VII.

I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard to

the magazines. I am not sure that the case is in every way improved

for young authors. The magazines all maintain a staff for the careful

examination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print has

been engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use

is very small; one of the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty

in the course of a year. The new writer, then, must be very good to be

accepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed. The

pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one,

two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay. If the writer has

not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels in the

courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, the book

is his immediate hope. How slight a hope the book is I have tried to

hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude

enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worse

still, if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not

indecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean

success with a self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which

does not personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by

it. I will not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book

which the young author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an

untainted mind, such as most young men and women write; and I will

suppose that it has found a publisher. It is human nature, as

competition has deformed human nature, for the publisher to wish the

author to take all the risks, and he possibly proposes that the author

shall publish it at his own expense, and let him have a percentage of

the retail price for managing it. If not that, he proposes that the

author shall pay for the stereotype plates, and take fifteen per cent.

of the price of the book; or if this will not go, if the author cannot,

rather than will not do it (he is commonly only too glad to do anything

he can), then the publisher offers him ten per cent. of the retail

price after the first thousand copies have been sold. But if he fully

believes in the book, he will give ten per cent. from the first copy

sold, and pay all the costs of publication himself. The book is to be

retailed for a dollar and a half, and the publisher is very well

pleased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred copies. Whether the

author has as much reason to be so is a question, but if the book does

not sell more he has only himself to blame, and had better pocket in

silence the two hundred and twenty-five dollars he gets for it, and

bless his publisher, and try to find work somewhere at five dollars a

week. The publisher has not made any more, if quite as much as the

author, and until a book has sold two thousand copies the division is

fair enough. After that, the heavier expenses of manufacturing have

been defrayed, and the book goes on advertising itself; there is merely

the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be met, and the

arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher. The author

has no right to complain of this, in the case of his first book, which

he is only too grateful to get accepted at all. If it succeeds, he has

himself to blame for making the same arrangement for his second or

third; it is his fault, or else it is his necessity, which is

practically the same thing. It will be business for the publisher to

take advantage of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault;

but I do not say that he will always do so; I believe he will very

often not do so.

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.