failures would damn
him with the publishers. He took
another name, therefore. Not even his
publishers knew who he really was. He
succeeded and he concealed his identity
until he died. -
The publisher's loss on an unsuccess-
ful novel may be little or big. All pub-
lishers lose much on unsuccessful ven-
tures in fiction, chiefly on young authors
who are supposed to have a future, or on
old authors who have a “literary” repu-
tation and have reached that ghostly
period of real decline when they walk in
dreams from one publishing house to
another. -
But there is generally a reason for
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 41
success or for failure. The trouble is
that the reason often does not appear
soon enough. The chief reason for the
success of a novel is the commonplace
one that it contains a story. It may
be told ill or it may be told well, but
there is a story. And the chief reason
for failure is the lack of a story. A novel
may be ever so well written, if it have
no story, the public will not care for it.
I wonder if there be any light in this
very obvious discovery. Simple as it
seems, it costs every publishing house
a pretty penny every year to find it out;
and as soon as we find it out about one
writer we forget it about another! It is
a great truth that does not remain dis-
covered.
Are Authors an Irritable Tribe tº
CHAPTER III
ARE AUTHORS AN IRRITABLE TRIBEP
An Emphatic Answer in the Negative—They Are
Gentlemen and Ladies and Treat Their Pub-
lisher with Courtesy—Bonds of Friendship
Thus Formed That Endure—Some Amusing
and Nettling Exceptions—Cranks Among the
Scholars—The Inconstant Author Who Is Al-
ways Changing Publishers—Why a Publishing
Trust Is Impossible.
The old and persistent notion that the
writers of books are an irritable tribe,
hard to deal with, and manageable only
by flattery—if it was ever true, is not
true now. During an experience of a
good many years I have suffered a dis-
courtesy from only two. Both these
were “philosophers”—not even poets,
nor novelists. They wrote books that
the years have proved are dull; and,
45
46 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
when it became my duty to disappoint
them, although I hope I did it courte-
ously, they wrote ill-tempered letters
The hundreds of other writers of all sorts
that I have had the pleasure to deal with
have conducted themselves as men and
women of common sense, and most of
them are men and women of very un-
usual attractiveness. I doubt whether a
man of any other calling has the privi-
lege of dealing with persons of such
graciousness and of such consideration.
But the women who write require
more attention than the men. Their
imaginations are more easily excited by
the hope of success, and few of them
have had business experience. They
want to be fair and appreciate frank
dealing. Yet they like to have every-
thing explained in great detail.
One woman, now one of our most
successful novelists—successful both as
a writer of excellent books and as an
earner of a good income—was kind
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 47
enough to seek my advice about one of
her early novels. It was a book that she
ought not to have written; the subject
was badly chosen. Ifrankly told her so.
The whole reading world has told her so
since. But naturally she did not agree
with me. She took the book to another
publisher. Two years passed. She had
a second novel ready. This was one of
the best American stories of a decade.
To my great gratification I received a
letter from her one day asking if I cared
to read it. Of course I said yes.
Then came another telling how she
had never changed her opinion of her
former book—not a jot—I must under-
stand that thoroughly. If that were
clearly understood she went on to say
she would like to have me publish the
Tiew book on two conditions: (1) That
I should myself read it immediately and
say frankly what I thought of it, and (2)
that I should pay her a royalty large
enough to repair her wounded feelings
48 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
about the former book. Subsequently
she added another condition—
“You may publish it,” she said, “if
you heartily believe in the book.”
Very shrewdly said—that “heartily
believe in the book.” For the secret of
good publishing lies there. There are
Some books that a publisher may suc-
ceed with without believing in them—a
dictionary or a slapdash novel, for ex-
amples. But a book that has any ster-
ling quality—a real book—ought never
to have the imprint of a publisher who is
not really a sharer of its fortunes, a true
partner with the author. For only with
such a book can he do his best.
I did believe in this book. As soon as
it was in type I required every man in
my office who had to do with it to read
it—the writer of “literary notes,” the
salesman and even the shipping clerk.
When the author next called Iintroduced
to her all these. They showed their
enthusiasm. She was convinced. The
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 49
book succeeded in the market almost
beyond her expectations. It is a good
book. Everyone of us believes in it and
believes in her.
She is not a crank, “but only a wo-
man.” We have our reward in her
friendship and she is generous enough to
think that we have done her some ser-
vice. We esteem it a high privilege to be
her publishers.
But God save me from another wo–
man who has won a conspicuous success
in the market. The first question she
ever asked me was:
“Are you a Christian?”
“Do I look like a Jew or a Mohamme-
dan?” 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
50 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
a crank. But it is not fair to call her
loooks literature.
The veriest crank of all is our great
scholar. It is an honor to publish the re-
sults of his scholarship (few parsnips as
it butters), for the man’s work is as at-
tractive 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 publish-
ing his books an even more expensive
luxury than it was before. A contract
is to him a thing to make endless ex-
periments with. When we were once
driven to desperation, one of my asso-
ciates suggested that we propose half a
dozen unimportant changes in it, on the
theory that change—any change—was
a11 he wanted. It was an inspired sug-
gestion. A great scholar, a restless
child. But some day (we feel) he will
break over all traces, and we are allafraid
of him.
But very sane and sensible men and
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 51
women are most of those who succeed
in winning the public favor. Some are
grasping, as other men are. One, for in-
stance, whose book had earned $7,000 in
two years, demanded a prepayment of
$8,000 for the next book. A compro-
mise 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 advertise-
ments 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
52 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
bought a certain number of copies of a
novel—of One novel it may be 1,000
copies, of another Ioo,ooo copies—there
is nothing that can be done to make
it buy another I,000 or Ioo,ooo. It
seems to know when it has enough.
Take more it will not. The worst
“crank” that any publisher ever en-
countered is not an author; it is the
public, unreasoning, illogical, uncon-
vincible, 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 writ-
ers 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.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 53
Most writers have few financial deal-
ings, and they often innocently pro-
pose impracticable things. But this is
not a peculiar trait of writers. Most
preachers and many women show it. I
have known a successful college presi-
dent, for instance, to cut a paragraph
out of a proof sheet with a pair of scis-
sors, 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
54 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
his confidence about his work is his pub-
lisher. If the publisher be appreciative
and sympathetic and render a real ser-
vice, how easily and firmly the writer is
won. A peculiarly close friendship fol-
lows in many cases—in most cases, per-
haps, certainly in most cases when the
author's books are successful.
And this is why a great publishing
trust, or “merger” is impossible. The
successful publisher sustains a relation
to the successful author that is not easily
transferable. It is a personal relation.
A great corporation cannot take a real
publisher's place in his attitude to the
authors he serves.
This is the reason, too, why the
“authors' agents” seldom succeed in
raising the hopes of unsuccessful writ-
ers. As soon as a writer and a publisher
have come into a personal relation that
is naturally profitable and pleasant, a
“go-between” has no place. There is
no legitimate function for him.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 55
Writers are as constant in their rela-
tions as other men and women. As they
acquire experience, they become more
constant. Every one for himself works
his way to this conclusion—once having
an appreciative and successful publisher,
it is better to hold to him. And the
strong friendships that grow out of this
relation are among the most precious
gains to each.
One publisher said to another the
other day: “I see by your announce-
ments that one of my authors has gone
to you—you are welcome.”
“Yes,” was the reply, “I have in al-
most every instance made a mistake
when I have taken in a dissatisfied
writer—one cannot make lasting friends
with them.”
Every great publishing house has been
built on the strong friendships between
writers and publishers. There is, in fact,
no other sound basis to build on; for the
publisher cannot do his highest duty to
56 A PUBLISHER's conFESSION
any author whose work he does not ap-
preciate, and with whom he is not in
sympathy. Now, when a man has an
appreciation of your work and sym-
pathy for it, he wins you. This is the
simplest of all psychological laws—the
simplest of all laws of friendship and one
of the soundest.
Those who know the personal history
of the publishing houses that in recent
years have failed or met embarrass-
ments know that, in most cases, one
cause of decline was the drawing apart
of publishers and authors. When auth-
ors begin to regard their publishers as
mere business agents, and publishers to
regard authors as mere “literary men”
with whom they have only business
relations, the beginning of a decline has
CO11162.
... I recall as one of the pleasantest days
of my life the day on which I accepted a
pook by an author I had never before
seen. So pleasant was our correspond-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 57
ence that I took the first occasion I
could to go nearly a thousand miles to
see him. In his own house we talked
about his literary plans, and I spent a
day always to be remembered. Our
friendship began then. Of course I was
interested in his work—you cannot long
feign an interest that you do not feel.
This friendship has lasted now long
enough to make it very much more se-
cure a bond than any merely commer-
cial service could have become.
Every publisher's experience is the
same—if he be a real publisher and will
long remain a real publisher. Else he
would be only a printer and a salesman,
and mere printers and salesmen have
not often built publishing houses. For
publishing houses have this distinction
Over most other commercial institutions
—they rest on the friendship of the most
interesting persons in the world, the
writers of good books.
The more formal cultivation of
58 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
friendly relations such as the famous
dinners that some publishers used regu-
larly to give to writers has gone out of
fashion. There are yet a few set dinners
in the routine of several American pub-
lishing houses. But every true publisher
knows the authors of his books—knows
them as his friends; and the tradition of
irritability is false. It is usually the un-
successful who are irritable, whether
they be authors or not.
Has Publishing Become Commer-
cialized P
CHAPTER IV
HAS PUBLISHING BECOME COMMER-
CIALIZED P
A Charge Fairly Met and Its Truths Admitted—
Many Features of the Business in Which a Low
Tone Prevails—The Literary Solicitor an Ab-
horrent 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 contem-
poraneous literature—has for the mo-
ment a decided commercial squint. It
would be wrong to say, as one some-
times hears it said, that it has been de-
graded; for it has probably not suffered
as nearly a complete commercialization
as the law has suffered, for instance.
But that fine indifference to commercial
6I
62 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
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
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 63
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 pub-
lisher has to watch his ledger closely.
Another reason for greater emphasis
on the financial side of literary produc-
tion is the enormously increased ex-
pense 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 remem-
64 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
bered, has become commercial. He de-
mands 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 in-
creased. There was a time when pub-
lishing houses needed no travelling
salesmen. Now every house of any im-
portance has at least two. They go
everywhere, with “dummies” and pros-
pectuses 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; corres-
pondence grows more and more; more
and more are special “window dis-
plays” 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.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 65
All these modern commercia1 methods
have added to the publisher's expense or
risk; and for these reasons his business
has become more like any other manu-
facturing 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 suc-
cess. 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,
66 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
discern a high sense of honor and con-
duct 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 pub-
lishing houses, which are conducted by
men of real character.
But there are others—others who keep
“literary drummers,” men who go to see
popular writers and solicit books. The
authors of very popular books them-
selves also—some of them at least—put
themselves up at auction, going from
publisher to publisher or threatening to
go. This is demoralization and com-
mercialization with a vengeance. But
it is the sin of the authors.
As a rule, this method has not suc-
ceeded; or it has not succeeded long.
There are two men in the United States
who have gone about making commer-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 67
cial calls on practically every man and
woman who has ever written a success-
ful book; and they are not well thought
of by most of the writers whom they see.
Every other publisher hears of their
journeyings and of their “drumming.”
Sometimes they have secured immediate
commercia1 results, but as a rule they
have lost more than they have gained.
The permanent success of every publish-
ing house is built on the confidence and
the esteem of those who write books.
When a house forfeits that, it begins to
lose. Its very foundations begin to be-
come insecure.
Commercial as this generation of writ-
ers may be, almost every writer of books
has an ambition to win literary esteem.
They want dignity. They seek reputa-
tion on as high a level as possible.
“The trouble with the whole business”
(I quote from a letter from a successful
novelist) “is that novel-writing has be-
come so very common. ‘Common’ is
68 A PUBLISHER's confession
the word. It is no longer distinguished.
What I want is distinction. Money I
must have—some money at least; but
I want also to be distinguished.” That
is a frank confession that almost every
writer makes sooner or later. -
Now, when a publishing house forfeits
distinction it, too, becomes common,
and loses its chance to confer a certain
degree of distinction. And literary
“drummers” have this effect—authors
who can confer distinction shun their
houses. The literary solicitor, therefore,
can work only on a low level; and the
houses that use him are in danger of
sinking to a low level.
The truth is, it is a personal service
that the publisher does for the author,
almost as personal a service as the phy-
sician does for his patient or the lawyer
for his client. It is not merely a commer-
cial service. Every great publisher knows
this and almost all successful authors
find it out, if they do not know it at first.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 69
The ideal relation between publisher
and author requires this personal ser-
vice. It even requires enthusiastic ser-
vice. “Do you thoroughly believe in
this book? and do you believe in me?”
these are the very proper questions that
every earnest writer consciously or un-
consciously puts to his publisher. Even
the man who writes the advertisements
of books must believe in them. Else his
advertisements will not ring true. The
salesmen must believe what they say.
The booksellers and the public will soon
discover whether they believe it. They
catch the note of sincerity—the public
is won; the author succeeds. Or they
catch the note of insincerity and the
book lags.
This is the whole story of good pub-
lishing. Good books to begin with, then
a personal sincerity on the part of the
publisher. And there is no lasting sub-
stitute for these things.
The essential weakness in most of even
70 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
the best publishing houses of our day is
the lack of personal literary help to
authors by the owners of the publishing
houses themselves. Almost every writer
wishes to consult somebody. If they do
not wish advice, they at least wish sym-
pathy. Every book is talked over with
somebody. Now, when a publishing
House has a head—an owner—who will
read every important manuscript, and
freely and frankly talk or write about it,
and can give sympathetic suggestions,
that is the sort of publishing house that
will win and hold the confidence of the
best writers. From one point of view the
publisher is a manufacturer and sales-
man. From another point of view he
is the personal friend and sympathetic
adviser of authors—a man who has a
knowledge of literature and whose judg-
ment is worth having. A publisher who
lacks the ability to do this high and inti-
mate service may indeed succeed for a
time as a mere manufacturer and Seller
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 71
of books; but he can add little to the
best literary impulses or tendencies of
his time; nor is he likely to attract the
best writers.
And—in all the noisy rattle of com-
mercialism—the writers of Our Own gen-
eration who are worth most on a pub-
lisher's list respond to the true publish-
ing personality as readily as writers did
before the day of commercia1 methods.
All the changes that have come in the
profession, therefore, have not after all
changed its real character as it is prac-
tised on its higher levels. And this rule
will hold true—that no publishing house
can win and keep a place on the highest
level that does not have at least one man
who possesses this true publishing per-
sonality.
There is much less reason to fear the
commercial degradation of many other
callings than the publishers’.
A louder complaint of commercialism
has been provoked by the unseemly
72 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
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 ex-
plain, has the same possibilities of popu-
larity as Salvation Soap. A saponace-
ous publisher puts it out; he advertises
it in his soapy way; people buy it—
sometimes two hundred or three hun-
dred 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.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 73
It sees only the occasional accidental
S11CCéSS.
