The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
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William Dean Howells >> The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
At one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the
author's gains by subscription publication, and one very
well-known American author prospered fabulously in that way. The
percentage offered by the subscription houses was only about half
as much as that paid by the trade, but the sales were so much
greater that the author could very well afford to take it. Where
the book-dealer sold ten, the book-agent sold a hundred; or at
least he did so in the case of Mark Twain's books; and we all
thought it reasonable he could do so with ours. Such of us as
made experiment of him, however, found the facts illogical. No
book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except
Mr. Clemens's books, and I think these went because the
subscription public never knew what good literature they were.
This sort of readers, or buyers, were so used to getting
something worthless for their money, that they would not spend it
for artistic fiction, or indeed for any fiction all, except Mr.
Clemens's, which they probably supposed bad. Some good books of
travel had a measurable success through the book agents, but not
at all the success that had been hoped for; and I believe now the
subscription trade again publishes only compilations, or such
works as owe more to the skill of the editor than the art of the
writer. Mr. Clemens himself no longer offers his books to the
public in that way.
It is not common, I think, in this country, to publish on the
half-profits system, but it is very common in England, where,
owing probably to the moisture in the air, which lends a fairy
outline to every prospect, it seems to be peculiarly alluring.
One of my own early books was published there on these terms,
which I accepted with the insensate joy of the young author in
getting any terms from a publisher. The book sold, sold every
copy of the small first edition, and in due time the publisher's
statement came. I did not think my half of the profits was very
great, but it seemed a fair division after every imaginable cost
had been charged up against my poor book, and that frail venture
had been made to pay the expenses of composition, corrections,
paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies. The
wonder ought to have been that there was anything at all coming
to me, but I was young and greedy then, and I really thought
there ought to have been more. I was disappointed, but I made
the best of it, of course, and took the account to the junior
partner of the house which employed me, and said that I should
like to draw on him for the sum due me from the London
publishers. He said, Certainly; but after a glance at the
account he smiled and said he supposed I knew how much the sum
was? I answered, Yes; it was eleven pounds nine shillings, was
not it? But I owned at the same time that I never was good at
figures, and that I found English money peculiarly baffling. He
laughed now, and said, It was eleven shillings and nine pence.
In fact, after all those charges for composition, corrections,
paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies,
there was a most ingenious and wholly surprising charge of ten
per cent. commission on sales, which reduced my half from pounds
to shillings, and handsomely increased the publisher's half in
proportion. I do not now dispute the justice of the charge. It
was not the fault of the half-profits system, it was the fault of
the glad young author who did not distinctly inform himself of
its mysterious nature in agreeing to it, and had only to reproach
himself if he was finally disappointed.
But there is always something disappointing in the accounts of
publishers, which I fancy is because authors are strangely
constituted, rather than because publishers are so. I will
confess that I have such inordinate expectations of the sale of
my books which I hope I think modestly of, that the sales
reported to me never seem great enough. The copyright due me, no
matter how handsome it is, appears deplorably mean, and I feel
impoverished for several days after I get it. But then, I ought
to add that my balance in the bank is always much less than I
have supposed it to be, and my own checks, when they come back to
me, have the air of having been in a conspiracy to betray me.
No, we literary men must learn, no matter how we boast ourselves
in business, that the distress we feel from our publisher's
accounts is simply idiopathic; and I for one wish to bear my
witness to the constant good faith and uprightness of publishers.
It is supposed that because they have the affair altogether in
their hands they are apt to take advantage in it; but this does
not follow, and as a matter of fact they have the affair no more
in their own hands than any other business man you have an open
account with. There is nothing to prevent you from looking at
their books, except your own innermost belief and fear that their
books are correct, and that your literature has brought you so
little because it has sold so little.
The author is not to blame for his superficial delusion to the
contrary, especially if he has written a book that has set
everyone talking, because it is of a vital interest. It may be
of a vital interest, without being at all the kind of book people
want to buy; it may be the kind of book that they are content to
know at second hand; there are such fatal books; but hearing so
much, and reading so much about it, the author cannot help hoping
that it has sold much more than the publisher says. The
publisher is undoubtedly honest, however, and the author had
better put away the comforting question of his integrity.
