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.