There is no science, no art, no litera-
ture 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 hun-
dred tune-makers try their hands at the
trick—not one of their tunes goes. The
same tune-maker who “scored a suc-
cess.” 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 gamb-
ling. 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 a11 that
need be said about it but for the “liter-
74. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ary” journals. They forthwith fall to
gossiping, and keep up a chatter about
“great sellers,” and bewail commercial-
ism 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 pub-
lishing 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 for-
tune. Certainly not one of them ever
failed to recognize or to encourage a high
literary purpose if it were sanely di-
rected. Every one of them every year
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 75
invests in books and authors that they
1<now 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 criti-
cal 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.
Has the Unknown Author a
Chance?
CHAPTER V
HAS THE UNKNOWN AUTHOR A
CHANCEP
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 “Read-
ing ” Is Done.
It will probably always be believed by
many persons that publishing houses do
not give careful attention to book manu-
scripts that come from strangers. The
case of “David Harum” did much to fix
this notion in the public mind. The
manuscript was declined by three or
four publishers before it was accepted by
the Appletons. Its declination was an
evidence of bad financial book-judg-
79
8o A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ment, but it is not proof that it was
carelessly considered. Most publishers'
readers are literary folk, pure and sim-
ple. Not one in a hundred has a good
financial judgment of a manuscript. As
a literary product, judged by academic
standards, there was not much in “David
Harum” to commend it. The publish-
ers who rejected it acted on the readers'
reports. When it went to the Apple-
tons, somebody was shrewd enough to
see that if it were shortened and put in
somewhat better form, it would have a
commercial value. A publishing judg-
ment was passed on it there and not
merely a conventional literary judg-
ment.
Or, take the case of “Graustark.” It
was declined at least by one publisher.
There is, perhaps, not a “literary”
reader in the world who would have
commended it in manuscript, or (for
that matter) who will commend it now.
It does violence to every literary canon.
A PUBLISHER's CONFESSION 81
But a Chicago publisher, by some divine
or subterranean suggestion, saw a
chance for it. Its roughest edges were
hewn off with an axe, and it was put
forth. There have now appeared four
“Graustark” books, three of which have
each sold perhaps a hundred times as
many copies as Mr. Howell's latest novel
will sell.
The difference between a mere literary
judgment and a publishing judgment in-
dicates the greatest weakness in the or-
ganizations of most publishing houses.
The publisher himself is usually a busi-
ness man. He has to concern himself
with the financial work of his house—
with the manufacture and the sale of
books. In a great measure he relies, for
his judgment of literary values, on his
advisers and readers. As a rule these
advisers and readers are employed men
or women. They know nothing about
what may be called the commercial
value of books. Many of them know
82 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
nothing about the losses or the profits on
the books that they have commended.
They have had no experience in selling
books. These facts indicate the wrong
Organization of most publishing houses.
Yet the faithfulness that they show to as-
piring authors is amazing; they plough
conscientiously through thousands of
manuscripts looking for the light of
some possible genius, and they com-
mend dozens of books where their em-
ployers accept a single volume.
But the publisher does acquire a sort
of sixth sense about a book. He may or
he may not know literary values, but he
comes to have a peculiar sort of knowl-
edge of the commercial possibilities of
books. If he takes “literary read-
ers’.” judgments and does not read
manuscripts himself, he will now and
then let a “David Harum” pass through
his hands. To avoid such mistakes
every publishing house has at least two
readers, and these read manuscripts in-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 83
dependently of one another. The pub-
lisher then makes his judgment from
them both, or perhaps from a third read-
ing by a specialist, if the manuscript
seem good enough to warrant a third
reading.
The mistake of permitting a profitable
manuscript to be rejected does not come,
therefore, from inattention to the work
of strangers, but from sheer fallibility of
judgment. And the work of strangers
is very carefully considered in every
publishing house that I know anything
about. Every publisher in these days is
just as eager to get a new good writer on
his list as any unknown writer is eager to
get a publisher; and no manuscript
above the grade of illiteracy is neglected.
A “first reader”—a man of all around
general knowledge of books, and he
ought to be a man full of hard common-
sense, common-sense being worth more
than technical literary knowledge—the
“first reader” examines the manuscript.
84. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
If it be a shopworn piece of common-
place work, obviously hopeless, he may
not read it from preface to end, but he
must say in his written report whether
he has read it all. Whether he condemn
it or approve it, it is examined or read by
another reader. If both these condemn
it as hopeless, the publisher declines it
without more ado.
The greater number of manuscripts
that come to publishing houses are hope-
less. Three-fourths of them, or more,
are novels that have been written by
lonely women or by men who have no
successful occupation; and most of
these are conscious or unconscious imi-
tations of recent popular novels. It does
not require very shrewd judgment to see
that they are hopeless. But it does re-
quire time. If they are above the grade
of illiteracy somebody must read a hun-
dred pages or more to make sure that
the dulness of the early chapters may
not be merely a beginner's way of find-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 85
ing his gait. And many of these manu-
scripts go from publishing house to pub-
lishing house. There are, I should say, a
thousand hopeless novels in manuscript
at all times making this weary journey.
Sometimes one comes back to the
same publisher a second time, the author
having perhaps not kept an accurate
record of its itinerary. Sometimes it
comes back a year later, somewhat
changed. There is one novel-manuscript
that has come to me four times within
two years, every time in a somewhat
different form, and twice with different
titles—obviously to fool the “careless”
publisher.
While very few mistakes are made or
are likely to be made with these manu-
scripts that two readers independently
declare hopeless, the class next to these
require a great deal of work and care.
This class includes those books by un-
known writers that are not bad. One
reader will say that they are worth con-
86 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
sidering. The next reader will say that
they have some sort of merit. Then the
publisher must go slowly. A third per-
son must read them. If the publisher be
an ideal publisher, he will read them
himself. (The weakness of most Ameri-
can publishing houses of this generation
comes just here—the publisher himself
does not read many manuscripts.)
In the best publishing houses (this, I
know, is the habit of three) the reports
On books of this class are all read at a
meeting of the firm, or (better) at a
meeting of the firm and of the heads of
departments. At such a meeting the
judgment of a sensible man who is at the
head of the sales department of a pub-
lishing house is very useful. He knows
by his everyday work what sort of books
the public is buying. Some of them are
books that the “literary” world knows
nothing about or has forgotten.
And three or four or five men, by a
little discussion, can reach a clearer and
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 87
saner judgment about a book from the
reports of three or four readers than the
readers themselves can reach or than
any one man or any two men who con-
sider the reports could reach. There is
no subject in the world about which a
conference is likely to be more helpful.
One man's judgment about the publish-
ing quality of a book may easily be
wrong. The judgment of two men may
be wrong if they look at it from the same
angle or with the same temperament.
But the judgment of three, or four, or
five men, if they have the facts before
them and if they indulge in frank dis-
cussion, is very seldom wrong. No book
on which serious work has been done
ought to be rejected or accepted without
the benefit of the independent reports of
two or three sensible persons who have
carefully read it, and without the dis-
cussions of these reports by three or four
other persons of experience and judg-
ment. And in at least three American
88 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
publishing houses every manuscript of
any value or promise runs a course of
hopeful consideration such as this; for
the publisher wants good new books, he
wants good new writers; and he wants
them badly. Half a dozen popular
writers will build a publishing house.
It is, therefore, doubtful whether any
other business is so carefully conducted
with reference to its sources of supply.
In fact, all publishers make many
more mistakes in accepting books than
in declining them. They accept many
books from new writers that they hope
may possibly succeed, but in which they
have not very strong faith. It is the
book manuscripts of this class that
cause the most work and the greatest
trouble—the class that may possibly
succeed. A book of this class by a new
writer who shows cleverness or some
other good quality is often accepted in
the hope that the author may do better
with the next book. It is accepted as an
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 89
encouragement and as a hope; it chiefly
is for this reason that so many books are
published that are barely good enough
to warrant publication. The publisher
is trying to “develop” an author.
Sometimes this method succeeds; for
it sometimes happens that a good writer
writes a first book that is merely a prom-
ise of 1ater achievement. But this does
not often happen. In most cases the sec-
Ond book is no better than the first—or
is worse. Then the publisher loses and
the writer is seldom heard of again. The
number of one-novel writers scattered
over the land would surprise the world if
it were known. There is no rule about
literary production to which there are
not an embarrassing number of excep-
tions. But in most cases a successful
writer starts with a successful book.
The hope that the second book will be
better is one of the rocks on which many
publishing ventures wreck. -
But if the publishers put forth a num-
90 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ber of commonplace books (chiefly
novels) from a false hope that they may
thus develop good writers, they also do a
service of the opposite kind. They save
the long-suffering public from many
worthless books. For if the public had
thrust upon it all or half or a tenth of the
books that are written, what a dull
world we should have
When a book-manuscript has been re-
jected, the delicate task comes next of
informing the author. This task is
seldom done as well as it ought to be. It
is almost impossible for a publisher—
who receives and rejects manuscripts as
a matter of business—to put himself in
the place of a writer who has spent
lonely weeks in her work. To send a
mere business note is almost an insult.
Yet what more can the publisher write?
He does not dare write hopefully. If he
does he will give a degree of encourage-
ment that is dishonest. Yet the author
expects a long and explicit letter telling
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 91
why the manuscript is unavailable. If
she does not receive such a letter she
jumps to the conclusion that her manu-
script has not had fair consideration.
Publishers' letters of rejection are the
chief cause, I suspect, of the persistent
notion that they are careless in the ex-
amination of manuscripts.
Every letter of declination ought to be
written by a skilful man—a diplomatist
who can write an unpleasant truth with-
out offence. Every such letter ought to
be written with a pen. No general form
ought to be used. Yet in only one of the
publishing houses whose habits I know
is this degree of care taken. The con-
sideration of manuscript from strangers
is careful and conscientious, but letters
of rejection are often perfunctory.
To sell a novel that has the mysterious
quality of popularity in it is not difficult.
Properly launched, it sells itself. To sell
a novel that lacks the inherent quality of
popularity—that is almost impossible.
92 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
Apparently it has sometimes been done,
but nobody can be sure whether the
result after all was due to the book or
to the salesman. Every publisher has
proved, over and over again, to his dis-
gust, that he cannot make the people
buy a novel that they do not want; and
when a novel appears (no better novel)
that they do want, the novel-readers
find it out by some free-masonry and
would buy it if the publishers tried to
prevent them.
Nobody has discovered a rule—to say
nothing of a principle—whereby the
popularity of a novel by a new writer
may be determined. If it be a really
great, strong book, Of course it is easy to
understand that it will sell; but whether
it will sell Io,000 copies or Ioo,ooo no-
body knows. If it be a slap-dash dime-
novel, full of action, it is easy to guess
that it will sell; but whether 5,000 or
5oo,ooo nobody knows. Sometimes a
book of the sheerest commonplace hap-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 93
pens to hit the public mood at the happy
angle and sells beyond all expectation.
The truth is, every new novel by an un-
knownwriter presents a problem peculiar
to itself; and in advertising it and offer-
ing it for sale, every book's peculiar
problem must be studied by itself.
The whole question is a subtle social
one. Who could have foretold popular-
ity for “pigs in clover,” rather than for
some other silly puzzle; or for ping-
pong; or for women's hats of a certain
grotesque construction? The popular
whim about novels is like the whims for
these things. And a popular novel
passes as quickly as any other fashion.
The story has been many times told of
the sudden falling off of the demand for
“Trilby”—so sudden that the publish-
ers had a large number of copies left on
hand which could not be sold at all ex-
cept as waste paper. Every publisher is
afraid to publish very large editions of
any very popular novel; for they have
94 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
all had an experience parallel to this ex-
perience with “Trilby.”
But other kinds of books are less
capricious than novels; and the business
of the publisher has been reduced more
nearly to a science in dealing with books
of information. Several publishers, for
example, have series of little books
made of selections from English and
American classics. Many of them have
sold well; but some of them have sold by
the million and others just as good and
just as attractive have stopped at the
ten-thousand limit or at a lower limit.
The difference is with the skill with
which they were put on the market.
Sometimes an ingenious “scheme” will
sell information books in great numbers;
and it often happens that the worst of
three or four books on the same subject
and published for the same price, be-
comes far better known than the other
better books.
As a theoretical proposition it seems
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 95
plain that the publisher who will spend
the most money in newspaper advertis-
ing will sell the most books. Authors
not infrequently take up this notion.
Sometimes it is true; for sometimes
newspaper advertising will cause a great
demand for a book. But this is not true
with every book. And most recent pub-
lishing failures have been due—in a
great measure, at least—to prodigal ad-
vertising—or, perhaps, to misdirected
advertising.
Every book is a problem unto itself.
The wise publisher so regards it from the
beginning; and he makes his plans for
every book to suit its peculiar case and
not another. All the long road from
author to reader, the book—any book—
presents a series of interesting, original
problems. Many of them are very fas-
cinating problems. They call for im-
agination, fertility, ingenuity. The
reason why few authors or authors’
societies or other persons who have not
96 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
been definitely trained to publishing
fail, is that they are too likely to regard
publishing as a mere routine business—a
business of manufacturing a certain pro-
duct and then of offering it for sale.
They forget that every book—and even
every edition of every book—presents a
problem that was never presented be-
fore since the world was made. And
when its sympathetic ingenuity and in-
ventiveness fail, a publishing house be-
gins to become a mere business and the
drying-up period is not far off.
But no publishing house fails because
it does not examine manuscripts care-
fully. There is no other business that I
know of that is done more seriously; and
the mistakes made are fewer than the
public thinks. They are mistakes of
judgment and not of carelessness.
The Printer Who Issues Books at
the Author's Expense
CHAPTER VI
THE PRINTER WHO ISSUES BOOKS
AT THE AUTHOR'S EXPENSE
A Heartless Pirate Who Preys Upon the Un-
sophisticated and Ambitious Writer—The Con-
tract in Which This Sort of “Publisher ” Can-
not Lose—The Inevitable Disappointment—
How the Publication by Even a Responsible
House of a Book That Sells Poorly Injures the
House.
An innocent and ambitious good
woman sent to me last year a form of
contract that a printer who pretended
to be a publisher had sent her to
sign for the publication of a novel. In
its unessential clauses it was like the
usual publisher's contract; but it re-
quired the author to pay in advance a
fixed sum for the plates and for the
manufacture of one thousand copies;
99
I oo A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
and this sum was just about twice what
they should cost him. Then he was to
pay her not the usual ten or even fifteen
per cent. royalty, but fifty per cent. on
all copies sold—as well he might; and,
if at the end of a year the book had
ceased to sell, she was bound to buy the
plates from him at half cost. The
meaning of all this translated into
figures, is this: The plates would cost
him $250, for he does cheap work; a
thousand copies of the book would cost
him $200, for he makes cheap books;
total, $450. She would pay him in ad-
vance $900. He has a profit so far of
$450. He does not expect to sell any
of the books. Her friends would buy
perhaps as many as two hundred copies.
They would not be on sale at the book-
stores—except in her own town. At
the end of the year she would pay him
again for the plates half what he charged
her at first—which is just what they
cost him. By this time she would have
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION I of
paid just three times their cost to him.
His outlay in the whole transaction
would be:
For plates.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘. . * * * * * * * * * * * $250
For IOOO copies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2OO
His income would be: Her prepayment. . 900
Her purchase of the plates a year later... 250
—II50
His profit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $700
He would not have even to make any
outlay of capital. She supplies the cap-
ital and he makes his $700 profit by
writing her a few letters. If any of the
books were sold he would receive also
half what they brought. She would
have spent $1150, less what she re-
ceived for the few copies that were sold.