The English writers seem largely to suspect their publishers (I
cannot say with how much reason, for my English publisher is
Scotch, and I should be glad to be so true a man as I think him);
but I believe that American authors, when not flown with
flattering reviews, as largely trust theirs. Of course there are
rogues in every walk of life. I will not say that I ever
personally met them in the flowery paths of literature, but I
have heard of other people meeting them there, just as I have
heard of people seeing ghosts, and I have to believe in both the
rogues and the ghosts, without the witness of my own senses. I
suppose, upon such grounds mainly, that there are wicked
publishers, but in the case of our books that do not sell, I am
afraid that it is the graceless and inappreciative public which
is far more to blame than the wickedest of the publishers. It is
true that publishers will drive a hard bargain when they can, or
when they must; but there is nothing to hinder an author from
driving a hard bargain, too, when he can, or when he must; and it
is to be said of the publisher that he is always more willing to
abide by the bargain when it is made than the author is; perhaps
because he has the best of it. But he has not always the best of
it; I have known publishers too generous to take advantage of the
innocence of authors; and I fancy that if publishers had to do
with any race less diffident than authors, they would have won a
repute for unselfishness that they do not now enjoy. It is
certain that in the long period when we flew the black flag of
piracy there were many among our corsairs on the high seas of
literature who paid a fair price for the stranger craft they
seized; still oftener they removed the cargo, and released their
capture with several weeks' provision; and although there was
undoubtedly a good deal of actual throat-cutting and scuttling,
still I feel sure that there was less of it than there would have
been in any other line of business released to the unrestricted
plunder of the neighbor. There was for a long time even a comity
among these amiable buccaneers, who agreed not to interfere with
each other, and so were enabled to pay over to their victims some
portion of the profit from their stolen goods. Of all business
men publishers are probably the most faithful and honorable, and
are only surpassed in virtue when men of letters turn business
men.
Publishers have their little theories, their little
superstitions, and their blind faith in the great god Chance,
which we all worship. These things lead them into temptation and
adversity, but they seem to do fairly well as business men, even
in their own behalf. They do not make above the usual
ninety-five per cent. of failures, and more publishers than
authors get rich. I have known several publishers who kept their
carriages, but I have never known even one author to keep his
carriage on the profits of his literature, unless it was in some
modest country place where one could take care of one's own
horse. But this is simply because the authors are so many, and
the publishers are so few. If we wish to reverse their
positions, we must study how to reduce the number of authors and
increase the number of publishers; then prosperity will smile our
way.
VIII.
Some theories or superstitions publishers and authors share
together. One of these is that it is best to keep your books all
in the hands of one publisher if you can, because then he can
give them more attention ad sell more of them. But my own
experience is that when my books were in the hands of three
publishers they sold quite as well as when one had them; and a
fellow author whom I approached in question of this venerable
belief, laughed at it. This bold heretic held that it was best
to give each new book to a new publisher, for then the fresh man
put all his energies into pushing it; but if you had them all
together, the publisher rested in a vain security that one book
would sell another, and that the fresh venture would revive the
public interest in the stale ones. I never knew this to happen,
and I must class it with the superstitions of the trade. It may
be so in other and more constant countries, but in our fickle
republic, each last book has to fight its own way to public
favor, much as if it had no sort of literary lineage. Of course
this is stating it rather largely, and the truth will be found
inside rather than outside of my statement; but there is at least
truth enough in it to give the young author pause. While one is
preparing to sell his basket of glass, he may as well ask himself
whether it is better to part with all to one dealer or not; and
if he kicks it over, in spurning the imaginary customer who asks
the favor of taking entire stock, that will be his fault, and not
the fault of the question.
However, the most important question of all with the man of
letters as a man of business, is what kind of book will sell the
best of itself, because, at the end of the ends, a book sells
itself or does not sell at all; kissing, after long ages of
reasoning and a great deal of culture, still goes by favor, and
though innumerable generations of horses have been led to water,
not one horse has yet been made to drink. With the best, or the
worst, will in the world, no publisher can force a book into
acceptance. Advertising will not avail, and reviewing is
notoriously futile. If the book does not strike the popular
fancy, or deal with some universal interest, which need by no
means be a profound or important one, the drums and the cymbals
shall be beaten in vain. The book may be one of the best and
wisest books in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal
in it, the readers of it, and worse yet, the purchasers, will
remain few, though fit. The secret of this, like most other
secrets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the awful keeping of
fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by some lucky chance.
To plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor, is
the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the
unworthiest; and I can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man
of business, counsel the young author to do it. The best that
you can do is to write the book that it gives you the most
pleasure to write, to put as much heart and soul as you have
about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to reach the
heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That,
and that alone, is good business for a man of letters.