Her book would not have been pub-
lished—only printed at an excessive
COSt. -
There are several “publishers” who
seem to do a prosperous brief business
of this kind by preying upon inexpe-
*The items of expense should at present-day prices be
doubled.
Io.2 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
rienced and disappointed authors. It
is only by accident they ever get a book
that sells; and they hardly pretend to
put books on the market, for of course
the booksellers will not buy them. A
really good book would, therefore, in
their hands be buried. The public
would never find it out. They print a
large number of the novels that the real
publishers decline.
The long list of books—chiefly novels
—that these pseudo-publishers put out
tells a sad tale of misdirected energy
and of disappointed hopes. A man—
oftener it is a woman—conceives the
notion of writing a novel. She works
alone. She shuts herself off from life
about her. Any human being who
spends months at a self-imposed secret
task becomes profoundly, even abnor-
mally interested in it. The story grows
—or flows; for the author becomes
more fluent as she goes on. She is likely
to accept all the stories of extraordinary
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION Io;
successes that she reads in the literary
journals as if they were common suc-
cesses. She goes on working by herself
with no corrective companionship. At
last she sends it to a real publisher and
gets a disappointing decision. She
imagines a thousand reasons why she is
not appreciated. She sends it to an-
other, and so on. The story of the
wanderings of “David Harum” in man-
uScript has given courage to thousands
of worthless novels—a courage to travel
to the last ditch, and the last ditch is the
pseudo-publisher. “Yes,” he writes,
“it is an unusual story;” and he will
be greatly honored to publish it, and
sends one of his remarkable contracts.
To get the book published by any-
body will bring her recognition, she
thinks. The public will be kinder than
the publishers. She takes the risk—
sometimes goes into debt to do so. That
is the end of the book, and in most cases
the end of the author's career. The
IoA. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
work begun in loneliness has ended in
Oblivion—wasted days, wasted dollars,
wasted hopes.
Yet what is an author to do who be-
lieves in his own work when it is refused
by the regular publisher? Publish it
himself or let it remain in manuscript.
Never permit it to be brought out by a
publisher to whom any suspicion at-
taches.
There is not much danger (I do not
believe there is any danger) that a man-
uscript of any value whatever will under
present conditions fail to find a legiti-
mate purchaser. But one way out of
the difficulty that authors often seek is
to propose to a legitimate publisher to
publish his book at the writer's ex-
pense; and it is not apparent to the
layman why the publisher cannot afford
to make such arrangements. “If the
author pays the bill,” he says, “the pub-
lisher will surely lose nothing.” But the
publisher does lose, and loses heavily,
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 105
every time he publishes a book that is
not successful in the market. A pub-
lisher cannot afford to accept a book
that will not itself earn a profit. If the
author pay all the cost and a good
profit besides, even this does not change
the case; for unsalable books clog the
market and stop the wheels of the pub-
lisher's whole trade. He soon begins to
lose influence and standing in the book
trade. The jobbers buy new books
from him in smaller quantities. The
booksellers become suspicious of his
judgment.
Last year, to give a true instance, a
publisher put out four new novels by
four new writers. His salesmen and his
advertising man announced them as
good books. They made enthusiastic
estimates of them. The book dealers
ordered liberally. Three out of the
four failed to make any appreciable
success. The dealers had many copies
of them left on hand. This year, when
Ioô A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
the same publisher brought out two
more new novels by two more new
writers, his salesmen met with incre-
dulity and indifference. The booksellers
said to them with a sad smile, “We’ll
swap copies of your last year's novels
for these.”
Now it so happens that both of these
new books of this year are good and
popular. A demand for them was made
as soon as the reviews appeared and
people began to read them. But the
booksellers were ill supplied. They
would order only a few copies at a time
—or none. Thus the good books of this
year suffered because the publisher's
dull books of last year failed to bring
profit or satisfaction to anybody. They
stood in the way of this year's better
books.
While, therefore, no legitimate pub-
lisher wishes to reduce his business to a
mere commercia1 basis, and while he is
eager to maintain the dignity of his pro-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION Io;
fession—must maintain it in fact —and
do as high service as possible to the
literary production of his time; yet he
can not load down his list with many
books that have not a good commercial
reason for existence.
The plausible proposition which is so
often made in these days of universal
authorship—to publish books at the
author's expense—is for these reasons
not a sound proposition. If the book
succeeds there is no reason why the
author should make the investment.
If it fail, the publisher loses, even though
the author settle the bill; and he loses
heavily.
A writer who asks a publisher to
bring out a book that has no commer-
cial reason for existence is asking him
to imitate the “fake” publisher. The
“fake” publisher could not make a liv-
ing (since he has no character and can-
not sell books) except by cash payments
from his authors. As soon as the pub-
Io8 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
lisher begins to receive cash payments
from his authors (be the basis ever so
legitimate) he begins to clog up the out-
lets for his product. He has taken the
first step towards “fake” publishing.
In a word, commercially unprofitable
books may be printed, but they cannot
be published without ruining the ma-
chinery that they are run through. He
is the best publisher who has the largest
proportion of good books on his list
(whether his list be long or short) that
are at the same time alive in the
market. -
There are—let it be said as an excep-
tion—a few classes of books that every
publisher wishes to have on his list in
spite of the fact that they cannot be
made profitable, such as works of great
scholarship or monumental works that
have a lasting value. It is legitimate
that the writers or the societies or or-
ganizations under whose directions such
books were written should pay or share
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 109
the cost of their manufacture. But few
such works yield a profit at last to either
publisher or author. And they are not
made to clog the book market. They
are sold only to special classes of readers.
A book is a commodity. Yet the mo-
ment it is treated as a mere commodity
it takes severe revenge on its author and
on its publisher.
These pseudo-publishers sometimes
solicit manuscripts from ignorant writ-
ers. They have veiled advertisements
in the literary journals. Ignorance and
ambition is a susceptible combination.
Several years ago one of these plausible
Swindlers bribed a reader in One of the
larger publishing houses to report to
him the names of all the writers whose
novels were declined there. The fakir
then plied them with circulars and
letters.
While I have been writing about pub-
lishing swindles I have been reminded
of the accusation brought several years
I To A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ago against publishers—especially Eng-
lish publishers—that the temptation to
fraud was too strong to be resisted by
any but the most upright and successful
men. An author gives his book to his
publisher. Twice a year the publisher
makes a report—pays royalties on the
number of books that he has reported as
sold. There is no way whereby the
author can verify the publisher's re-
ports. He has to take his word for it.
Even if the author or someone who
acted for him were to see the publisher's
books, he could learn nothing, for the
publisher's bookkeeping is a very com-
plicated thing; and reports of book
sales could easily be “doctored.”
The chance for fraud does exist. But
the first wish of every normal man in the
business, even if he lacks vigorous hon-
esty, is to make his reports of sales to
his author as large as possible. This
wish is too strong to be overcome by
anything less than the most hopeless
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION I I I
moral depravity. A publisher who
should commit the crime of making
false reports to his authors would be a
monstrosity. Yet the contention that
Sir Walter Besant made in England for
so many years, that the publishing bus-
iness was conducted without such checks
and verifications as are applied to other
business transactions was true; and I,
for one, see no practical remedy for it.*
Moral: Select your publisher with
care; make sure that he is honest (by
far most of us are); then trust him.
But steer clear of all “fake” publishers
and “agents.”
a.º.º.º.:
to authors examined and certified by expert chartered ac-
countants.
The Advertising of Books Still
Experimental
CHAPTER VII
THE ADVERTISING OF BOOKS STILL
EXPERIMENTAL
Publishers Are Uncertain as to the Amount of
Sales Made in That Way—How the Book Busi-
ness Differs from the Shoe Trade, for Example
—The Problem of How to Get the Books Be-
fore the People Is at the Root of All Other
Book Trade Questions—Why the Book Can-
wasser Is Still Necessary—A Vast Field Wait-
ing for Development.
About the advertising of books, no-
body knows anything. The most that
can be said is that some publishers are
making very interesting experiments.
But nobody has yet worked out a single
general principle that is of great value.
The publishers themselves frankly con-
fess that they do not know how to ad-
vertise books—except a few publishers
who have had little experience.
II5
II 6 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
The fundamental difficulty of course
is that hardly any two books present the
same problem. Find a successful ad-
vertising plan for one book—it will not
be a good plan for another. This fun-
damental difficulty marks the difference,
for instance, between books and shoes.
When a shoe merchant finds out by ex-
periment how to describe his shoes and
in what periodicals to print his descrip-
tion, his problem is solved. Recently
several publishers discovered a success-
ful way to advertise a novel. They
tried the same plan with another novel
and another. But it's hit or miss. I,
for one, would give much to know how
often it has been “miss.” -
The old-fashioned way was to insert
a brief, simple, dignified announcement
of every book, as is still done in The
Spectator, of London, for example.
Good; but such an announcement
doesn’t go far. A very few thousand
persons see it. They wait until the
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 117
books are reviewed or till some friend
or authority speaks about them. For
this perfectly good reason some publish-
ers do not insert many advertisements
in those publications that go only to the
literary class—they are to a degree su-
perfluous. Those that are inserted are
inserted to give the publishers and the
books a certain “standing,” and to
keep pleasant the relations between the
publishers and these journals.
Then come, of course, the monthly
popular magazines. They reach a very
much wider class of readers, and to ad-
vertise books in them is a logical pro-
cedure. But their advertising rates are
almost prohibitory. The margin of
profit on books is very small. There
is not money enough in the business to
warrant extensive and expensive maga-
zine advertising. The result is the pub-
lishers put their announcements of per-
haps a dozen new books on a single ad-
vertising page of the magazines, and
II 8 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
they cannot, in this restricted space,
Say enough about any particular book
to make the advertisement effective.
Then there are the daily papers. One
or two of the best dailies in every large
city are used by the publishers for an-
nouncements of new books. They can-
not afford more—except in the case of
those novels which may reach enormous
editions. Given a novel that will sell
Ioo,ooo copies or more, and you have
enough possible profit to warrant a
good deal of advertising. But during
this calendar year only two novels (per-
haps three) have new editions of more
than Ioo,000 copies. What is a pub-
lisher to do, then, who has a novel that
will sell Io,000 copies, or 20,000 copies
and no more? Can he make it sell
50,000 or Ioo,ooo by spending a large
sum in advertising it? Perhaps, once
in ten times, or once in twenty times;
but not oftener.
Five or six publishing houses spend
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 119
more than $50,000 a year, each, in ad-
vertising.” Two spend a good deal more
than this sum; and One is reported as
saying that he spends $250,000. These
are not large sums when compared with
the sums spent for advertising other
wares. But an advertisement of a shoe
published to-day will help to sell that
shoe next year. The shoemaker gets a
cumulative effect. But your novel ad-
vertised to-day will be dead next year.
You get no cumulative effect. When
I say, therefore, that no publisher has
mastered the art of advertising books,
I tell the literal truth. They all run
against a dead wall; and they will all
tell you so in frank moments.
The study of the problem of adver-
tising books takes one far afield. What
quality in a book makes it popular any-
how? Even if you are wise enough to
know that (and you are very wise if you
do know that) the question arises
whether advertising is necessary. There
*The outlay for advertising has increased greatly in recent
years.
I 20. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
have been as many popular books sold
in large editions without advertising as
with it. If your book is really popular
it may sell anyhow. I could make a
long list of such books, and a still longer
list of books that extensive advertising
did not sell—books which seemed to
their publishers to have the quality of
great popularity.
The question carries us further back
still. Let us take the analogy of the
shoemaker again. He has shoe stores
within reach of the whole population.
There is not a village in the land where
there is not a store in which shoes are
sold. The manufacturers’ salesmen find
this distributing machinery ready to
their hands. If a man in Arkansas or
in Montana or in Florida wants a pair of
shoes, he is within reach of a place where
he may buy them. Not so with books.
There are few bookstores. Two or
three per cent. Of the population (per-
haps less) live within convenient reach
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION I 2 I
of bookshops. True, a book may be
ordered by mail. But SO may a pair of
shoes. But this is not a good substitute
for a store, where a man may see the
lbook. The mail-order business will
always be secondary to direct sales.
But, since bookstores are so few, the
book-distributing machinery is wholly
inadequate. The publisher has no ef-
fective way yet to reach his normal pub-
lic with his wares.
There is nobody to blame, perhaps.
Surely, it would not be a profitable
undertaking for any man or woman to
buy a stock of books and to open a store
in a small town. What is the remedy,
then?
The simple truth is, here is one of the
problems of distribution that have not
yet been solved. There are throughout
the land another one hundred thousand
persons who would buy any novel of
which one hundred thousand have been
sold, if they could see the book and hear
I 22 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
about it—if it were intelligently kept
for sale where they would see it. This
is a self-evident proposition. But no-
body has yet found a way thus to distrib-
ute a book. And (this is the point) until
better distributing machinery is organ-
ized, it will not pay publishers to adver-
tise with as prodigal a hand as shoe-
makers and Soapmakers use in making
their wares known.
It is this lack of proper distributing
machinery that has made possible the
career of the book-agent. There are no
shoe peddlers. Almost all the publish-
ing houses—all the important houses—
employ book peddlers. The business is
generally regarded as a-nuisance, to say
the most for it. But, from the publish-
er's point of view, it is a necessity. And
this is the crude way whereby it is
sought to remedy the radical deficiency
of proper distributing machinery. Of
course, the book-agent method has its
obvious disadvantages. It is not a dig-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 123
nified Occupation, as most agents prac-
tise it. The most dignified members of
the community, therefore, do not take
it up. In every case it is not even the
trustworthy members of the community
that take it up. Again, the agent must
be paid; and this is a very costly
method (to the purchaser) of buying
books. The purchaser pays half his
money for the books; the other half for
loeing persuaded to buy them.
And (to take a broad, economic view
of the subject) the book peddler surely
cannot be considered the final solution
of the problem of a proper distribution
of books. At some time in the future,
when the country is three or four times
as densely settled as it now is, there will
be book stores in all towns. There may
still be need for the persuasiveness of
the agent, for some of the most success-
ful of them now do their best work in
cities within sight of good book shops.
But the point is, few book-agents sell
1 24 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
new books, and few of them sell single
books: they usually sell books in sets.
The problem, therefore, of the proper
distribution of the four or five really
good books that my publishing house
has put out this fall still remains un-
solved and, though I advertised them
in all magazines and newspapers, I
should not effectively reach the atten-
tion of one-fifth or one-tenth of the pos-
sible buyers of them. I should simply
spend in advertising the profit that I
may make on the copies that I sell with
a reasonable publicity through the regu-
lar channels. I do insert advertisements
of them for three or four reasons—with
the hope of helping their sales; to keep
the public informed of the activity of our
publishing house; to please the press;
and—to please the authors of the books.
But I know very well that I am working
(as every publisher is working) in a busi-
ness that has not yet been developed,
that is behind the economic organization
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 125
of other kinds of manufacturing and sell-
ing, that awaits proper Organization.
Figure it out yourself. Here is a
book of which eighty thousand copies
have been sold through “the trade;”
that is, through the book stores. Our
salesmen have visited every important
bookseller from Portland, Me., to Port-
land, Ore., and from Duluth to New
Orleans. We have spent quite a hand-
some sum in advertising it. Four-fifths
of these eighty thousand copies were
sold in a few months after its publica-
tion. The booksellers said that they
could sell many more if we would ad-
vertise it more. We did so. By this
time our salesmen were making another
trip. No, they would not buy more,
thank you; it is a little slow now. The
second effort at advertising did not
cause it to “move” in the market. The
demand is slow yet. In other words,
the demand for it that could be supplied
by the existing book stores was practi-
I 26 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
cally exhausted. Our second adver-
tising effort was a waste of money. We
have frankly to confess that we do not
know how to sell more copies of this
book until the time comes when it may
be put into a “set” and sold by book
agents. This is the same as to say that,
the few existing book stores utilized,
there is no organized machinery for find-
ing more buyers except the book agent.
Yet it is obvious that a wholesome
book (as this is) which eighty thousand
persons have bought would please eighty
thousand other persons of like minds
and taste if we had any way to find these
second eighty thousand persons. They
exist, of course. But they live out of
easy reach of the book stores. The
book agents will find them several years
hence.
I have (I think) shown why there can
never be a publishers' trust, or “com-
bine,” because the relation of the pub-
łisher and the author is a personal rela-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 127
tion as intimate and personal as the rela-
tion of a physician to his patient or of a
lawyer and his client. But, after a book
has been sold and has become a com-
modity, the problem is a different one.
The booksellers have perceived this;
and they have made ineffective efforts
to “combine.” They have failed be-
cause they have not made plans to widen
the existing market. An organization
of those that exist is not enough. The
real problem is to extend their area, to
find book-buyers whom they do not now
reach.
Perhaps all this is very dull—this
trade talk. But a publisher who is
worthy of his calling regards himself as
an educator of the public; and he has
trade reasons and higher reasons as well
for wishing to reach as many buyers of
his good books as he possibly can. He
Rnows (and you know, if you know the
American people) that the masses even
of intelligent folk have yet hardly fairly
I 28 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
begun to buy books. Go where you
will among the people and you will find
few books—pitifully few. We are just
coming into a period when book-buying
is even beginning to become general.
The publishers of a generation hence will
sell perhaps ten times as many good
books as are sold now—surely, if they
find in their day distributing machinery
even half adequate.
The Story of a Book from Author
to Reader
CHAPTER VIII
THE STORY OF A BOOK FROM AUTHOR
TO READER
The Divers Problems Which Constantly Arise—
Every Step of the Way Beset with Expense, So
That the Publisher Is Amaged When He Finds
a Surplus—Why Books of Large Sale Are Hard
to Get—The Publisher as Anxious as the Public
to Print Better Books.
The wonder is (and in my mind it
grows every year) how the publishers of
books make enough money to keep their
shops going. When I look at my own
ledgers (ledger, by the way, is become a
mere literary word, for we now all keep
accounts on cards and not in books)—
whenever I look at my own cards and
See a profit, I am astonished as much as
I am gratified. Every other publisher in
I31
132 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
America, if he have a normal and simple
mind such as fits the calling, has the
same emotion. Let me say, lest I ap-
pear “simple” in another sense, that our
cards have, miraculously enough, gen-
erally shown very satisfactory profits,
but the astonishment never becomes
less.
See what a long series of processes, or
adventures, if you will, a book must go
through between the writer and the
reader; every step costs money; and
the utmost possible profit is small. Sup-
pose it be a novel. “Book” means
“novel” these days in “literary” circles
and journals. Heaven bless our shallow
gabble called “reviews.” A novel comes
to the publisher in fairly good English.
The English doubtless is the author's,
but the punctuation and capitals are the
“typewriter-lady’s” own. It must be
read by one person; and, if that person's
report have a ray of hope, it must be
read by another; perhaps by a third.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 133
These “readers” cost money—alas! too
little money. They are generally liter-
ary persons who have failed, and there is
something pathetic about their Occupa-
tion. Then, after two or three readers
have reported on it, I have to read it—
in our particular shop, in any shop,
somebody “higher up” must read it—
especially if it come from a new writer.
Then we have to correspond with the
author or have interviews with h-er.
All this takes time, and the cost of this
service rolls up. Somebody must next
go over the manuscript to prepare it for
the printer—to make sure that the
heroine's name is spelt the same way all
through and so forth and so forth. With
the processes of manufacture I need not
weary you. Only I must say that a bad
manuscript can be put into legible type,
and that type cast into solid metal
blocks ready for the press with a rapid-
ity and cheapness that rank among the
mechanical wonders of the world.
134. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
By this time the artist has appeared,
if the novel is to be illustrated. Book
salesmen will tell you that pictures help
to sell novels, and they ought to know.
But I venture to say that you haven’t
seen three new novels in ten years whose
illustrations conveyed anything but con-
fusion to your mind. The conventional
illustration of the conventional novel
marks the lowest degradation of the
present-day publisher. We confess by
these things that we are without charac.
ter or conviction. But the artist has
the benefit of the commercial doubt on
his side. He has also the vanity of the
author. And he gets his fee—200, 300
or 5oo good dollars or more—and the
publisher pays the bill. Another artist
makes a design for the cover.
Paper, printing, binding—all these
are commonplaces, worthy of mention
here only because they roll up the cost.
But there are other steps in the book's
journey that the public knows less
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 135
about. For instance, as soon as the first
chapter has been put into type and a
cover made, “dummies” of the book are
got ready. A “dummy” of a book is a
sort of model, or sample, of it. The
cover is the cover that will appear on the
finished novel; the titlepage is the novel's
titlepage; and the first chapter is as it
will be when the book is published.
But the rest is blank paper. This
“dummy” shows the physical size and
appearance of the book.
The travelling salesmen take these
dummies and begin their work. They go
to all the jobbers and book dealers, ex-
plaining to them the charming qualities
of this newly discovered novelist, and
taking orders for the books. By the time
they come home and their advance
orders are added up, the book is ready
to go to press; and the publisher knows
what his “first sale” will be. Meantime
(not to lose the thread of my story) all
this travelling and soliciting of orders
136 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
have cost a good deal of money. The
public has not yet seen a copy of the
book nor even so much as heard of it nor
of the “talented young author.”
But now the machinery for publicity
is put in action. Sly little literary notes
about the book and the author begin to
appear in the newspapers. These, too,
have come from the publisher. From
whom else, pray, could they come? But
they mean that the publisher has to
maintain a literary bureau. The man
who writes these news notes and the ad-
vertisements of the book and other
things about it is a man of skill, if he do
his work well; and he, too, costs the
publisher a good salary. When he be-
gins to put forth advertising—how much
shall he spend on this new novel by an
unknown writer? How much shall you
risk at Monte Carlof Your upright man
will risk nothing at Monte Carlo. I have
sometimes thought that your upright
publisher, if there be one, would risk
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 137
nothing in advertising a new book by an
unknown writer, until the book began it-
self to show some vitality in the market.
But—to go back—as soon as the book
is ready, review copies, of course, are
sent to the newspapers and the literary
journals (to appear a little later in the
second-hand book-shops for sale at re-
duced prices.) All this activity requires
clerks, typewriters, bookkeepers, post-
age-money—a large office, in fact.
There are many posters, circulars—
there is as much machinery required to
sell a book as to sell a piano Or an auto-
mobile.
From the starting-point, where the
book was an ill-written manuscript, to
the delivery of it to the bookseller, the
publisher has less than 50 cents a copy to
pay for this whole journey and to save
something for profit if he can. There-
fore I say that publishers who do suc-
ceed are among the most astute man-
agers of industry.
138 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
Lest I seem to “boast rather than to
confess,” I come back to the starting-
point, which was this—that the pub-
lishers' calling is not a very profitable
one; not a profitable one at all except in
fair weather and with a good skipper.
The truth is, publishing is too impor-
tant a profession and our publishing
houses are too important as institutions
to be at the mercy of present conditions.
The making of schoolbooks and the
vending of standard old books in sets,
which are useful vocations, but are not
publishing proper, are now done best by
firms and companies that do nothing
else. Hence publishing proper—the
bringing out of new books—must find a
safer basis than the present conventional
profit. It will find this safer basis in two
ways.
The first and obvious way is to secure
books that have an enormous popular-
ity. This is the effort of nearly all the
publishing houses to-day. If a novel
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 139
reach an edition of Ioo,000 copies, there
is a good profit in it as matters now
stand. And a novel, or other book, that
will be bought by Ioo, ooo persons ought
not to be sold for more than such books
now fetch. But there are not enough
such books to go around; and the least
worthy publishing house is as likely to
secure them as the most worthy. A per-
manent institution, therefore, cannot be
built on these or on the hope of them.
They are the accidents of the calling.
The other way to maintain a worthy
publishing institution is to publish
worthy books, to manufacture them
well, to do every piece of work that is
done on them or that is done for them in
the most conscientious way—to keep
bookmaking as a fine art, to keep book-
selling a dignified profession, to keep the
selection of books to publish on the high
level of scholarly judgment. This done,
a publisher may set his prices higher—
must set his prices higher, for he does a
I4o A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
higher and more costly service to soci-
ety. Excellent and worthy of all praise
as is some of the publishing work of this
Sort that is now done, a beginning has
hardly yet been made. There is a de-
mand, or a dormant demand can be
awakened, for books that have merit (I
mean new books as well as old) of better
manufacture than we now often see.
They must be sold for higher prices, of
CO111 Se.
This is the same as to say that just as
a three-dollar shoe is made for most feet
that tread this weary continent, but a
five-dollar shoe is made for an increasing
number of feet that prefer ease to econ-
omy, so we are becoming rich enough
and wise enough to pay two dollars, or
three dollars, or five dollars for a good
new book that shall have large and beau-
tiful type, good paper, good margins,
good binding—shall be a work of art in
its manufacture as well as in the quality
of its contents. The public gets its good
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 141
books too cheap; and the reason is plain.
It was only the other day that the
publishers discovered the possibility of
securing book after book that would run
into large editions. A novel-reading
democracy—a public-school democracy
—is a new thing. It is an impressive
thing. It made new and big markets,
and we all rushed after it. Cheapness
and great editions became the rage.
Writers wrote for the million; publish-
ers published for the million. Cheap
books became the fashion. All very
well—this widespread effort, this uni-
versal reading. But it has not radically
changed human nature nor even the
permanent foundations of the profes-
sion of publishing. We shall come back
to higher and better work—some of us
will, at least.
Bring the subject home to yourself.
What do you want for your book
money? Not the latest “big seller.”
You may buy that to entertain you on a
142 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
railway journey. But if you bring it
home at all, you send it away at Christ-
mas to some country library. What you
want in your own library for your book-
money are good books, made at least as
well as the furniture in the room; and
you want the new books of permanent
value. You are sometimes disgusted
when you look over the publishers' cata-
logues to find so few books of this kind.
Your publishers, too, are becoming
weary of having such catalogues; and as
soon as we rediscover the old truth that
there is a permanent demand for just
the kind of books that you want, we
shall turn to a more generous encourage-
ment of them. Men who might do better
work will then cease trying to write
“best sellers.” But you must pay the
price. Since you have become accus-
tomed to buy new books at $1.5o a vol-
ume, you are somewhat reluctant to pay
$2 or $4 for a new book.” You must
break yourself of that habit. In a word,
*Even Mr. Page, farsighted as he was, would be surprised
at the large sales of books bringing prices that were regarded
as extraordinary in his lifetime.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 143
you must become at least as generous to
your publisher as you are to your shoe-
maker; and then the change will take
place.
By a similar course of reasoning (and
it is sound) you may discover that you
are yourself to blame for what our writ-
ers write and our publishers publish—in
a measure at least; and, whenever you
want better books, better books will be
ready for you. For the publisher and
even the author are but human after all;
and in the mood that has possessed us
all for a decade or two—since presses
and paper became so cheap—we have
perhaps worshipped mere numbers. I
have published some books only because
thousands and thousands of persons
would read them. You have read them
simply because thousands of other peo-
ple were reading them and for no better
reason. Perhaps our sins have not been
heinous. But, if you are so stubbornly
virtuous as to cry shame at me, I prom-
144. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ise you this: I will reform on the day
that you yourself reform; but you must
first signify repentance. For you—the
public—are after all our masters.
The Limits of the Book Market
CHAPTER IX
THE LIMITS OF THE BOOK MARKET
In Spite of the Many Books Issued and the Many
“Large Sellers,” the People Are Very Poorly
Equipped with Good Books—Circulating Libra-
ries and the Sale of Books—Many Neglected
Subjects on Which Successful Books Could be
Written—The Lack of Good Writers the Main
Source of Poor Sale of Books.
How large the book market is, nobody
knows. Still less does anybody know
how large it may become, say, in another
decade of our present prosperity and
spread of intelligence. Beyond any
doubt more books are bought in the
United States than in any other coun-
try. Yet it is a constant surprise to dis-
cover how ill supplied the mass of the
people are with good books. But the
I47
148 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
enormous increase of the market in re-
cent years gives hope of a still greater in-
crease to come. The number of books
published every year in the United
States and in the United Kingdom is
about the same, but more American
than English books run to large editions.
Leaving out fiction, which is the spec-
tacular and sensational part of publish-
ing, books of reference, of standard
literature, of history, of applied science
and even of poetry are sold in constantly
increasing quantities. The public hears
little of these because the literary jour-
nals pay little attention to them. There
is, for instance, one publisher of sub-
scription books who now adds few books
to his list of which he does not expect to
Sell Ioo,000 copies. He has agents in
every part of the United States, and
they probably sell more books in a year
than all the publishing houses in the
United States put together sold thirty
years ago—excluding textbooks, of
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 149
course. Last year a literary man went
to a remote railway station, 1,000 miles
from Boston Or New York, to shoot
quail. One day he saw men unloading
boxes of books from a freight car on the
side track. The wonder was that there
should be even a freight car in that cor-
ner of the woods; and that the freight
car should be filled with books was sim-
ply incredible. But there were wagon
loads of Thackerays, of Dickenses, of
Eliots, and even of sets of the poets,
fairly well-printed, fairly well-bound
volumes which had been sold to the
country folk for miles around. Perhaps
there has been more money spent for
encyclopaedias and dictionaries than
Noah Webster could compute, these last
ten years. The book market, therefore,
is very much bigger than persons who
live outside the book selling world are
likely to think.
Still, relatively it is small. The largest
retail book store in the country is a de-
150 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
partment store in New York or Philadel-
phia; but the book department is not
considered one of the important parts of
the store. The much-abused depart-
ment store, by the way, has done much
to bring a new class of persons to acquire
the book-buying habit. It has made
books common merchandise for the first
time. Since the “Century Dictionary,”
to take a definite example, was thus
made common merchandise, the sets of
it that have been sold are incomparably
more than were ever sold in any other
way. Yet how small the book market
yet is, is shown by this fact—that a novel
of which one hundred thousand copies
are sold reaches only one person in every
eight thousand of the population.
Do circulating libraries lessen book
sales? Yes, I dare say they do. But you
will find that the publishers do not com-
plain of them. They are disposed to ac-
cept the comforting doctrine that every-
thing which encourages the reading of
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 151
books in the end helps the sale of them,
In the end—yes. But for the moment
probably no.
One man will tell you that he used
regularly to buy a novel a week—some.
times two novels. He was a pretty good
customer of the publishers; for fifty-two
novels a year is about as many as the
most avaricious publisher could reason-
ably expect One man to buy. But now
he says he does not buy three a year. A
circulating library will for $5 bring him
all he wants. The publishers have,
therefore, lost him as a good customer.