The failures in literature are no less mystifying than the
successes, though they are upon the whole not so mortifying. I
have seen a good many of these failures, and I know of one case
so signal that I must speak of it, even to the discredit of the
public. It is the case of a novelist whose work seems to me of
the best that we have done in that sort, whose books represent
our life with singular force and singular insight, and whose
equipment for his art, through study, travel, and the world, is
of the rarest. He has a strong, robust, manly style; his stories
are well knit, and his characters are of the flesh and blood
complexion which we know in our daily experience; and yet he has
failed to achieve one of the first places in our literature; if I
named his name here, I am afraid that it would be quite unknown
to the greatest part of my readers. I have never been able to
account for his want of success, except through the fact that his
stories did not please women, though why they did not, I cannot
guess. They did not like them for the same reason that they did
not like Dr. Fell; and that reason was quite enough for them. It
must be enough for him, I am afraid; but I believe that if this
author had been writing in a country where men decided the fate
of books, the fate of his books would have been different.
The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United
States the fate of a book is in the hands of the women. It is
the women with us who have the most leisure, and they read the
most books. They are far better educated, for the most part,
than our men, and their tastes, if not their minds, are more
cultivated. Our men read the newspapers, but our women read the
books; the more refined among them read the magazines. If they
do not always know what is good, they do know what pleases them,
and it is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is
no appeal from them. To go from them to the men would be going
from a higher to a lower court, which would be honestly surprised
and bewildered, if the thing were possible. As I say, the author
of light literature, and often the author of solid literature,
must resign himself to obscurity unless the ladies choose to
recognize him. Yet it would be impossible to forecast their
favor for this kind or that. Who could prophesy it for another,
who guess it for himself? We must strive blindly for it, and
hope somehow that our best will also be our prettiest; but we
must remember at the same time that it is not the ladies' man who
is the favorite of the ladies.
There are of course a few, a very few, of our greatest authors,
who have striven forward to the first place in our Valhalla
without the help of the largest reading-class among us; but I
should say that these were chiefly the humorists, for whom women
are said nowhere to have any warm liking, and who have generally
with us come up through the newspapers, and have never lost the
favor of the newspaper readers. They have become literary men,
as it were, without the newspapers' readers knowing it; but those
who have approached literature from another direction, have won
fame in it chiefly by grace of the women, who first read them,
and then made their husbands and fathers read them. Perhaps,
then, and as a matter of business, it would be well for a serious
author, when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and
probably never will please them, to turn humorous author, and aim
at the countenance of the men. Except as a humorist he certainly
never will get it, for your American, when he is not making
money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it.
IX.
I hope that I have not been hinting that the author who
approaches literature through journalism is not as fine and high
a literary man as the author who comes directly to it, or through
some other avenue; I have not the least notion of condemning
myself by any such judgment. But I think it is pretty certain
that fewer and fewer authors are turning from journalism to
literature, though the entente cordiale between the two
professions seems as great as ever. I fancy, though I may be as
mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that most
journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the
beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young
authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own
thwarted wish to be authors. When an author is once warm in the
saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is
different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no
longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they would
willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise
brought to grief and shame. They are apt to gird at him for his
unhallowed gains, and they would be quite right in this if they
proposed any way for him to live without them; as I have allowed
at the outset, the gains ARE unhallowed. Apparently it is
unseemly for an author or two to be making half as much by their
pens as popular ministers often receive in salary; the public is
used to the pecuniary prosperity of some of the clergy, and at
least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher can always
get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between the
ten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel, and the five
pounds Milton got for his epic. I have always thought Milton was
paid too little, but I will own that he ought not to have been
paid at all, if it comes to that. Again, I say that no man ought
to live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not to the
artist; but as yet there is no means of the artist's living
otherwise, and continuing an artist.
The literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the
newspaper man, generally speaking. I have often thought with
amazement of the kindness shown by the press to our whole
unworthy craft, and of the help so lavishly and freely given to
rising and even risen authors. To put it coarsely, brutally, I
do not suppose that any other business receives so much
gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. It is enormous, the
space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary
announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs,
biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and
incisive attacks made from time to time upon different authors
for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism,
socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. I have sometimes
doubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the
editors gave them, but I have always said this under my breath,
and I have thankfully taken my share of the common bounty. A
curious fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity
seems to have very little to do with an author's popularity,
though ever so much with his notoriety. Those strange
subterranean fellows who never come to the surface in the
newspapers, except for a contemptuous paragraph at long
intervals, outsell the famousest of the celebrities, and secretly
have their horses and yachts and country seats, while immodest
merit is left to get about on foot and look up summer board at
the cheaper hotels. That is probably right, or it would not
happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, like millionairism
and pauperism; but it becomes a question, then, whether the
newspapers, with all their friendship for literature, and their
actual generosity to literary men, can really help one much to
fortune, however much they help one to fame. Such a question is
almost too dreadful, and though I have asked it, I will not
attempt to answer it. I would much rather consider the question
whether if the newspapers can make an author they can also unmake
him, and I feel pretty safe in saying that I do not think they
can. The Afreet once out of the bottle can never be coaxed back
or cudgelled back; and the author whom the newspapers have made
cannot be unmade by the newspapers. They consign him to oblivion
with a rumor that fills the land, and they keep visiting him
there with an uproar which attracts more and more notice to him.