On the other hand it is a working theory
that every subscriber to a circulating
library who reads a novel and talks
about it at the woman's club may induce
somebody to buy a copy who otherwise
would never have heard of it. At any
rate, the total number of novels, or of
books of other sorts, now sold is not less
than the number that was sold before
the libraries found subscribers. The
152 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
discussion is, after all, a vain one. The
publisher and the author must do the
best they can by the help of the libraries
or in spite of them.
Yet I am sure that the great widening
of the market for which we are all look-
ing will be found, when it is found, not
by any special machinery or mechanical
device; but the person who will really
find it—or make it—will be a great
writer. Whenever books are written
that are interesting enough to compel
the attention of the whole people, the
poorest publishing house can sell them.
The secret of success, after all, is the
secret of writing books that touch
masses of men deeply and directly. We
have much to learn from the careers of
such books as “Progress and Poverty”
and “Looking Backward.” They
reached their great sale not by the inge-
nuity of their publishers, nor by their
literary merit, but only because they
carried messages to many minds. How-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION I 53
ever delusive these messages may be,
they were sincere. The truth is that
the publisher (exalt him as I am trying
my best to do) is, after all, only a piece
of machinery. The real force that
makes itself felt in the world that has to
do with books is the initial force of the
men and women who write. Whenever
a great mind, or a great sympathy, be
found which puts forth an appeal or a
hope in the form of a book that has the
power to touch those emotions or aspira-
tions that all men have in common—
then the trick's done. The mechanical
plans that we make have power to carry
only as far as the book has strength to
go. If I had five great living writers on
my list, my publishing task would be
easy.
For the broadening of the book mar-
ket, then, what we need is writers—
writers of the proper quality. Of
novels, we have enough and to spare,
such as they are. But not of good books
154. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
of other sorts. Let us take a hint from
the novel writers. Twenty years ago or
less the American public was amusing
itself with novels written by English
writers. But about that time came
those story tellers, a whole army of
them, who began to write about life in
different parts of our own country. Of
New England, Miss Jewett and Miss
Wilkins and Mrs. Austin and many
more; in the Middle West, Mr. Garland,
Mr. Churchill, Mr. Tarkington and half
a hundred more; in New York, the
author of “David Harum,” Mr. Fred-
erick, Mr. Bacheller and others; of the
South, Mr. Page, Miss Johnston, Miss
Glasgow and more; and there are Cali-
fornia stories in profusion. In other
words, an army of men and women be-
gan about the same time to write stories
of local history and manners.
Now there are other subjects that
need to be written of just as much. One
such subject is science. The world is
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 155
flooded with popular books about
science, but nearly all of them fail either
in being accurate or in being popular.
There is a better opportunity now than
there ever was before for a man who
really knows the most recent and scien-
tific achievements, and who can write in
the language of the people. To many
people, “authoritative books” are dry
books, but this is not what I mean. Such
pooks as I have in mind can be written
only by men of the best scientific equip-
ment, but they can be written only by
men who have also a great deal of liter-
ary skill.
Another great subject about which
good books are needed is—you may not
believe this—American history. Our
political history has got itself pretty
voluminously written, and there is no
lack of slapdash books in distant imita-
tion of Green’s “Short History of the
English People.” But most of these
have been prepared out of newspaper
156 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
files by men who would not take their
task seriously or who were not well pre-
pared either in matured knowledge or in
literary skill to produce them. Then,
too, geographically considered, the his-
tory of less than one-fourth of our terri-
tory has not yet been written. Southern
history, for example, is utterly un-
1<nown.
It would be easy to name a half-dozen
other great subjects which writers who
now bring their manuscripts to the pub-
lishing houses are neglecting. If, there-
fore, men and women who have the lit-
erary gift, even to a reasonable degree,
and who have literary ambition, would
frankly seek those two or three publish-
ers who are real publishers and would
prove their ability to do serious work of
this sort they would be almost sure to
find satisfactory careers before them.
Of course, one disadvantage of such
work is that during its early stages no
very large financial returns can be ex-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 157
pected. But if the work were done well
enough it would pay in the end—pay
more money by far than a professorship
in science or in history or in literature
payS.
All this leads me to this general re-
mark—that the writing public does not
take the trouble to find out who the real
publishers are. There is a lack of co-
öperation between publishers and writ-
ers in what may be called the formative
period of the writer's lives. A man who
writes a book sends it to some publish-
ing house that is chosen by accident Or
by personal acquaintance or by whim.
The public seems to think that one pub-
lishing house is as good as another. If a
writer's first volume in this way falls
into the hands of a publisher who does
not make the acquaintance of the writer,
or who cannot make an appraisal of his
ability and promise, and who does not
understand him, then the writer, after
an initial failure, of course, becomes dis-
158 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
couraged. On the other hand, all the
publishers are so eager to get books that
they accept work which is not properly
done, and on their part fail to put them-
selves into such a relation to young
authors as would help them to their
normal development.
If a man or woman, therefore, pro-
poses to enter upon a literary career his
first duty is to make the acquaintance
of a real publisher, to be as frank with
him as one must be with one's physician
or one's lawyer. If two such men work
together seriously and without too great
Haste the best results will be achieved
for both, and the best results are not
likely to come in any other way.
If you start, then, to gossip intelli-
gently about the book market or about
anything else with which a publisher
has to do, and if you gossip long enough,
you will come back to the starting point
of the whole matter. What do we do or
can we do to encourage the writing of
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 159
good books? And now we've run on a
subject as deep as a well and as wide as a
door. In the multitude of counsellors
about it there is confusion. In the only
other “confession” that is to follow this
I shall try to show how ignorant and
mistaken all those are who differ with
me about this fundamental subject.
Plain Words to Authors and
Publishers
CHAPTER X
PLAIN WORDS TO AUTHORS AND PUB-
LISHERS
It Pays the Author to Be Honest and Frank with
His Publisher, Who Is, After All, His Best
Friend—Some Recent Instances of a Discour-
aging Sort—The Need of Greater Dignity and
Statesmanship Among Publishers—The Obli-
gation of Ministering to the Higher Impulses
of the People.
I am flattered by hearing that a
prominent publishing house wishes to
print these rambling “confessions” in a
pamphlet, to send to persons who write
books; “for,” says this house, “they
tell some plain facts that authors ought
to know.” I hope so; and, for my part,
I am not averse to publishers knowing
them either. For instance, the wretched
smallness of one sinner among the pub-
I63
164 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
lishers came to light to-day. Here is
the unpleasant story:
A year and a half ago I published the
first novel by a young author. He is a
promising writer and his story was a
good one. We sold it in fairly satis-
factory numbers. We advertised it,
“exploited” it—did the best we could.
We invited the author to come and see
us. We took him into our confidence.
We have regarded him as our partner,
so far as his book is concerned. We
have had a continuous correspondence.
We have exchanged visits a time or two.
He paid me the compliment to ask my
advice about his next story. We have
become good friends, you see; and we
are as helpful to each other as we know
how to be. Now his second novel is
finjºled. In a letter that came from
him to-day he informed me that another
publishing house (I have a great mind
to write the name of it here) has made
him a very handsome offer of serial pub-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 165
lication, provided, of course, that they
may also publish the book!
Now, if the young author wishes to go
browsing in these new pastures, I have
no power or wish to prevent him. I
cannot serve him—or do not care to
serve him—if he is unwilling that I
should. But I was nevertheless very
grateful when he wrote, “Of course, I
prefer you. I hope you have never
thought me unloyal.”
If publishing his first book had been
a mere job done under contract, a com-
mercial job and nothing more—that
would have been one thing. But that's
not publishing. What I did was to
give the man the unstinted service of
our house, as publishers, as advisers, as
friends. We print and advertise and
sell his books—yes, to the very best of
our ability. But we do more. We try
to make friends for his book and for him
throughout the reading world. We all,
take a personal interest in him and in
I66 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
his future. We invest our money, our
good will, our work, our experience, our
advice, our enthusiasm in him and in
his future. This service (except the in-
vestment of money) is not a matter of
contract. It is a personal, friendly ser-
vice. If the service had not been suc-
cessful, he would have had a perfect
right to come and say that he feared
that we did not serve him well and to
go away from us. That would have
been frank and honorable. Even, since
we did succeed and have become friends,
he could still go to another publisher.
Yet, I maintain, if he had, he would
have shown himself a man of blunt
appreciation and dull honor. And the
publisher who tried to win him away
did a trick unworthy of the profes-
sion. -
This is my last story about a pub-
lisher; and the moral is plain, alike to
publisher and to author.
And now I will tell my last story
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 16;
about an author, the moral of which also
is plain:
There is an author for whom we have
published two books, and they have
been uncommonly successful. A little
while ago he finished his third book.
He wrote that many publishers had so-
licited it, that he had had several hand-
some offers, that he needed a large sum
of money. Would we make a big ad-
vance payment? He disliked to men-
tion the subject, but business was busi-
ness after all. Now I had been at that
man's service for several years. Day
and night, he had sought my advice.
Well, we were cajoled into making a
big advance payment—about half as
big as he first asked for; and the con-
tract was signed. Two days later, I
met another publisher under conditions
which invited free and friendly talk;
and I told him this story. The pub-
lisher smiled and declared that that
author had approached him and asked
I68 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
how much he would give for this very
book!
Men and brethren, we live in a com-
mercial age. I suspect that, if we knew
history well enough, we should discover
that all ages have been commercial, and
that all our predecessors had experiences
like these. For ungrateful men have
written books for many a century, I
have no doubt; and we know that
Barabbas was a publisher. But let us
lift an honorable calling to an honorable
1evel. Hence these frank “confessions.”
And, if any publisher wishes to reprint
them to send to authors, or any author
to send to publishers, they both have
my permission. For dignity and honor
thrive best in an atmosphere of perfect
frankness.
Thinking over the behavior of authors
and publishers to one another, I am
obliged to confess that, while the pea-
nut methods that I have just described
are not common enough to cause us to
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 169
despair, the truth is that the whole
business is yet somewhat unworthily
conducted. I mean that it is con-
ducted on too low a plane. For what
is it that we are engaged in?
The writers of good books are among
the greatest benefactors of society; and
the publishers of good books, if publish-
ing be worthily regarded and properly
done, is a necessary and complimentary
service. The publisher is the partner, the
helper of the author and his high servant
or minister to the people. It is work
worthy of large men and of high-
minded men. Honest men we are—
those of us who conduct the publishing
houses that are in good repute. But I
sometimes think that we miss being
large men; for we do not do our busi-
ness in (shall I say?) a statesmanlike
way. We imitate the manners of trades-
men. We speak in the vocabulary of
tradesmen. We are too likely to look
at small projects as important—to pay
170 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
our heed to the mere tricks of our trade
—and to treat large enterprises, if we
have them, as if they were but a part
of the routine. A good book is a Big
Thing, a thing to be thankful to heaven
for. It is a great day for any of us when
we can put our imprint on it. Here is
a chance for reverence, for something
like consecration. And the man or the
woman who can write a good book is a
form of capital infinitely more attractive
than a large bank account or a great
publishing “plant.” Yet, if we regard
an author simply as “capital,” we are
not worthy to serve him. The relation
leads naturally to a friendly and helpful
attitude. We know something about
books, about the book-market, about
the public, that no author is likely to
know. With this knowledge we can
serve those that write. And with our
knowledge of the author and of his work,
we can serve the public. It is our habit
to keep our accounts with authors ac-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 171
curately, to pay them promptly, to re-
ceive them courteously when they call,
to answer their letters politely and
sometimes to bore them with formal
dinners at our clubs, before they sail
for Europe. But how many of us really
know the intellectual life of any author
whose books we print and supply a
stimulus to his best plans?
And the authors? How little they
know about us or about publishing!
They seem to select publishers by whims
and not often by knowledge. I know a
writer of good books who is at this mo-
ment seeking his third publisher. One
of the others failed. The other dis-
pleased him. And now he is thinking
of giving his next book to a third pub-
lisher who also will fail within five
years, or I am no prophet. Yet I am
hindered by courtesy from telling him
so. Why the man has not by this time
found a personality among the publish-
ers who has a soundly constructed busi-
172 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ness and at the same time a helpful
intellectual appreciation of his work, I
cannot understand. He, too, is looking
at a great matter in a small way.
Therefore I am led to write down
these rules for an author to follow when
he looks for a publisher: -
Find out whether the publishing
house that you have in mind be finan-
cially sound. The commercial agencies
will tell you, or will tell any commercial
friend who may make inquiry for you.
And find out who the real owners of the
house are.
Then find out who conducts it. If it
is conducted by a lot of hired “literary”
men, avoid it. They are, most of them,
men who have failed at authorship;
they “read” and “advise” for salaries;
and most of them know nothing about
the houses that they serve. They are
not principals, but (as Henry George
once called them) “literary operatives.”
I mean to say nothing harsh about a
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 173
well-meaning, hard-working class of
men. But if you have a good book, you
wish to find not a “literary operative,”
but a real publisher.
Having found a real publisher, you
will expect him to read your book him-
self. I am assuming that you have an
important book. When he has read it,
he will talk to you about it frankly.
When I say frankly, I mean frankly. If
he is himself a real man and knows men
and books, he will not retail hack lit-
erary phrases to you. He will talk good
English and good sense straight out of
his intelligence to your intelligence, with
no nonsense such as reviewers write in
the “literary” magazines. He will be-
come your intellectual friend.
Having found such a man, give him
your book and leave him to work out
the details of publishing. He will be
proud to serve you. You will discover
as your acquaintance ripens, that he has
your whole career as a writer in his mind
174 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
and plans. He will shape his whole
publishing activities to your develop-
ment and to the development of other
writers like you.
Then—if you are capable of writing
great books—you will discover that you
have set only natural forces at work for
your growth and for your publisher's
growth; and the little artificial tricks of
the trade whereby a flashy story has a
“run”—into swift oblivion—will pass
from your mind and from his. You
will both be doing your best work.
After all, the authors of any genera-
tion generally have the publishers that
they deserve to have; and this axiom
is reversible. For my part, while I am
as glad as Podunk, Exploitem & Com-
pany to have novels that will sell Ioo,-
ooo copies, provided they give clean and
decent amusement, I take no permanent
interest in anything that comes this
month and goes the next; nor does any
serious man. My wish and aim is to
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 175
become a helpful partner of some of the
men and women of my generation who
can, by their writings, lay the great
democracy that we all serve under obli-
gations to them for a new impulse. By
serving them, I, too, serve my country
and my time. And, when I say that
this is my aim and wish, I could say with
equal truth that it is the aim and wish
of every other real publisher. But, as
every good physician constantly won-
ders at the ignorance and credulity of
otherwise sensible men who seek quacks,
so I wonder at the simplicity of many
respectable writers of books in seeking
publishers. Of downright quacks in the
publishing world, there are not many.
But there are incompetents a-plenty and
a fair share of adventurers.
We shall both—authors and publish-
ers—get the proper cue if we regard the
Swarming, eager democracy all about us
as a mass of constantly rising men and
women, ambitious to grow, with the
176 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
same higher impulses that we feel in our
best moods; and if we interpret our
duty as the high privilege of ministering
to these higher impulses and not to their
lower senses, without commercialism on
one side and without academicism on
the other, men among men, worthy
among the worthy, we may make our
calling under such a conception a call-
ing that leads.
On Editorship
ON EDITORSHIP
An article which appeared in the WoRLD'S WORK in
January, 1913, under the title, “What the World's
Work is Trying To Do.”
My associates ask that I write what
we are trying to do with this magazine,
thereby going Squarely against the first
principle of good editing. That first
principle is that every piece published
shall be interesting; and in such an ar-
ticle there is less a tale to tell than an
explanation to make.
The group of men who direct the
WoRLD's WoRK have a very definite
aim, however often they miss it, and we
are very much in earnest. Earnestness,
mind you, does not mean Solemnity, and
we try to keep it from meaning dullness.
The aim is—every reader of the maga-
zine knows it as well as we do—so to
I79
180 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
report and to interpret representative
activities of our time as to give the
reader a well-proportioned knowledge of
what sort of things are happening in
the world—in the American world in
particular. It may be a political cam-
paign, it may be a woman's “move-
ment,” it may be the building of a great
dam across the Mississippi River; it
may be explanations of scientific dis-
covery and of new scientific theories; it
may be the industrial progress of the
Northwest or of the Southeast; it may
be the breeding of better grain or of
better cotton; the making of fitter
schools; the waste of money and the
degradation of men by unworthy pen-
sions;–it may be anything typical
of the activities of the people and
worthy of the attention of thoughtful
persons; and in the course of a year
the magazine Ought to contain articles
about all sorts of these important ac-
tivities.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 181
We work in constant conference; for
it is all team-work. Every man knows
and every man must know what every
other one is doing; and in our confer-
ences we decide what volunteer articles
we shall accept and we make plans for
our outside friends who help us write—
for such articles, for example, as Mr.
Stockbridge went West to write, and as
Professor Orth of Cornell is writing
about the labor war.
It is a cheerful and exhilarating occu-
pation; for we must keep an eye on all
sorts of human activities and meet and
learn from men of all helpful sorts. The
real reward of the editorial life is in the
friends and acquaintances that one has
occasion (and necessity) to make. No
sort of active and useful man or woman
is foreign to our plans or purposes. Of
course not even a much larger group of
men than we are could possibly know
many subjects thoroughly; but each of
us has his own kinds of tasks—One, sub-
182 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
jects of social welfare; another, political
subjects; another, financial and com-
mercial subjects; another, rural life and
education, and so on; and each does his
reading and makes acquaintances that
lead to increasing knowledge of his group
of subjects. Consequently we must go
about the United States and see what
men are doing. The theory is that at
least one editor of the magazine shall
visit every section of the country at
least once a year, and, of course, at
times other countries also. One of the
most pleasing compliments ever paid to
us was said in half jest by a man who
had led a closet-life: “Why, you really
regard Wyoming and Louisiana as parts
of the United States.” The real work
of making a “live” magazine cannot be
done in an office.
There is, therefore, no mystery about
the work: the main thing to be said
about it is that it is work, unceasing,
hard work; but do not forget that it is
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 183
interesting work. If an article does not
interest us, it is pretty sure not to in-
terest the reader; for we are men of
different temperaments, of unanimity
only in ideals and in purpose, men of
different kinds of training, of somewhat
different outlooks on life. Yet nothing
has ever appeared in the magazine about
which we had any serious disagreement;
and, of course, no man ever writes any-
thing that he does not profoundly be-
lieve. The note of sincerity is as neces-
sary in a magazine as it is in a man.
You can't make any genuine periodical
with “literary operatives.” If we should
encounter subjects or plans or policies
about which there was radical disagree-
ment, we should, I presume, leave them
alone. So far we have not encountered
them.
Nor is the editorial department the
whole magazine. There is still wider
team-work throughout the publishing
house of which it is a part. It is coör-
184 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
dinated with other activities, to the
benefit of all. The other owners of the
magazine at times contribute most help-
fully to the stock of editorial ideas.
There is a luncheon on every Wednes-
day at which all the editors and all
the owners sit down to talk over the
WoRLD'S WORK. One day the talk may
turn on editorial subjects, another day
on the financial condition of the busi-
ness, another day on the manufacture
of it, on another day on the advertising
department, on another day on all these
subjects. There are no secrets that one
department or group keeps from the
other. Such conferences would be of
no value if they were not open and frank;
and there is no opinion or suggestion
ever held back for fear of anybody's dis-
approval. The atmosphere is as free as
any group of men can make and keep
it; for not a man has to do with the
magazine who has any other interest to
serve or any other business to engage
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 185
him. You could not make a helpful and
interesting periodical as an incident to
any other business or “interest”; and
many a one has failed by such an effort.
Of course, there is not unanimity
about every detail in so large a body of
men. Why should there be? For in-
stance, when the political campaign came
on last year, the policy of the magazine
was determined by the editor, who is
the court of 1ast appeal, if there be any
occasion for appeal. There were in the
group some men who differed with the
political policy of the magazine. What
better corrective influence against sheer
partisanship could be devised? This, I
am sure, was a lucky circumstance—
lucky in one instance at least; for when
an article in proof was read by a dis-
senter he made the valuable criticism
that it was less than fair to his side. The
unnecessary cruelty of the criticism was
omitted, and the magazine was the bet-
ter for it—at least in temper.
I86 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
Did I not warn you that all this is
dull? I mean that the telling of it is
uninteresting, for the doing of it is al-
ways interesting. For example: We
described the farm demonstration work
in the Southern States whereby two
bales of cotton were made to grow where
one bale grew before; and a gentleman
in North Dakota read about it and set
to work to have similar instruction given
to the farmers in his state, at a cost of
more than $80,000 a year. A mission-
ary in India read about the eradication
of the hookworm in our semi-tropical
regions and he wrote for information.
It happened that he lived at the place
with which the American Hookworm
Commission most desired to get into
communication. A man came to this
office one day and said: “You had a
little article about farming profits in a
certain part of the country last year.
I read it and said that you had been
imposed on. But I had occasion to
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 187
visit the place last month and I in-
vested $100,000 there. You didn't tell
the story half strong enough.” There
are now in this office letters from men
who say they have more than a million
dollars to invest in farms, asking Sug-
gestions about soils and climates and
markets and such like things. (One
man, by the way, gives his whole time
and takes much of the time of the edi-
tors, too, in answering questions about
every conceivable thing.) Of course,
many millions of dollars are invested in
conservative securities on the advice of
the financial department; and many
magazines imitate the WORLD'S WORK
in maintaining such a department.
But these are obvious, concrete, re-
portable results. A better result is the
influence on public opinion of some of
the policies emphasized by the WORLD's
WORK. Sometimes these are not popu-
lar. Take the abuse of the pension-roll
as an example. There has been a de-
188 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
cided stiffening of opinion and of cour-
age since Mr. Hale's and Mr. Charles
Francis Adams's articles were published
in the WORLD'S WORK two years ago.
|Many newspapers that had before been
uninformed now demand that the roll
be made public and thereby purged of
unworthy names; and the opposition
in Congress to “any old pension” scheme
grows stronger yearly.
Evidences multiply of the effect of
educational articles that the magazine
has published. A description of a good
school always suggests the same plan to
persons in another part of the country.
This sort of thing has occurred time
and again. The WORLD'S WORK has
found a country preacher or a country
teacher who did his job so well that
there was inspiration for others in the
story of it. As soon as a description of
such a man's Or woman's work was pub-
lished they began to receive invitations
to lecture and presently they found
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 189
themselves so famous that they were
called from their fields of labor to Or-
ganize society in general. This is one
of the misfortunes of fame.
The results that justify the maga-
zine's existence are what educational
folk, who love long words, call “inspira-
tional.” It carries to one man or to
one group of men a story of what some-
body else is doing and gives fruitful sug-
gestions. For instance, an account of
Dr. Dowling's health-train and of his
energetic work toward the cleaning up
of Louisiana set boards of health and
sanitary officers at work in many other
communities.
The first quality required to make a
helpful magazine is a balanced judg-
ment, an intellectual inability to be
drawn off into the advocacy of any fad
or cure-all, or to allow one's personal
tastes and particular enthusiasms to
dominate the whole periodical—in a
word, the refusal to become sensational.
190 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
“Movements” are necessary and desir-
able in the free life of the United States;
but the free life of the United States is
a very complex thing, and no “move-
ment” carries all salvation with it.
Good judgment calls for the reporting
of all sorts of good work but for very
wary acceptance of all men's burning
enthusiasms. Common sense is the most
useful quality that you can get into an
editorial office.
In the execution of the task of mak-
ing a magazine, the greatest practical
difficulty is the difficulty of finding men
who can write with simple directness
and still put the glow of conviction and
of “human interest” in their writing. I
have on my desk now this report from
one of my associates on a manuscript:
“This is a horrible example of what a college pro-
fessor can do to obscure a good idea by means of a
magazine article. The idea itself is interesting and
it emerges first on page 8.”
Every word of this report is true. The
first seven pages are dull commonplace
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 191
—the same sort of things that thou-
sands of writers have written as the first
seven pages of a manuscript about thou-
sands of subjects. One of these days we
shall have post-graduate schools of writ-
ing at our universities, or somewhere
else, where young men will be taught to
omit at least half of what they feel
moved to write “in a state of nature”
—to present their messages directly and
briefly, with charm and enthusiasm. It
required ten years full of many experi-
ments to get together (out of twenty or
more men) the four who do the main
work of making this magazine.
At intervals, we have asked blocks of
our subscribers what parts or qualities
of the WoRLD's WORK they think most
highly of and what they find least help-
ful, and we have asked for suggestions.
Many corrective and suggestive com-
ments come, but few constructive ideas
—naturally enough, for it is not the
business of men who buy the magazine
192 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
to make it. But those who are kind
enough to answer such inquiries do a
great service by giving the editors, some-
times unconsciously, the point of view
of the readers that they are trying to
serve. It is always helpful to meet and
to talk with or to read letters from such
persons.
The truth is, the successful editing of
such a magazine is in reality the inter-
pretation of the people, their revelation
to themselves; and this cannot be done
except by men who know the reading
and thoughtful people of the whole
country, or as many of them as possible.
This is what with all humility and
earnestness we are trying to do, regard-
ing the magazine as an instrument of
reporting the people's activities and
thought in the widest and most helpful
and sympathetic way, with directness
of speech and with a joyful confidence
in the soundness of American life. This
leaves no room for merely personal jour-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 103
nalism nor for becoming the organ of
any “cause” or “party” or man or doc-
trine or school. The whole American
people is a good master to serve. But
any sect or section or party of them
would be a tyrannical master. The
evangelist has his uses but they are not
the highest uses. .
The American public is surfeited with
magazines; for, as a business, the mak-
ing of them is greatly overdone. Many
lead a precarious life. Many are bank-
rupt. Many more, whose purpose is
chiefly commercial, try this tack and
then that; for profitable sensations
enough cannot be found to maintain
them. The public does not show the
nicest discrimination—in fact, there are
many publics; but in the long run the
half-dozen or more magazines that serve
thoughtful people year in and year out
by honest work find permanent friends,
whom it is a great privilege and joy to
serve. One of the most pleasing facts
194 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
about the WORLD'S WORK is that a
much larger percentage of its subscrib-
ers renew their subscriptions year after
year than is usual with most magazines.
This is a guarantee of sufficient stability
to make us sure that we are doing some
service and that it is a natural and nor-
mal and not a merely spasmodic Service.
And on those rare occasions when it
seems no violation of good taste to write
about the magazine (and it is hoped
that this is such an occasion) the one
thought that comes first and comes
strongest is gratitude for the apprecia-
tion that has been shown year after year
by readers in all the walks of life. You
may see in our files a letter from an il-
literate carpenter in Maine close beside
a 1etter from a President of the United
States and a president of a university,
and a banker and a farmer—from all
sorts of men—saying that they find the
WORLD'S WORK worth while. That's
reward enough; and what we are try-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 105
ing to do is to deserve the thanks that
men like these send us, by a real service
in reporting the significant activities of
our many-sided life with the hopeful
and helpful spirit that every well-bal-
anced man must have when he studies
it in the large. To know the American
people in our time is a great privilege
and a constant inspiration; and we do
on Occasion—as on a New Year—feel
that such work brings us a realization
of the majesty of our democracy.
On Writing
ON WRITING
An article which appeared in the ATLANTIC
MONTHLY's 50th Anniversary Number, November,
1907, under the title, “The Writer and the Uni-
versity.” -
I
I write this paper to show, if I can,
why men and women who propose to
write for a living ought to have the
benefit of professional training, as men
and women may now have professional
training who propose to practice any
Other art; why post-graduate profes-
sional schools for writers at our univer-
sities would make good writing more
common, by dignifying and improving
the everyday practice of the art; why
such schools of practice, vigorously con-
ducted, would give new life also to the
literary studies in our universities; and
I99
200 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
why they would, I think, make more
common among the educated class a
good use of both written and spoken
language.
I may prevent confusion of thought
by saying at the outset that I am not
now writing about what the schoolmen
usually call literature, nor about men
and women of “genius.” I am writing
only about those who write every day
or every week for their livelihood, and
about what we generally call current
literature. I pray you before reading
farther, then, to set aside in a special
class all young persons whose writings
you are sure will be read with joy fifty
years hence, or even five years hence;
for they, I grant, may be pardoned for
ignoring teachers. Nor have I anything
to say about those persons who have
contracted the divine afflatus, nor those
for whom “professors of English” pre-
dict brilliant careers because they have
written excellent undergraduate themes.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 201
I have in mind only the big volume of
writing that is done every day in the
United States by journeymen writers,
and the need of training us to do our
work better, us who regard Our trade as
an honest and difficult Occupation at
which we wish to excel.
Such journeymen's writing has now
come to be an important trade for sev-
eral reasons. In the first place, journey-
men writers write almost everything
that the American people read. They
write our advertisements; they write
our newspapers; they write Our maga-
zines; they write our novels; they write
our scientific books; they write travels
and adventures for us; they write our
histories and biographies; they write
our textbooks,—all our books of instruc-
tion from almanacs to encyclopaedias.
Leaving out the reading that is done by
a small class and that done by students
chiefly during the period of formal edu-
cation, most of the writing that is read
202 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
in the United States is written by per-
Sons who write for a living; most of it
was written during the last few years,
much of it within the last year, much
of it, in fact, within the last month, and
a good deal of it was written yesterday.
The journeymen writers write almost
all that almost all Americans read. This
is a fact that we love to fool ourselves
about. We talk about “literature” and
we talk about “hack writers,” implying
that the reading that we do is of litera-
ture. The truth all the while is, we read
little else than the writing of the hacks,
—living hacks, that is, men and women
who write for pay. We may hug the
notion that our life and thought are not
really affected by current literature, that
we read the living writers only for utili-
tarian reasons, and that our real intel-
lectual life is fed by the great dead writ-
ers. But our hugging this delusion does
not change the fact that the intellectual
life even of most educated persons, and
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 203
certainly of the mass of the population,
is fed chiefly by the writers of our own
time. Let us hope that the great writ-
ers of the past do set the standards
whereby a few judge the writing of the
present. But, even if this be true, it is
still true also that the intellectual life of
the American people is chiefly shaped
by current writing.