An author who has long enjoyed their favor, suddenly and rather
mysteriously loses it, through his opinions on certain matters of
literary taste, say. For the space of five or six years he is
denounced with a unanimity and an incisive vigor that ought to
convince him there is something wrong. If he thinks it is his
censors, he clings to his opinions with an abiding constance,
while ridicule, obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical
refutation and personal detraction follow unsparingly upon every
expression, for instance, of his belief that romantic fiction is
the highest form of fiction, and that the base, sordid,
photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, Zola,
Hardy, and James, are unworthy a moment's comparison with the
school of Rider Haggard. All this ought certainly to unmake the
author in question, and strew his disjecta membra wide over the
realm of oblivion. But this is not really the effect. Slowly
but surely the clamor dies away, and the author, without
relinquishing one of his wicked opinions, or in anywise showing
himself repentant, remains apparently whole; and he even returns
in a measure to the old kindness: not indeed to the earlier day
of perfectly smooth things, but certainly to as much of it as he
merits.
I would not have the young author, from this imaginary case,
believe that it is well either to court or to defy the good
opinion of the press. In fact, it will not only be better taste,
but it will be better business for him to keep it altogether out
of his mind. There is only one whom he can safely try to please,
and that is himself. If he does this he will very probably
please other people; but if he does not please himself he may be
sure that he will not please them; the book which he has not
enjoyed writing, no one will enjoy reading. Still, I would not
have him attach too little consequence to the influence of the
press. I should say, let him take the celebrity it gives him
gratefully but not too seriously; let him reflect that he is
often the necessity rather than the ideal of the paragrapher, and
that the notoriety the journalists bestow upon him is not the
measure of their acquaintance with his work, far less his
meaning. They are good fellows, those poor, hard-pushed fellows
of the press, but the very conditions of their censure, friendly
or unfriendly, forbid it thoroughness, and it must often have
more zeal than knowledge in it.
X.
Whether the newspapers will become the rivals of the magazines as
the vehicle of literature is a matter that still remains in doubt
with the careful observer, after a decade of the newspaper
syndicate. Our daily papers never had the habit of the
feuilleton as those of the European continent have it; they
followed the English tradition in this, though they departed from
it in so many other things; and it was not till the Sunday
editions of the great dailies arose that there was any real hope
for the serial in the papers. I suspect that it was the vast
demand for material in their pages--twelve, eighteen,
twenty-four, thirty-six--that created the syndicate, for it was
the necessity of the Sunday edition not only to have material in
abundance, but, with all possible regard for quality, to have it
cheap; and the syndicate, when it came into being, imagined a
means of meeting this want. It sold the same material to as many
newspapers as it could for simultaneous publication in their
Sunday editions, which had each its special field, and did not
compete with another.
I do not think the syndicate began with serials, and I do not
think it is likely to end with them. It has rather worked the
vein of interviews, personal adventure, popular science, useful
information, travel, sketches, and short stories. Still it has
placed a good many serial stories, and at pretty good prices, but
not generally so good as those the magazines pay the better sort
of writers; for the worse sort it has offered perhaps the best
market they have had out of book form. By the newspapers, the
syndicate conceives, and perhaps justly, that something
sensational is desired; yet all the serial stories it has placed
cannot be called sensational. It has enlarged the field of
belles-lettres, certainly, but not permanently, I think, in the
case of the artistic novel. As yet the women, who form the
largest, if not the only cultivated class among us, have not
taken very cordially to the Sunday edition, except for its social
gossip; they certainly do not go to it for their fiction, and its
fiction is mainly of the inferior sort with which boys and men
beguile their leisure.
In fact the newspapers prefer to remain newspapers, at least in
quality if not in form; and I heard a story the other day from a
charming young writer of his experience with them, which may have
some instruction for the magazines that less wisely aim to become
newspapers. He said that when he carried his work to the editors
they struck out what he thought the best of it, because it was
what they called magaziny; not contemptuously, but with an
instinctive sense of what their readers wanted of them, and did
not want. It was apparent that they did not want literary art,
or even the appearance of it; they wanted their effects primary;
they wanted their emotions raw, or at least saignantes from the
joint of fact, and not prepared by the fancy or the taste.