And the writers' craft is now become
a very large craft. In numbers it ranks
perhaps second or third among the pro-
fessions. There are more teachers and
possibly more lawyers than there are
persons who make their living wholly
or in the main part by writing; and
possibly there are as many physicians.
But, if you could count the reporters
and correspondents, the special writers
for the newspapers, the makers of text-
books, the writers for magazines, the
novelists, the playwrights, the writers
of governmental and other public
documents, and all the rest who
204 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
make their living wholly or in the
main part by writing, you would be
astonished to see how large a company
they are.
The craft has come to be a fairly well
paid craft, too. No writers make such
great fortunes as Some lawyers, nor even
such fortunes as some physicians and
surgeons make; but many of them make
more money than most lawyers and
most physicians; and they are better
paid than teachers and preachers. By
sheer economic demand, therefore, writ-
ing as a career is attracting as capable
men and women as most of the other
professions and almost as many of them
as any other. It is an interesting fact,
too, that the earnings of writers during
the last twenty years have increased
faster than the earnings of most of the
other professions. The writers of cur-
rent literature, then, form a craft influ-
ential enough, big enough, and well
enough paid to deserve as careful train-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 205
ing as those who ply the other trades
which we usually call professions.
Regarding the skill and character of
current writers, it is probable that they
fall below the level of lawyers in the ex-
cellence of their craftsmanship, but not
in the character that their work shows,
and that they do no better than physi-
cians and perhaps as badly as teachers
and preachers. Of course they ought
to do a great deal better than teachers
or preachers, because they both teach
and preach to all the people all the time,
and not merely on Sundays or during
the period of school age. Newspaper
writing, of course, runs from very good
to very bad. The most important part
of it, which is the reporter's part, is gen-
erally very bad. Magazine writing is
just shaping itself into a craft. Until a
few years ago it was a side-product of
scholars and men of action. Most of it
was then very proper and stilted, just
as much of it now imitates the vices of
206 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
the newspaper. The American maga-
zine is just finding its power and its
Opportunity, and shaping its character
to definite ends. It is become the
most influential form of current liter-
ature and the chance that it offers for
strong men is just beginning to be under-
stood.
Concerning current book-writing, it is
true, I suppose, that our best novelists
are, as a rule, the best writers of our
time, just as our worst novelists are the
worst. The average quality of writing
in current books is probably higher than
the average was a generation ago, and
surely a very much larger number of
persons write reasonably well than ever
before. But is it not fair to say that a
general view of the whole mass of new
books that come out year by year would
show that as a rule our book writers do
not do a high grade of work? The most
common fault is a lack of form, of order-
liness, and of construction. A certain
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 207
verbal smartness is very common, but
the careful construction of books is rare.
There are two great departments of
current literature that are very badly
written. One is what may be called the
literature of reports and documents,
from commercial reports to governmen-
tal documents. The waste in printing
these, if it could be saved, would be
enough, I am sure, richly to endow a
professional school of writing at half
the colleges in the land. So badly are
governmental reports and documents
written, as a rule, that the public sel-
dom finds out what the government,
municipal, state, or national, is doing.
This is one cause of bad political condi-
tions. Large amounts of money are
spent to gather useful information which
is so ill told that it remains practically
unknown. The national government,
for instance, through all its departments
and bureaus at Washington, prints an .
incalculable mass of things at an enor-
208 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
mous cost, which it cannot give away
because they are so ill written that no-
body wants them. Nothing is gained
by this waste of labor and of paper, and
yet nobody seems able to stop it or to
change the “system,” or even to induce
those in authority to employ men to
edit such of these reports as might be
read if they were written with common
intelligibility.
The other department of current lit-
erature that is such “tough” reading
that much of it is valueless is the work
of academic men, the publications of
many Societies, the monographs and
“theses” and “studies” of teachers and
students of our universities, books on
science, on historical subjects, even on
politics and sociology, which fail of their
purpose because they are written with-
out form or style. Some of our aca-
demic men go on year after year piling
up these unreadable things, as the gov-
ernment writers go on piling up their
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 200
unreadable things; and the habit has
become so fixed that they are even held
in esteem for writing unintelligibly. The
public is asked to believe that learning
makes unintelligibility necessary.
A professor of English literature in
one of our universities once brought to
me to publish in this magazine such a
1earned piece of writing. It seemed to
me a pretty dull thing and not impor-
tant, according to my judgment, to any-
body, and not possibly interesting to
more than a handful of special students.
I wrote him this opinion as politely as I
could. He came to see me again and
smilingly took me into his confidence.
“I hardly expected,” he said, “that you
would publish that ‘study’ that I of.
fered you. In fact, I care little about
it myself. I wrote it because my pro-
fessional standing demands that I shall
produce something at certain intervals.
But now I have a piece of writing that
I do take great pride in, and I want you
2Io A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
to publish it without betraying the au-
thorship to any living being. It would
hurt my professional standing if it be-
came known that I wrote this.” It
was a novel!
Well, Scott wrote novels, and Thack-
eray, and Goethe, and Turgénieff, and
some great writers of every modern na-
tion that has a literature. It is truly
often a much debased form of literature
in our day, but the most powerful living
form for all that; and that a professor
of English literature should assume an
apologetic attitude toward it sets a plain
journeyman to thinking. His disserta-
tion was published in one of the learned
organs of his university and duly cata-
logued by title, by subject, and by au-
thor in the library. His novel has, so
far as I know, never been published.
Of course any editor or any publisher
could tell dozens of such experiences to
illustrate how in a didactic and critical
atmosphere a man is forced against his
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 2 II
will to compile burdensome erudition
that is of no value, and is permitted by
the false feeling about him to try his
imagination and creative powers Only
as a secret pleasure. The tragedy of it
is, such a man does not become either a
great scholar or a tolerable novelist. In
the first place, he never learns even the
fundamental graces of an English style.
To return to our poor craft of journey-
men writers, please regard us all as a
class, as a craft, as a profession (call us
what you will). Think of writers for
newspapers, for magazines, writers of
governmental reports, of advertisements,
of novels, of books of information, poets,
—all who make it their business to write
and who earn all or part of their in-
comes by writing; think of us all, if
you can, as you think of any other class
of workers, physicians, or teachers, or
architects, for examples. You will dis-
cover that there is one great difference
between your conception of writers and
212 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
your conception of physicians. Although
you know that there are all kinds of phy-
sicians, good and bad, when I say that a
man is a physician, that fact at once
classifies him in your mind, no matter
how many incompetent physicians there
are. You take it for granted that he
has been trained at a school of medicine,
that he practices his profession in an
orderly way, that he has a certain defi-
nite body of knowledge and a certain
minimum degree of skill. He may be a
skillful or an unskillful physician. But
the bare fact that he is a member of the
profession means something. But, when
I say that a man is a writer, what does
that convey to any mind? an imperti-
nent newspaper reporter, or a gutter
novelist, or a historian, or a professor in
a university? You get no clear-cut no-
tion at all; and you say that there is
no such profession of writing as there is
of physicking people, or of teaching
them, or of preaching to them, or of
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 213
building houses for them. Yet as many
persons earn their livings by writing as
by practicing medicine, and they serve
Society in quite as important ways.
There was a time, not very long ago,
when professional training was not
thought necessary, or at least was not
provided, for the other professions. The
barber bled his patient. The young
lawyer “read law” in the office of an
older lawyer. The engineer learned his
trade in any way he could. Even now
the teacher is just coming to have a
professional standing and consciousness.
All these callings gradually came to
have a definite relation to society and
some dignity of position by special pro-
fessional training. As soon as Oppor-
tunities for such special professional
training were given, a definite body of
knowledge and a definite degree of skill
were required of the best practitioners.
Quacks and incompetents yet flourish,
and they always will. Still, medical
2I4. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
Schools and pedagogical schools find jus-
tification, and they keep raising the
standard of knowledge and of skill. Pro-
fessional writers have yet no standard
or standing, as a class. Why could their
profession not profit by the experience
of these others? r
The successful practice of the writer's
craft, whether as a novelist, a reporter,
an historian, a writer of advertisements
or what not, Surely requires a degree of
experience and professional skill. Yet
our educational institutions do not seem
to be aware of this fact. For instance,
a little while ago I received a letter from
the president of a college asking me to
give “magazine writing” to a gentle-
woman of cultivation who had been
overtaken by misfortune. If he had
asked me to get her a place in grand
opera, he would not have made a more
absurd request. Every year a proces-
sion of young men and women comes
from the colleges to the newspaper of
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 215
fices, the publishing houses, and the
magazine offices, who wish to make
their living by writing. Many of them
bring pathetically simple letters from
their professors of English. They are
ready to begin to instruct or to amuse
the nation, and the professors predict
great things for them. Sometimes, in
utter despair, we who work at current
literature with hammers and anvils say
to them, “Well, you wish to write?”
“Yes.” -
“Go and write, then; nobody will
hinder you. We will buy your writing
and publish it if it be good enough.”
“Oh, but I wish to learn.”
“Well, we are sorry, but we don't
keep school. We must deal in finished
products.”
They must serve, of course, a long ap-
prenticeship and then fall short of doing
as well as they could have been taught
to do; for the masters to whom they
are apprenticed have no time, even if
216 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
they have the skill, to teach them sys-
tematically. They pick up the tricks
of the craft rather than learn its princi-
ples; and in this harum-Scarum, un-
trained way they come in time to write
perhaps half the matter that the Ameri-
can people read. Then these same pro-
fessors of English, and suchlike gentle-
men, who do not themselves write,
complain that our newspapers and maga-
zines and novels are ill written.
Nor is even this the worst of it. Most
of the young men who come thus raw
into the trade come with high aims;
they have literary standards; they have
worthy ambitions. But they soon dis-
cover that the trade is not the making
of “literature.” They have not been
prepared by a reasonable amount of
practice even to understand what writ-
ing, day by day, means. They have
their heads full of “literary”, notions,
which are, as a rule, very false notions.
They are not prepared for the orderly
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 217
practice of a useful art. They hope
rather to do some great piece of work
quickly. They are in a false relation to
work and to life. When the inevitable
disillusion comes, they either lose ambi-
tion and sink into hopeless drudgery, or
they lose their bearings and run off into
“yellow” journalism, where they can
at least do spectacular jobs and earn (for
a little while) more money.
Thus, although many capable and am-
bitious youths come to the doors of the
writers' workshops, so few of them are
properly prepared to begin work or even
look upon it in a proper way,+as young
physicians look upon their work, or as
young lawyers, or as young architects,
—so few come with proper preparation
or in the proper state of mind, that the
demand for honest, capable, trained
journeymen writers is not supplied.
Every editor of a magazine, every editor
of an earnest and worthy newspaper,
every publisher of books, has dozens or
218 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
hundreds of important tasks for which
he cannot find capable men: tasks that
require scholarship, knowledge of sci-
ence, or of politics, or of industry, or of
literature, along with experience in writ-
ing accurately in the language of the
people. The profession is yet a harum-
scarum, rough-and-tumble business into
which men and women come chiefly
from our universities, with academic
superstitions instead of principles; and
every one has to blaze his own way.
And this in a democracy where public
opinion rules congresses and presidents
and courts, and where the machinery
for the proper training of men, one would
think, would be especially adjusted to
the training of those who are to write
the public journals, adjusted to train-
ing at once the judgment and the style
of men who are to write; for even style
requires most excellent good judgment.
We complain, and we complain justly,
of the commercialization of the press
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 219
and, to a degree, of all current litera-
ture. And it would be strange if it had
escaped commercialization in this rush
of industrialism which is the most strik-
ing fact of our time; for all the profes-
sions have to some extent suffered the
same misfortune. But, if the press is
commercialized, it is not the writers who
have commercialized it. They are the
victims of this commercialization. We
have left the writing to be done by those
who lack the strength and the skill that
come from good training, and the forces
of commercialism have found many of
them easy victims. For most men when
they set out to write set out with high
aims. The first impulse that drives men
to their pens is usually a noble impulse.
They wish to teach their fellows. They
wish to win names for themselves. They
wish to exert a good influence. When
they succumb they succumb because
they are weak rather than because they
are depraved. Yet the strong man who
22 o A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
can write well is the man of real power.
He can capture and command the ma-
chinery of publicity. If, then, this great
machinery of publicity is controlled and
used too much by sheer commercial men,
this has come to pass because strong men
have not been trained as good writers. Is
it not true, then, that our universities,
which are justly offended at the com-
mercialization of current literature, have
failed of their duty to prevent it?
For the usual undergraduate practice
of composition and study of the English
language and literature, good enough as
far as they go, go little farther toward
training a boy for writing than the usual
undergraduate courses in mathematics
, go toward training him as an astrono-
mer Or as an engineer. Nor can under-
graduate work do more. There is not
time to do more. Nor has the under-
graduate sufficient maturity to learn
more than the rudiments of so difficult
an art.
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 22 I
II
A proper course of practice and study
for such a professional post-graduate
school could be prepared only by men
who are both good writers and good
teachers, and only after some experi-
ence. But the general principles that
should guide them are obvious. No
student ought to be admitted who has
not such a “general education” and
such maturity as an A. B. degree im-
plies; and only such students ought to
be admitted as mean to make their liv-
ing and their careers by writing, and
only such as show some aptitude for the
art, some facility of expression, some
love of the right use of speech, and who
get joy from its right use.
The teachers in such a professional
school ought to be scholars in literature
and men who have a good sense of right
speech; men, too, who are themselves
writers of some degree of skill, not mere
222 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
lecturers, and not mere scholars. Writ-
ing is an art, and the teaching would be
too theoretical if it were done by men
who are not themselves practitioners of
the art, just as the teaching of painting
would be too theoretical that should be
done by men who cannot paint fairly
well themselves. No man can write well
who has not written a good deal; and I
doubt whether a man could be a success-
ful teacher of good writing who had not
written much.
The main work in such a school would
be practice, just as the main work in a
school for painters or sculptors or musi-
cians must be practice. We should have
to throw away at the gate the notion
that mere scholarship is a sufficient
equipment for a successful writer. For
scholarship alone never made a good
writer; nor did reading alone ever make
one, however close and 1oving commun-
ion a man may have with great writers.
This fallacy lingers in our academic life
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 223
as stubbornly as the dogma of the di-
vine afflatus itself.
Suppose every student were required
to write a thousand words a day,+for
a time narrative, such as biography or
a bit of history; then description, then
argument, then a novel, then a play,
then for a time, instead of tasks in prose,
a sonnet a day or practice in other forms
of verse. A student who should write
a thousand words a day would in a year
of three hundred working days gain such
practice as the writing of three books of
the usual size of a novel would give. In
three years he would have written as
much as nine such books contain. Of
course, his writings would every day
have to undergo the criticism of his
teacher and of his fellows. No teacher
could properly have more than half a
dozen students, and the teacher him-
self ought to write as much as any of
his students. They ought, at times at
least, to write together, and about the
224 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
same subjects. Doubtless it would be
helpful, as Robert Louis Stevenson found
it helpful, sometimes to write in con-
scious imitation of great writers, one
after another.
Of course, there must go along with this
practice definite, well-planned courses of
post-graduate study in language and in
literature. In most post-graduate work
that I know of in the United States such
studies now take the direction given by
the philologists or the historians. Theirs
is a science, not an art. The results of
philological study are necessary for a
good writer; but, if he get himself deeply
entangled in philology for its own sake,
he may become a great scholar, but the
chances are that he will never learn the
art of writing. To the philologist a word
is material for historical study. To a
writer a word is an instrument of ex-
pression, a tool. He must know his
tools well to use them well, but he can-
not give himself to the study of the his-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 225
tory of tools. The same may be said of
the historical study of literature. Of
the great literature itself no writer who
wishes to do his best can be ignorant.
He must steep himself in it. He must
continue to live with it; for no man
can write his best who does not read
great writers constantly. He will gain
incalculably, too, if he can read the
ancient as well as the modern.
By the time a young man, in such a
post-graduate school, had written the
equivalent of eight or ten books in prose
and verse, under the guidance of a mas-
ter who had himself written perhaps as
much, and with the criticism of his fel-
lows, and had in the meantime also con-
stantly read masters of style, he would
at least know whether the writing life is
likely to offer the career that he seeks
and whether the divine afflatus blows
toward him. He would have shown
some degree of earnestness; he would
have worked out certain definite prin-
226 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
ciples of the craft; he would have ac-
quired a certain degree of skill as an
artificer in words and in the orderly ar-
rangement of thought; and he would be
likely to begin the practice of the craft
with a clearer understanding than he
had when he began his professional train-
ing of what the career that he has
chosen demands of a man,—in resolu-
tion, in ideals, in practice, and in char-
acter. And this also surely is true: for
them that are fitted by temperament
and by capacity for such a calling, these
years of training the productive facul-
ties, these years of progressive effort at
creation, would be happy and inspiring
years. I have never known a success-
ful and earnest writer of current litera-
ture who did not wish that he had had
such training.
Indeed, it is hard to understand why
such schools were not long ago Opened
at our universities. Those who write
for their living are the only large class
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 227
of skilled workmen for whom profes-
sional schools are not provided. Our
universities train men not only for the
old professions, but they train them to
be dentists, pharmacists, foresters, vet-
erinarians, and sociologists. Although
nobody supposes that a boy as SOon as
he finishes his undergraduate life is pre-
pared to begin work at any of these
callings, he is supposed even by our edu-
cational masters to be prepared to begin
work as a writer. These youth surely
have as good a claim to professional
training as those who wish to practice
these other professions. Nor is there
any doubt about the demand for such
training. Any university that should
open such a professional school with
well-equipped teachers would have more
applicants than the school could prop-
erly receive; and, after any one of our
principal universities establishes such a
school, others will soon follow the exam-
ple. The demand for those young men,
228 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
too, in the working world, who had credi-
tably finished a three years' course in
such a school would far outrun the sup-
ply for many years to come.
III
There are other reasons for post-gradu-
ate, professional practice - schools for
young scholars who wish to learn to
write, and even stronger reasons than
those that I have named. For so far I
have written only of the needs of the
writing craft. But do our universities
themselves not need such schools for
their own sake and for the better ad-
justment of their work and influence to
our democratic society?
The dominant method of training in
the university work of our time is by re-
search. The higher academic degrees
are given for research work. Men are
chosen for college faculties who have
won these higher degrees. Their men-
tal habit and their methods of teaching
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 229
are shaped by this method of training.
This is the right method of acquiring
facts and of acquiring skill in acquiring
facts, for it is the scientific method.
But, while it is the proper method for
scientific work and training, it is not
the proper method for the teaching of
an art. You cannot apply it to paint-
ing, to sculpture, to music, or to the
great art of writing.
But the method of training by re-
search has so dominated our university
activity that the teaching of the arts
has been neglected. Our higher teach-
ing of English has run to philology; our
higher teaching of literature has run to
such tasks as the tracing of mediaeval
legends from One language to another.
These are scientific pursuits; and one
result of their domination of university
methods is a neglect of the art of ex-
pression, even a sort of contempt for it.
You will find this contempt in our schools
of science. A scientific man who can
230 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
write well—write, I mean, in language
that everybody can understand—is
looked at by his fellows with suspicion.
He is considered a “popularizer,” a man
who plays to the galleries. It is not
considered good form to write well. It
is a mark of weakness to cultivate style,
or to think about methods of expression,
except to make sure of accuracy.
We can see how this neglectful atti-
tude toward good writing has worked
sad harm to many of our historical stu-
dents, for example. There have been
published during the last ten or fifteen
years a large number of books about
the history of the United States, most
of them by historical scholars who work
in our colleges and universities. They
are historical investigators, scientific
men. Their first aim—and it is prop-
erly the first aim of any man who has
to do with history—is to make sure of
accuracy, to trace every statement to
an original source. So far so good. But
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 231
when they come to writing history
they come to a task of another kind.
So long as they are investigating facts
it is proper and necessary that every
fact should be set down in a row in its
proper relation to every fact that comes
before and to every fact that goes after
it, and then put into a chain. In
investigation one fact is of as much
importance as any other fact, and a
chain is no stronger than its weakest
link.
But, as soon as the writing of history
begins, one fact is no longer of as much
importance as another fact. It is still
necessary to be accurate, and no fact
may be set down wrong. But sheer ac-
curacy is not enough to make a good
narrative. To make a good narrative is
an art. The historical investigator must
now become an artist. He must not
give all his facts equal emphasis. He
cannot even use all his facts. For a
work of art is often made effective quite
232 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
as much by what is left out of it as by
what is put into it.
But many of our historical students
hold the art of expression in almost as
low esteem as other scientific men hold
it. They think it a mark of weakness
to try to write well. They regard it as
their sole business to be accurate. They
do not regard it as their business to be
graceful. They do not understand that
the task that they have in hand as writ-
ers of history is an artistic and not a
scientific task. They do not see that
they must now make pictures,-produce
artistic effects. They ought not, as his–
torical writers, to be making mere chains
of their facts. They ought to group
them, putting a strong emphasis on the
big facts, a light emphasis on the little
facts. They must have a strong light
here, a shadow there. They must re-
lieve their narrative by descriptions.
They must put men into their proces-
sion of events. The reader must under-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 233
stand the historical characters that he
reads about, and see them as clearly as
we see men in the best portraits. He
must hear them talk and come to know
them. The writing of history is not a
scientific pursuit: it is an artistic task.
Thus (I hope that I do not write too
harsh a judgment) the art of writing
well has come to be much neglected in
our educational life; its value has come
to be misunderstood. It has, to a de-
gree, even come to be despised. So, far
from being cultivated, except in rudi-
mentary undergraduate work, it is left
almost to take care of itself. The re-
sult is slovenly expressed erudition. The
result is a too low value set on good
speech or good writing even by the edu-
cated class. The result is a great gap
between our scholars and the rest of the
community. The result is that men of
learning do not deliver to the people the
knowledge that is gained by science and
by historical study. The result is a de-
234. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
tachment of our universities from the
life of the people, and their loss of con-
trol and even of authority over the in-
tellectual life of the nation; for the
medium of communication is neglected.
We hear much of the cultural value
of this study or of that. No subject
has a very great cultural value that is
studied in a dumb way; for is the art
of expression not the basis as well as
the medium of the best culture? If the
best method of acquiring facts is the
method of research, surely the best
method of acquiring culture, of acquir-
ing skill in any art, the best method of
developing a man for creative (and not
merely acquisitive) work is the method
of practice, and not exclusively the
method of investigation nor yet the
method of criticism, LI mean that kind
of criticism which men try to exalt into
a department of literature, as it is not
and never can be. .
After a man has written a book and
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 235
published it, criticism of it seldom helps
him, unless he have made errors of fact
that may be corrected. Helpful criti-
cism is a personal and friendly and in-
timate service that can be best done in
private; and public criticism usually
hardens a writer in his wrong ways by
arousing his resentment. The idea that
mere criticism of literature will set up a
standard whereby men will do their own
work well is fallacious; for any standard
so wrought out and set up soon becomes
remote and theoretical, if it be disasso-
ciated from practice. It is at best a
sort of secondhand knowledge. It does
little to lift the 1evel of the achievement
of young men themselves. The time to
criticise writing, for artistic improve-
ment, is before it is published; and the
only criticism that helps a man to write
better is his own criticism and that of
fellow workmen while he is still writing.
Yet it is chiefly by such criticism or by
the criticism of literature in general that
236 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
our universities seek to train youth in
literature. If the energy and the subtlety
that are given to the criticism of dead
writers—in the vain effort to make criti-
cism a living part of literature—were
spent in efforts at production (teachers
and pupils writing together and severely
criticising one another as they write), a
working and inspiring standard in pro-
duction would be set up.
Moreover (and this is the most serious
matter of all), where literature is taught
by the historical method and by the
critical method and by the method of
research, to the practical exclusion of
the method of severe and continuous
practice in writing, in such an intel-
lectual atmosphere the feeling grows and
becomes at last a conviction, that litera-
ture is a closed chapter of human experi-
ence, and that it has all been written;
and men forget—young men do not even
find out—that literature is a continu-
ous expression of every phase of human
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 237
experience in every period, that it must
be continuous, that every generation
must contribute to it, ill or well, whether
it know it or not; that literature must
be written in the present and in the fu-
ture, and that no man can tell when a
great outburst of it will come, or who
will write it, or what forms it will take,
or whether it will even be recognized
when it appears. Youth in our training
do not have that feeling of expectancy
in literature, that bounding hope, which
youth ought to have as a right of its
eagerness of spirit; for we do not whet
their minds for actual experiment with
their own creative impulses. Do we not
rather overawe them with the greatness
of the past and discourage them by hope-
lessness of the present? Such is the in-
evitable intellectual result of exalting
the function of those useful drudges, the
commentator and the critic, over the
creative impulse itself. Vigorous efforts
in the practice of any art are necessary
238 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
to keep alive a keen appreciation of that
art. Vigorous efforts to do good writing
are necessary to implant and to keep
really alive a proper appreciation of great
literature. This is, in fact, the only
way to teach or to study great literature
SO as to make it a vital and not a mere
theoretical force in men's lives, the
only way to keep the stream of litera-
ture flowing clear and strong, the only
way to keep alive the consciousness that
it flows all the time, shallow or deep,
muddy or clear, do what we will. For
men study most lovingly and profoundly
what they themselves wish to do or to
imitate or to live by. -
Thus a plea for the training of the
poor, honest “hack” leads to a plea for
a more vigorous and direct study of
literature in our universities, study by
sustained practice, which is the coun-
terpart of the study of science by re-
search. For the study of literature—of
the “humanities”—does it not need in-
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 239
vigorating? Is not the imitation by our
teachers of literature of the more vigor-
ous scientific men a confession of a lapse
from the place that they once held in
the training of youth? Have they not
lost something of their rightful influence
in making “educated” men cultivated
men and in keeping alive among the
educated class a proper appreciation of
good literature? And has this loss of
influence of the “cultural” studies not
had much to do with the neglect both
of good speech and of good writing by
this generation of Americans? And has
this in turn not made the way easier for
all the spectacular quacks in current
literature? And has this loss of literary
power not come because our teachers of
literature have forsaken the high labori-
ous method of practice and substituted
for it the scientific teacher's method of
research?
I verily believe that vigorous post-
graduate schools for the professional
24o A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
training of writers would attract a num-
ber of our most capable youth, would
put a new life into literary study at our
colleges, by setting up a high working
standard instead of merely theoretical
standards, would lift the practice and
dignify the calling of the professional
writer, and would bring our academic
life into a more helpful relation to the
production of literature and build up
the speech of the people. It might again
become the mark of an educated Ameri-
can gentleman that he should write well,
and a test of an American scholar that
he should be more than a vast, dumb
Teutonic voracity,+be also a man of
Some gifts and graces in the democracy
in which he lives, a democracy whose in-
tellectual masters yet are masters of the
people's speech.
IV
Of course there are objections and
difficulties. Many educated men do not
believe that good writing can be taught
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 24.1
by any such direct effort. The style is
the man. Therefore, as the man is, so
will his style be. This is the same as to
say that you need not bother with na-
ture's handiwork. Those that are born
to write need no teaching: those that
are born unable to write cannot be
taught. Old Divine Afflatus dies hard.
Many contend, too, that the usual un-
dergraduate theme work and the usual
study of the old thing called Rhetoric
are all that you can do in the way of
direct aid to young writers. They main-
tain that you can teach men to write
only by causing them to read the great
masters of style. They think that it is
wholly a question of intellectual breed-
ing and association. Men who grow up
with a knowledge of the great writers
and learn to love good reading will, they
say, learn to write well, at least as well
as anybody could teach them. That
objection is easy to answer. Simply
gather your facts. Make a list of the
242 A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
best-read persons you know and set down
opposite every name the writings of every
one of them, and you will be surprised
to find how few of them have written
much, and even more surprised to find
of how little importance to the world
most of the writing is that they have
done.
The truth is, if the habit of merely
acquiring knowledge be cultivated in the
formative time of life, too much to the
neglect of the faculties of creation and
of expression, these faculties of expres-
sion become atrophied, and they are
never used. We have all known schol-
arly men who talked all their lives of
what they were soon going to write, and
who went on acquiring but never wrote.
I do not mean to say that the lives of
such men were misspent; but I do mean
to say that we cannot depend on such
men to do our writing. Those whose
acquisitive faculties only are used in
their youth are likely to use only these
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 243
same faculties in their manhood, and
they seldom do creative work. They
at best become commentators and ex-
pounders.
Another objection is that young men
who are just out of college do not know
anything to write about, that good writ-
ing requires knowledge and a good deal
of experience of life. Yes, but these
same young men who would gladly be
trained to write will write without train-
ing; and surely a three years' course of
practice and study would not leave them
more ignorant of facts than it found
them. It ought to strengthen their judg-
ment and to train them in methods of
acquiring facts while they are practicing
their art.
It is said, too, that the teachers in
such schools would come to be mere
phrase-makers and rhetoricians. The
man who teaches in such a post-gradu-
ate school ought to be the man of the
greatest intellectual vigor that can be
244. A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION
engaged; for of course he must teach
not only writing but thinking as well,
as every worthy teacher of any subject
must. This objection—that such schools
will become schools of mere rhetoricians
—means that both teachers and pupils
will be weak and lazy. Why they should
be weaker or lazier than the teachers
and pupils of other schools is not plain.
But the most serious difficulty of all
is that Americans lack the conception
of writing as a teachable art, as the
French, for instance, regard it. We re-
gard the great writing of the past as the
product of a sort of divine, unteachable
gift, and the bad writing of the present
as a poor utilitarian trade. We feel,
therefore, that it is useless to try to
train men who have supernatural gifts,
if such men ever come again; and that
it is beneath the dignity of universities,
which train veterinarians and sociolo-
gists, to train men to do the slap-dash
work of writing for a living. To change
A PUBLISHER'S CONFESSION 245
this point of view—that is the very gist
of the problem.
The very purpose of such a proposal
as I make is to cause young men to look
upon writing as a useful art, an art in
which men may be trained as they are
trained in any other art, so that slap-
dash journalism and all other bad writ-
ing may, at Some time, cease to be tol-
erated, and so that those who write
what all the people read shall be honestly
trained craftsmen of the pen who do
their work worthily. Then, I fancy,
literature will really take care of itself.
Surely it is true that whatever influence
increases the skill and lifts the pride and
the dignity of any craft, strengthens the
character even of its strongest men and
builds up the character even of its weak-
est men; and every such influence makes
that craft a better force in the world.
*-J *...º. sº
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UNIVERSITY OF MICH
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